Making Counseling Work

Hi all - I (36f) have just started marriage counseling with my husband (36m) of 10+ years and sort of wanted some feedback on the process.

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We overall have a great marriage - we are very much in love and have similar goals, and have been together for a long time. We have always had issues with him not pulling his weight around the house and being generally sort of irresponsible. He has ADD that is treated with medication but not therapy, and some other things (family history of hoarding...) that make this difficult. What an original problem, I know.

We have been talking about having kids soon (getting old) and I am on the fence whereas he is getting more and more invested. Honestly, I have a lot of depression and anger around being the one who runs our entire lives, as you might imagine. Adding a kid into the mix just seems like insanity to me unless something drastically changes.

It's difficult because I know he's not doing this to be malicious. He's an incredibly, incredibly sweet and sensitive person and I think there's a lot going on under the surface around his ADD and just generally feeling empowered and capable of handling it and doing the things he wants to do. We've only been to a few counseling sessions but so far have focused mainly on topics and assignments around him - finding a new job (his is terrible, has awful hours), finding strategies to manage his ADD, participating in some chores on a weekly basis.

He's told me he just generally feels bad and negative around the whole process, obviously because we're focusing on things he's not doing well and needs to improve on. I don't know if he was asking me if we could stop therapy or if it would be better for him to go on his own. It's hard because yeah, I don't know if I would like couples therapy either if we were just always talking about me and things I needed to fix! But on the other hand, I feel bad too because I'm basically his mother and handle absolutely everything and anything related to cleaning, fixing or organizing our lives and I'm exhausted and mad. It makes me feel like he hasn't been listening to me for 10 years and hasn't taken this problem seriously at all if he thinks him feeling bad for a few sessions is equal to what I'm feeling.

I'm also not 100% sure I like our therapist yet - I want to give it some time, because I know things aren't instantaneous, but she's supposed to specialize in ADD/ADHD but so far her advice for him has been "find a system that works for you" which...I mean, yeah. If he could do that we probably wouldn't be here right now.

He is uncomfortable in general around therapy so I am very glad he agreed to go, and we did have a heart-to-heart a week or two ago where he told me he was absolutely committed to trying to improve things. But I don't know if he has a good sense as to what that looks like.

Tl:DR -- How do we have productive therapy sessions without it just feeling like a big husband pile-on?

Submitted May 07, 2019 at 05:29PM

Hi all - I (36f) have just started marriage counseling with my husband (36m) of 10+ years and sort of wanted some feedback on the process.​We overall have a great marriage - we are very much in love and have similar goals, and have been together for a long time. We have always had issues with him not pulling his weight around the house and being generally sort of irresponsible. He has ADD that is treated with medication but not therapy, and some other things (family history of hoarding...) that make this difficult. What an original problem, I know.We have been talking about having kids soon (getting old) and I am on the fence whereas he is getting more and more invested. Honestly, I have a lot of depression and anger around being the one who runs our entire lives, as you might imagine. Adding a kid into the mix just seems like insanity to me unless something drastically changes.It's difficult because I know he's not doing this to be malicious. He's an incredibly, incredibly sweet and sensitive person and I think there's a lot going on under the surface around his ADD and just generally feeling empowered and capable of handling it and doing the things he wants to do. We've only been to a few counseling sessions but so far have focused mainly on topics and assignments around him - finding a new job (his is terrible, has awful hours), finding strategies to manage his ADD, participating in some chores on a weekly basis.He's told me he just generally feels bad and negative around the whole process, obviously because we're focusing on things he's not doing well and needs to improve on. I don't know if he was asking me if we could stop therapy or if it would be better for him to go on his own. It's hard because yeah, I don't know if I would like couples therapy either if we were just always talking about me and things I needed to fix! But on the other hand, I feel bad too because I'm basically his mother and handle absolutely everything and anything related to cleaning, fixing or organizing our lives and I'm exhausted and mad. It makes me feel like he hasn't been listening to me for 10 years and hasn't taken this problem seriously at all if he thinks him feeling bad for a few sessions is equal to what I'm feeling.I'm also not 100% sure I like our therapist yet - I want to give it some time, because I know things aren't instantaneous, but she's supposed to specialize in ADD/ADHD but so far her advice for him has been "find a system that works for you" which...I mean, yeah. If he could do that we probably wouldn't be here right now.He is uncomfortable in general around therapy so I am very glad he agreed to go, and we did have a heart-to-heart a week or two ago where he told me he was absolutely committed to trying to improve things. But I don't know if he has a good sense as to what that looks like.Tl:DR -- How do we have productive therapy sessions without it just feeling like a big husband pile-on?