Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
Plenty of couples decide that any argument means something is broken, and then start managing each other into blandness, which nobody enjoys. The better measure is repair: how quickly you come back, whether either of you can say sorry without a negotiation, whether the same row leaves a mark each time. Lively is fine. Cruel is not, and the difference is usually obvious to both of you.
Each community has its own direction to which it turns (Quran 2:148). Households run at different temperatures, and yours does not have to match the quiet one next door.
البقرة
وَلِكُلࣲّ وِجۡهَةٌ هُوَ مُوَلِّيهَاۖ فَٱسۡتَبِقُواْ ٱلۡخَيۡرَٰتِۚ أَيۡنَ مَا تَكُونُواْ يَأۡتِ بِكُمُ ٱللَّهُ جَمِيعًاۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدِيرࣱ
Each community has its own direction to which it turns: race to do good deeds and wherever you are, God will bring you together. God has power to do everything
Qur’an 2:148read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A randomised trial with 52 female college students compared a three week self compassion skills group with an active control teaching general time management. That is training in how someone treats themselves after things go wrong, which is the nearest thing here to the repair being described, and it is a small student sample rather than couples in a marriage. Nothing in this bank tested relationship friction directly, so this supports working on how the aftermath is handled and not the claim about needing intensity.
Smeets E, Neff K, Alberts H, Peters M. (2014). Meeting suffering with kindness: effects of a brief self-compassion intervention for female college students.. Journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Conflict itself predicts less about a couple than what they do in the hour after it.
This is about ordinary friction only, and fear, contempt or anything that leaves you unsafe is not stimulation and needs help from outside the relationship.
For a lot of people with ADHD, making things is not a hobby but closer to an appetite. The itch to start something is always there, and when nothing is being made it does not go quietly.
Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.
Build your work around what your mind does well, novelty, hyperfocus, big-picture, not only around your gaps.