I'll start by saying H is very successful, despite his qualities (listed below.) He has worked for decades in international companies and according to ex colleagues, miraculously stopped just short of getting fired for his behaviour most days. Now he works for himself and still miraculously manages to keep the money coming in. I believe this is because he has a strong support network of people, especially me, his parents, his brother and a few loyal friends, who absorb his behaviour.
People have told me he displays all the qualities of someone with ADHD. Others have told me that he is potentially on the spectrum. Sometimes I feel that he is just a total arsehole. But I am exhausted from it all. Please tell me what you think - these are some of the things that happen:
He gets severe and sudden sensory problems: hunger, tiredness and thirst that must be immediately dealt with. Everyone has to stop what they are doing and help him. The same with changes of temperature, loud or quiet sounds, or smells. He gets very affected in a v short time, so can go from totally fine to freaking out unable to breathe from frustration the next. It can change an entire day or turn a whole situation that is supposed to be focused on someone or something else (a DC's birthday for example) on to him. I have been on a plane with him and the plane has had to be landed because he freaked out about a sound and was worrying people with his erratic behaviour. But he does not seem to foresee or prepare for these scenarios. Like he will not eat breakfast. Or he will wear the wrong clothes. Or he will not take any steps, away from the environments situations to tackle his reactions.
He has daily meltdowns, sometimes several a day. His emotions are so fragile that someone says or does something minor and he cannot let it go, deal with it or be talked down. It can mean hours of shouting, violence (towards objects) furious correspondence, phonecalls, in extreme cases doorstepping people, wild accusations, threatening litigation and massive escalations of the original problem. He forgets to eat/drink he is so upset and then has one of his sensory episodes (like above.) These dramas always trump everything else in our family life and render him totally useless. If I comment on this and how frequently it happens or ask him how he thinks he can prepare for it in the future I get accused of not caring about him and the things that "happen" to him.
He finds it impossible to judge any social situation. He walks into a room of people, talking very loudly at them upon entry about whatever is going round in his brain. No gauging the room, no reading the atmosphere, no seeing whether there were already other conversations going on. He just steers everything on to his present obsession. If he comes up against an equally dominant personality or is uncomfortable he will come to me, announce he wants to leave and have a meltdown (like above) if I don't want to leave with him, or tell him to go home alone.
He has no sense of the noise he makes and can't do anything quietly. Ironic considering his problems with sounds other people make. He will slam doors and crash around at 4am when everyone is asleep. He will speak loudly outside the DC's rooms when I've just got them off to bed. He will walk into a room of people having a conversation and start to play a video on his phone. I will be asleep and suddenly realise i am awake, because he is playing a news video (he follows the news obsessively). If I tell him it is not acceptable he says I do not understand how important this news story is and how this news story effects me as much as it effects him. He has an Armageddon mentality sometimes, believing the world is about to go to war which he uses to justify his insistence on his view. The latest obsession was the coup in Turkey which he was checking on every 1-2 minutes through the night.
He is forgetful and careless. He is always the person whose phone goes off in a funeral, at a wedding or at the cinema. When he gets the inevitable "looks" from fellow audience members he perceives them as a threat, confrontational or hostile and has a meltdown (like above), escalating the problem. He doesn't notice if the fuss he makes ruins the ceremony or performance.
For any event outside of the house, he will ignore any instructions about timings, routes or customs, then find he is blocked or gets lost, or goes the wrong way despite everyone's attempts at preparing him for the process, providing instructions, issuing maps, for months beforehand (which he denies they ever did.) My chest tightens whenever he or we receive invitations with complicated instructions or important timescales because i know despite my efforts to prepare him we will not make it.
He disobeys or does not "see" signs or rules. I can guarantee if a sign says "this way" with an arrow, he will go in the opposite direction. Or if it says an area is out of bounds, he will deliberately walk into it. When he gets caught he says he didn't know. He gets away with a lot of "one-offs," because people only see that one time. Only I know that they are not one offs and he habitually breaks rules. I just don't know if he notices the rules in the first place.
Lateness: if we have to be somewhere at 10 and it is an hour drive, the DC and I will be packed and ready at 9, call for him and he will start getting ready at 9. Shower, find clothes (where's his shirt? Tie? Clean trousers?) I will have reminded him about it the night before and the two days before that and begged him not to be late, but he will have forgotten. I will have set an alarm and woken him up but then he will have threatened a tiredness sensory episode and so I will have retreated. We normally arrive anywhere between 30 mins-1.5 hours late to anything we go to. Weddings are the worst because we usually miss the ceremony because he is not ready.
His emotionally volatile days ensure that he cannot interact with the DC in any meaningful way (3yo and 20 mo) nor meet their needs. They both find him emotionally unpredictable and will often not go to him and hide behind me when he calls them.
Driving: he has multiple speeding offenses. He was banned from driving once for a few years, now he's back on the road and losing points again. He doesn't indicate, doesn't obey traffic lights, doesn't keep his eyes on the road, he drifts into the layby or near to the barrier on a motorway. He drives over two lanes with the white line going down the middle of the car. He always misses turnoffs. He speeds up when the car in front's break lights go on. We (DC and I) no longer drive with him.
He is nocturnal. There is no night of sleep i have had in my life with him where I could safely say when I wake up he would be still in the bed next to me. He is usually watching the news (like I say, he is obsessed with the news and the potential end of the world,) eating or working. This means he gets episodes of tiredness and sleeps a lot during the day. As you can imagine, all the sensory circumstances have to be right for him to sleep in the daytime which is very hard on me with 2 DC who want to play. Again, i feel it is my responsibility to enable this to happen - otherwise he will have a meltdown creating an even bigger problem for me.
Why am I with him? He is brilliant at what he does. He is top in his field at it, and he is fascinating to talk to when he gets going. He's so intelligent, life with him is often quite exciting; travel, opportunities etc. He is very loyal. He tells me every day that I am the love of his life and he doesn't know what he would do without me.
His eccentricity was beguiling at first. Before DC we could both do our own thing with no responsibilities, and I wouldn't suffer any of the fall out from his issues because i could take a break and go off somewhere and do something else during his meltdowns. But having DC with someone, as I've learnt, changes everything and we are now in a dynamic where I am the rescuer.
Post DC, I have taken responsibility and he hasn't. I now wait from minute to minute wondering what is going to happen next on the roller coaster of our lives that I will have to absorb. I spend my time managing, enabling, containing and placating him to keep the DC's lives as normal as possible.
Also I find that I am filled with anxiety over what will cause the next meltdown and how it will affect my life. Will he accuse the next friend I have round of wearing perfume that is making him ill? Is he going to do something today that will get him in trouble because his meltdown gets out of control and I'm not there? Can I really go to that birthday lunch my friend asked me to reserve a date for months ago without him having a huge meltdown over something that day which requires me to completely stop what i'm doing and talk it over and solve it for him?
I know the obvious solution is to just not engage, to leave him to deal with it and take care of me and the DC. But if I do not step in as rescuer, it escalates until it becomes much worse to do nothing. Sometimes he can work himself up to a point where he is crying and banging his head against a wall. Or he is shouting at me and blaming me for not caring about him or not being on his side. I don't want the DC to have to see this, so it's always just easier to placate him and try to calm him. If I did just walk off with the DC when he started kicking off, things would escalate and he would probably perceive me as leaving him/taking the DC away and god knows what he would do.
After some recent extreme meltdowns I have asked him to take some kind of mental health/behaviour assessment after I've done my research. He has begrudgingly accepted. We will pay privately. What should I get him assessed for?