Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
ADHD rarely turns up on its own. If anxiety or low mood is in the room as well, it needs treating in its own right, and that includes when it is the other partner who is struggling.
This is the part that gets missed in couples. One person becomes the identified patient and everybody works on them, while the other one's untreated anxiety keeps the checking and the criticism running. Nothing the first person does will settle that. If you are the partner and you are exhausted and watchful, that is worth taking to someone for your own sake, not only for the relationship's.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast' (Quran 2:153). The instruction is addressed to everybody present, not only to the one who has been identified as the problem.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A narrative review describes emotional dysregulation as a feature running across child and adolescent psychiatric conditions rather than belonging to any single diagnosis. That supports looking at what is actually going on in a person instead of assuming it all comes from the label already on the file. Narrative reviews describe a field rather than measure it, so this is a way of looking and not a finding.
Paulus FW, Ohmann S, Möhler E, Plener P, Popow C. (2021). Emotional Dysregulation in Children and Adolescents With Psychiatric Disorders. A Narrative Review.. Frontiers in psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A pattern held up by two people's difficulties will not come down by treating one of them.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Picture spilling coffee down your shirt on the way in. One version: the day is ruined and everyone will see. Another: this is going to be a good story by eleven. Same coffee, two different days.
A small child does not have a feeling, they are the feeling, entirely, until it passes. Growing up is largely a gap opening between feeling something and doing something about it.
When you cannot skip it, shorten it. Come for the meal and skip the drinks afterwards. Two hours of you at your best is worth more to everyone than five hours ending badly.