Will bear them all in mind.

I’m doing ok right now, and will write more soon.

James

1) When I’m in the midst of focusing on one of my passions in life and my husband is feeling overwhelmed or neglected, it helps a lot if he begins sentences with “I” rather than “You,” as in “I’m feeling completely overwhelmed and I need some help” (as oppposed to “You’re completely irresponsible,” which he’s never said, by the way, which is good, since it would shut me down immediately). When my husband begins sentences with “I,” that gets my attention, since I care about how he feels. We also have a rule about not yelling. Shouting tends to be traumatizing to both of us and damaging to the relationship. The damage can be repaired, but it just adds another problem to the one at hand.

2) I check in with my husband a lot as to whether he’s feeling like the balance in the house feels fair to him. It’s one of my special interests. I don’t like being blindsided.

I’m sorry you are feeling so badly about yourself and the argument. It sounds like your wife didn’t really fight fair because she was attacking you and criticizing you instead of saying what it was she needed from you all along. So what would have helped from your perspective? What should she have done differently? Would it have helped to tell you that you were too focused on work and that it was becoming your latest special interest? If she had would you have recognized that and been able to give more at home – or does the special interest thing just need to run its course? Would it have helped you if she told you that she was getting upset before she blew up? Not that it was a good thing that she yelled at you – but would you have heard her if she had told you in a calmer voice that you weren’t plugging in at home? Sometimes people develop this anger/yelling pattern because they feel like it is the only way to get through. I don’t think that makes it right – but I can understand why she blows up at you – it makes an impact and you actually hear what she is saying. From your perspective what is a better way to do this? How else should she have gotten your attention? I don’t mean this to sound critical of you – I’m really asking what is the alternative? How does someone get through when the special interest focus takes over?

It’s essential that when you feel that everything is your fault that you remember that NOTHING in a relationship is ever one person’s fault. In my marriage, I also take on a lot of the “If it weren’t for me, everything would be fine” BS, and my husband does his best to drag me out of that place, because it’s a place of severe distortion. (I am fortunate that my present husband can give me this perspective; my previous husband simply saw me as the problem whenever we differed.) We call it “getting me out of the bad guy chair.” You must get out of the bad guy chair and then chop it into kindling and burn it.

You are dealing with the self-loathing of any minority person who has not yet taken hold of the idea that everyone is equally fine, just as they are. Unfortunately, we do not live in a world that gives us this message, and so we have to give it to one another. Wishing that you were someone else, wishing that you were “normal” (and please find me this mythic normal person, because I’ve never had the pleasure) will get you nowhere but suicidal thinking, and PLEASE do not go there. You have every bit as much of a right to be here as anyone else, just as you are, today.

You do not have a disorder. You are not a collection of deficits. You are not impaired. You just operate differently from your wife and from most people you know in real time. That’s a lonely place, but don’t make the jump from it being a lonely place to you being a bad or incomplete person. You have been accommodating yourself to the world all your life, and it is perfectly fine to expect that the people closest to you will accommodate to your needs as well. It’s a balancing act. It’s not up to you to take on all the blame, nor is it all on your wife to take on all the responsibility. The key, I think, is for you to get to marriage counseling, and to start looking at your strengths and what each of you can take on in the marriage so that you both succeed and so that the marriage is healthy. And I think it’s crucial that your wife understand that when she unloads on you, you simply absorb it and feel sick about yourself. There are other ways she can frame her feelings so that you do not feel sick about yourself. (I am a veteran of getting people to frame things properly so that I don’t end up feeling like their feelings become a permanent part of my genome.)

I’ve been thinking of you ever since I read in a previous post that you feel like your self confidence is shot. I am slowly coming out of that place, and it takes a lot of work and self discipline. Please write to me any time. I think we’d have a lot to say to each other on this theme. It’s essential that we spectrum folks reach out to each other and not feel like there is something wrong with us. Different does not mean wrong. Different just means that we live in a world that isn’t set up with our differences in mind, so we have be more resourceful in navigating things than we might have hoped.