This is the hardest one for me, I am so ashamed of things that I did and said. The hardest part to this was I didn’t even see things escalating the way they were, until it was too late. Let me explain…
Sam and I both had our own personal issues that we were either unaware of or didn’t know how to deal with. A couple of years ago I got my ADHD diagnoses, it wasn’t a surprise to get the diagnoses, it was a surprise when I started to learn about ADHD and when I started to understand just how much it affected me in so many different ways. Sam was given more than anyone should have had to deal with all at once, and all of it was brand new to her. Sam and I developed habits, behaviors and coping mechanisms to try and prevent big blowouts between us and doing things that we knew we didn’t want to do. We both did this because we loved each other and we were trying to help each other, we started out doing small things that we normally wouldn’t do for what we thought was the right reasons.
Doing This worked really well for a long time, it worked in a way that we didn’t see that it wasn’t sustainable, if we had to escalate the behaviors a little bit to get the same effect, eventually things would get out of control and cross lines that we probably couldn’t come back from. I know that I crossed a lot of lines that I wasn’t comfortable with, but Sam and I talked about things and we were both were “OK” with the things that happened. This was a huge mistake and never should have happened, we used good intensions to give each other permission to use bad behaviors instead of taking responsibility and dealing with the our issues head on.
Note: I have since learned that what I was trying to do is called grounding, it’s an attempt to bring her back to the moment. Sometimes it was as simple as holding her hand but other times it was much more difficult. Sam and me both needed to be able to ground ourselves or at least hear from the other that we needed to ground ourself.
Doing Bad Things For Good Reasons Was Never Going To Work, We set ourselves up to fail the moment we did this.