The Paradox of ADHD Impulsivity: Both Gift and Liability in Our Most Intimate Relationships with Melissa Orlov
What if the very quality that makes those early, intoxicating moments of romance so vibrant—the spontaneous weekend getaway, the surprise bouquet of flowers—later becomes the source of relationship friction? The human brain, particularly one wired with ADHD, contains multitudes of contradictions, and nowhere is this more evident than in how impulsivity shapes our intimate partnerships.
This week on the show, relationship expert Melissa Orlov peels back the layers of impulsive behavior in ADHD relationships with Pete Wright and Nikki Kinzer. Pete's personal confession—renting a convertible for a romantic coastal drive during courtship, then later purchasing an entire car during what should have been a routine oil change—illuminates the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of impulsivity that Melissa has observed in thousands of couples.
"It came from somewhere," Melissa notes of impulsive words and actions that wound our partners. But where? The answer lies in a neurological tightrope walk between present-moment reward and long-term relationship consequences. The ADHD partner experiences the euphoria of now, while their significant other bears witness to the aftermath, creating an asymmetrical emotional experience that compounds over time.
What of verbal impulsivity—those cutting remarks that can never be unsaid? Melissa offers a revelation that ADHD partners are "blessed with the ability to move on quickly," while non-ADHD partners ruminate, creating relationship dissonance long after the moment has passed.
Let us take our cues from Melissa's "verbal cues," pattern interrupters in relationship conflict. The deliberate absurdity of an agreed-upon word like "hamburger" or "aardvark" serves as a circuit breaker during emotional escalation—a linguistic tool that transcends the heat of argument to preserve relationship integrity. It's a Safe Word, but for your ADHD.
This is an invitation to understand how neurological differences fundamentally shape our perception of time, commitment, and connection—and how awareness of these differences might just be the greatest relationship skill we can develop.
Links & Notes
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Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer. Hello, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete.
Pete Wright:
We are continuing our relationships discussion today, ADHD relationships, and we're talking about one that is close to the hearts of so many in our community and beyond impulsivity and how impulsivity in ADHD impacts our relationships, and we have a fantastic guest to help us do that. Before we dig in, however, please head over to takecontroladhd.com, get to know us a little bit better. You can listen to the show right there on the website or subscribe to our mailing list and get an email each time a new episode is released. Connect with us on Facebook or Bluesky or Instagram or Pinterest at Take Control ADHD. But to really connect with us, join us in the ADH ADHD Discord community. It's super easy to jump in the general community chat channel.
Just visit takecontroladhd.com/discord. That's all you have to remember /discord, and you'll be whisked over to the general invitation and login. If you're looking for a little bit more, particularly if this show has ever touched you or helped you understand your relationship with ADHD in a new way, we invite you to support the show directly through Patreon. Patreon is listeners supported podcasting with a few of your dollars a month, you help guarantee that our show continues to grow, add new features, and helps us to invest more heavily in our community, patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more. Thank you for your support.
There are few people who understand the intricate dance of love and ADHD quite like Melissa Orlov. She is the founder of a adhdmarriage.com and one of the world's foremost experts on how a ADHD impacts relationships. Through her award-winning books, Rhe ADHD Effect on Marriage and The Couple's Guide to Thriving with ADHD, Melissa is reshaping how couples navigate the challenges and surprising strengths of ADHD in romantic partnerships. She joins us today to explore one of the most misunderstood aspects of ADHD in relationships, impulsivity, how it can spark joy, ignite conflict, and when harnessed well, even deepen intimacy. Melissa, welcome back.
Melissa Orlov:
Thank you so much. I love sort of the voice at the end there and even deep and impressive.
Nikki Kinzer:
So dramatic.
Pete Wright:
Certain words demand drama. Last time you were here it was 2021. A lot of water under that bridge. We're so glad you're back and contributing to this series and you have a lot to teach us I'm sure on impulsivity and ADHD.
Melissa Orlov:
Thank you.
Pete Wright:
This is the big one for me. So impulsivity is, I think is stereotyped as reckless, right. It's this force of chaos that disrupts the careful balance of a relationship, right. That it is a thing that can be so easily construed as an evil between people who are trying to live in calm and structured relationships. You've worked with thousands of couples navigating ADHD in their relationships. Can you describe how impulsivity manifests in relationships? Am I overselling the dark side of impulsivity in that description?
Melissa Orlov:
I wish I could say you were. I think there is a dark side of impulsivity in the ADHD relationships, but I also think there is a positive side as well, so we should cover both. Depending on what note you want to end on here. I can start with some of the positive stuff, a lot of which is very visible right up front in the courtship phase when there's a lot of really fun energy. And I remember when my now unfortunately ex-husband was courting me and how much fun it was, and two or three weeks into the relationship he said, "I got us plane tickets, we're going to go see some of my friends in California." And I'm kind of looking at him going like, "Whoa." But that was a completely impulsive moment, but also just tremendously fun. There was a huge amount of energy and just a lot to be said for that and a lot of focus in that time as well. So the impulsivity was fun. It felt very positive in that meeting stage.
Pete Wright:
Often it's the impulsivity that is a key marker of romance. You said the courtship phase, that's what we look at as being able to surprise one another and intrigue and provoke one another and bring us closer.
Melissa Orlov:
Well, and I think it's interesting 'cause I think a phase is important, right. Because romance and connection is also about vulnerability. So as you're getting to know each other, the impulsivity is an opening up which romance also is an opening up, and some of the issues come up if the impulsivity starts to take more of that darker turn that you were talking about, and then the vulnerability in the face of things that might surprisingly happen in a bad way can start to feel unsafe. So at the point at which some of the impact of impulsivity depends upon, and this may be a strange way to talk about it, but the tonality of the impulsivity. If the tonality is joyful and expanding and positive and connecting and all of those things can very much happen with a person who has ADHD, then that impulsivity is a wonderful addition. If impulsivity is threatening, then it becomes dark very fast.
Nikki Kinzer:
That makes sense because when you're courting, there's a benefit to both partners. I stopped by the store, I found these beautiful flowers, I bought them for you, everybody's happy. But when it takes a darker turn and that other partner is not benefiting from it or it's being hidden or something like that, then yeah, it makes sense that it would be more of that negative that Pete was talking about.
Melissa Orlov:
Right, there's a difference between, "Hey, I want to do new and exciting things for me to show you I love you," versus, "Oh, oops, I just bought a boat."
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
And we didn't have the budget for it. The difference... The impulsivity for the flowers in the boat is almost the same in some ways, and yet one is threatening and one is not, assuming what your budget is. I mean, maybe you can afford the boat and it doesn't matter, but...
Pete Wright:
I mean, I have my keystone example for my own courtship. I was dating my now wife and she flew down to see me in San Francisco and I surprised her by renting a convertible to drive down the coast and it was for the weekend. That was impulsive, she didn't expect it. It was romantic. She loved it and we had a great time. We got married and about six months into our relationship, I took my car for an oil change and came home with a new car. Hello, I've saddled us with a new car payment every month, and that was a surprise that was not as welcome and romantic, and I feel like this conversation is hand to glove to the last 40 years of my life.
Melissa Orlov:
Well, and so this is the interesting part about it, right. And so some of it is contextual in terms of your tolerance for the impulsivity on both sides. So you were thinking about the car and to you it was a similar kind of experience, I suspect, right. "Oh my God, look at this. This is an amazing car. This is going to be great." And you may not even as you were buying that, I'm wondering if you were even thinking about whether or not your partner would be pleased or not.
Pete Wright:
Oh no. Well, I wasn't thinking about it because the impulsivity leads to assumptive emotional status, right. "Of course, she's going to be as excited as I am because cars are my love language and they must be hers too."
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it just feels so good in the moment, right. There's this now, not now thing, which when you're doing the impulsivity thing, the now is so important and the reward of that. I mean, think about how you were feeling when you bought that car.
Pete Wright:
Oh yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
Right. Totally amped up.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. I haven't bought a new car for myself since then. We've had family cars, but at this point I'm just counting the days to a serious midlife crisis.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah, there you go. And that be the downside of the impulsivity for you, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Right.
Melissa Orlov:
Because possibly if you'd gone and said, "Look, I really love this car, I really want this car," and you had included your partner in the decision-
Pete Wright:
It would've been fine.
Melissa Orlov:
... you would still have the car.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
Right. And you wouldn't be worried about whether you should buy the next one and what she would think about it.
Pete Wright:
For sure. That is 100% accurate.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
For sure.
Pete Wright:
All right, so that leads us to some, just purchase, we'll call that a financial impulsivity because that was the fundamental sort of betrayal. It was the thrill of the spontaneous purchase at a 2:00 P.M. oil change, versus the crushing anxiety that can come from a drained savings account, right, that's sort of that next thing. Can we break down impulsivity that we'll take as not a monolith in this conversation, right. Impulsivity has different flavors besides what we're talking about, financial spontaneity. Where else do you see impulsivity rearing its head?
Melissa Orlov:
Well, I see it in a lot of different places, and I was thinking about this before we started talking about how to sort it out so people could think about it in their own lives. One way to sort it out is sort of along this personal dimension of things that are, for example, said impulsively that can never be unsaid. And so you leave a mark on your partner and for a person who has ADHD, recovery from those kinds of things is actually relatively easy. You move yourself into the next moment and you're onto something else. Whereas the person who has heard the thing that was so hurtful is now stuck with trying to figure out how to heal from that hurt. So that kind of thing can have a long tail. I hear from ADHD partners very regularly, like, "Why does my partner hang on to all this stuff for so long?"
And it's a difference in terms of the neurology of the brain and how the brain works. People with ADHD are blessed with the ability to move on quickly, while people without ADHD are sort of taking it in their head. They're ruminating, they're putting that action, that specific action in alignment with a whole bunch of other actions and it becomes a larger issue of trustworthiness or whatever it is. But this idea of words spoken in impulsivity or actions or smaller actions taken in impulsivity with the, "Oh, well..." And the partner says, "Why did you do that?" And the honest answer often is, "I don't know. It felt good."
Why not do it? And of course the answer to, why not do it is, "Well, because I'm a partner here with you and just like the car purchase I should be considered as well, we should be talking about do we want to take on this debt? Is this the right car for us when we need to move around five kids or whatever the thing is that you're doing there." So there are a fair number of interactive things as well as distraction things. Like, distractibility is a form of impulsivity. It's the impulse to follow the thing that's most interesting to you or most rewarding to you or has caught your eye in the moment. And in relationships that can take a huge personal toll as if you are constantly pursuing things other than the partner, then the partner can start to feel very lonely, very unimportant, the work and fun and games and going out with your pals gets priority over me, your partner. That can be very disruptive to the relationship as well.
Nikki Kinzer:
I can imagine the communication, especially when you're talking about the impulse of speaking, if you're in an argument or you're in a really serious conversation and your partner with ADHD is saying stuff that is hurtful, but also getting distracted in the conversation and now you don't feel necessarily as important, like, why are you not focused on me? Why is this so easily distractible or whatever it might be. So how do you talk to your couples about arguments? Like, how do you fight fairly? If that's even a thing.
Melissa Orlov:
Fighting fairly is totally a thing, actually. There's a lot of research John Gottman does about, it's not the number of fights you have, it's how you fight that makes a difference. And in fact, one part of that is repair and how you repair from a fight or from a heightened discussion. I mean, one of the elements here has to do with emotional regulation for people with ADHD. So there's a tendency to get escalated or irritated or emotionally enlarged faster than might be expected. You can call that, maybe that's a form of impulsivity. It's really how that's just a core part of adult ADHD. And so typically when I'm talking with couples about how do you repair some of these conversations, the first thing that you have to talk about is the sort of power struggle that's going on between the two partners with one person who gets escalated very quickly, which diminishes the other person's feelings like they can speak up and then explodes.
There's all these sort of dynamics that go on in what I call the parent-child thing. That's off topic from the impulsivity conversation, so I don't want to go down that road, but there are conversational techniques. One of which I teach is learning conversations which help you stay in the moment and not impulsive. It's a speaker-listener technique, very specific to hearing each other well and thoroughly and focusing your attention on that understanding. And so that helps eliminate impulsivity in conversations. But a lot of the impulsivity comes out as a defensive mechanism. It's fast defensiveness, you say something hurtful in order to get cover up that you're feeling bad that you didn't do something or whatever, but you don't necessarily mean those things. It's the self-defensive, stay away from me posture, but your partner takes it on. I mean, you've said it, so...
Pete Wright:
Yeah. This is again ringing some bells. Part of the shame speaking as somebody with ADHD who's I may have trucked in impulsivity in the past, the objective of... Not objective, that's not the right word. The rationalization that comes after an impulsive act in the relationship is that I was trying to make our lives richer, and I did it thoughtlessly. I did it impulsively, but my effort was good. And so when you tell me that was bad, I feel shame, right. Now, from the non-impulsive partner, what I hear is, "You make planning impossible, because we can't have a conversation that I can trust anymore because you say all the right things in the moment, but as soon as you go to an oil change, there's risk," right.
Precedence has said, "There's risk that our plans don't mean anything to you, or they appear not to mean anything to you when you are in an impulsive swing." So I really, like, I'm putting a frame around some of that relationship that's really interesting to me. When we were talking to you about coming onto this show, you used some intriguing words, felony impulsivity versus misdemeanor impulsivity. And so I give you all of that preamble as a way for you to let me off the hook, unpack that idea.
Melissa Orlov:
Not doing that, sorry. No, just kidding.
Nikki Kinzer:
You have a felon, my friend. You are a felon.
Pete Wright:
I have a record. Yeah, my record is burned.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah, well, so I mean it actually, it brings up... So what you're talking about is you can go out for an oil change, but it's still not a safe thing for your wife. Before I get into felonies and misdemeanors, there's a huge issue there on trust, and what the experience is of the other partner. So you think of a partnership sort of as, "Well, my partner's got my back," but that's not actually true. If the partner is very impulsive and you never know what's coming at you, which keeps the other partners sort of on this low-level alert status all the time, which is very bad for your health, that's a stress status. And our bodies aren't meant to take that. And so it really takes a toll on that partner. While the ADHD partner, because this is episodic and interesting, and is just sort of not generally thinking about it.
So you might feel the shame in the moment, but that doesn't mean that you're going to learn from that experience and say, "Well, okay, so now, when I go to the train ticket office, I should think twice before I buy a trip to," fill in the blank, impulsivity or impulsively. And there's sort of darker parts of it as well. I mean, we've been talking about financial issue here with the car purchase, but impulsivity can play a role in things as basic to your life as whether or not you can hold onto your job. And so that's an insecurity or whether or not you keep your children safe, you get the sudden urge to race the car next to you on the highway, and so you're going 120 miles with the kids in the backseat. And so there's an enormous amount of anxiety that comes up in the other partner when they don't know if they can trust you to put on the brakes at the right time. And that has a very, very large toll on the relationship.
Pete Wright:
We haven't yet mentioned fidelity to the relationship, which I imagine is another thing you see.
Melissa Orlov:
It is, and it's interesting. So Ari Tuckman did some really interesting research on connection, and romance, and sex, and et cetera, in mixed ADHD relationships. So one partner had ADHD, one partner did not. And the infidelity numbers were strong actually on both sides of the equation, both the nones and the ADHD partner. So I'm not chalking it up to just impulsivity. There are some impulsive affairs certainly, and if they're genuinely impulsive, then they're often short. But a lot of times I think that the affair side of things is more deeply embedded in sort of a general dissatisfaction or a need to feel more powerful in a situation where you don't or more loved in a situation where you feel lonely. So I think there are other things often going on there. Not to minimize it 'cause that's certainly one of the felonies-
Nikki Kinzer:
Sure. Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
... in a relationship.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah. But I think that impulsivity, the larger impact for me and sort the dark side of it is your inability to trust that your partner has enough self-control to be able to adequately be reliable and trustworthy for your relationship or your family.
Pete Wright:
Everything we're talking about is again, sort of dark side. I would love for you to dive in a little bit deeper on how to break out of those kinds of loops. What does effective communication look like? And frankly, by extension, what does real change look like in couples who are struggling with this sort of impulsive ADHD capacity?
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's sort of two sides of this for the person with the ADHD. One is they have to decide who they are and who they want to be. And if in fact, impulsivity is a tremendous part of what they value about themselves, then that's one thing. If their value structure is more around being, I'm making this up now, a really great parent, a really great partner, a reliable or respected partner or whatever, then it makes sense to tackle the impulsivity perhaps as a target symptom. So for those who aren't used to listening to sort of how I talk about this, a target symptom is one of maybe two or three primary symptoms where you want to really start to manage against that specific symptom. You select specific strategies to, in this case, manage impulsivity, or another one might be focused or another, et cetera.
And so there are strategies that you can choose to manage impulsivity if that's what you would like to do. And I think what I see in the sort of the transformation is people start to understand the impact that ADHD and impulsivity and other parts of ADHD have on their relationship. Many people do say, "Hey, I'd like to be a partner who is more reliable or who can be a better partner to my partner. We can decide on the car together. I'll still end up with the car, but I'll be a much better partner because my partner won't mistrust me." Right. I know you're asking this next, some of the kinds of things that people can do in this particular space, mindfulness training, I mean, the idea is to get a pause long enough to consider what you're doing, ask yourself some questions, and to not just assume that the thing that feels good immediately is actually the right thing to do.
So things that provide pause would include, mindfulness training, medications like Wellbutrin for example, is known to help people slow down enough to be able to think about what they're doing. Sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy work where you are attempting to change a thought pattern that says, "Yeah, this is the way I am, this is the way it should be. This is all cool. Everybody needs to adjust to me kind of a thought pattern." Some of that stuff can work. And also sort of more generally getting a handle on your ADHD.
If there's an emotional reward element that's sort of driven in part by, "Hey, things don't feel so good, this is going to feel good," some of those kinds of things. So those are some of the basic ways. And other people do things like count before they say anything or do anything or set rules for themselves. Not everybody can do this when they have a ADHD, but say, I'm not going to make any purchase over $1,000 without walking away from it and coming back in 24 hours or whatever. That's really hard if you have ADHD, that would be potentially mindfulness technique for somebody who really struggled with that kind of thing.
Pete Wright:
It could be just as practical to call the credit card company and say, "Put a de facto limit on purchases to $1,000. Make me call you if I try to make a purchase that's $1,500 or more."
Melissa Orlov:
Yes, exactly.
Pete Wright:
Let's offload that. It seems like maybe not corrective, but it does seem very practical if I have trouble with my impulsivity to actually remind me I'm being impulsive-
Melissa Orlov:
In that particular realm.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
Right. Yeah. In that particular realm.
Pete Wright:
But in the spirit of all of this, the objective seems to be from the relationship perspective, how do we make this collaborative rather than corrective or coercive? And the collaborative part for me begs the question, what is the obligation of the non-impulsive partner to be present or to frame how their relationship is or how their work in the relationship helps without becoming the police officer or babysitter along the way? And I think that seems really hard.
Melissa Orlov:
Well, it is really hard. And so part of the work that I do, some of the most important work I do actually with non-ADHD partners is around boundaries. It's too easy for non-ADHD partners to say, "You shouldn't do this. You should do this. Do it in this order. Do it in this way." And that ruins the relationship in a whole lot of ways for both people. It's not fun to be in that position. It's not fun to be receiving that kind of information, bad all the way around. So a lot of work on what's your stuff and what's not, and then where you co-regulate with somebody. Is there a way, for example, I also talk about verbal cues. If you have somebody who seems to be able to talk about a desired large purchase, since that's the example we're using today, or wants to talk about something that's on their mind that might create an argument or whatever, you might have a verbal cue in place where you knew that the response, the request to do this, let's say the verbal cue is, Pete loves to spend, I don't know.
And so you say, "Pete loves to spend," and the required response to that cue is that Pete stands still and doesn't spend in the moment. And Pete's partner says, "Okay, let's have a conversation." Opens things up. Doesn't say, "Ah, you can't spend that right now. We don't have any money, man." It makes it so that it's opening for being able to actually have a joint genuine conversation about the pros and cons of the potential purchase on hand. So you can set up things like that which are co-regulatory, but also partnered, right. So it's not like, "Okay, I'm going to tell you whether or not you can do it," it's, "I'm opening myself up to discuss whether we should and go from there."
Nikki Kinzer:
So the word partner, I use that a lot when I'm talking to clients, when they're talking to me about their relationships. And I know I've gotten this from your work, Melissa, watching you at presentations and reading your book, that you want to be a partnership. And I do know what you're talking about when you're talking about that parent and child dynamic and how hurtful that can be. I'm curious to know what you think about when someone makes, again, this is not a car, this is just an impulsive item that they bought or whatever it might be. They bring it home, and what they're getting from their partner is just a lot of criticism, like, "Why do you always do this? Why don't you think before you da, da, da, da?" And so-
Pete Wright:
Questions that are impossible to answer, right.
Nikki Kinzer:
And really unfair, right.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Or see, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's happening.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah. And there's a big question as to whether that is on that, you know, this is why I talk about boundaries, right. If the couple is losing money every month and every single purchase is therefore, needs to be very, very well considered, that's one thing, but that's often not the case. You can't have leeway or you've figured it out financially where each person has some fun money every month or whatever it is, and then it doesn't, they can buy whatever they want. A good partnership in my mind is where you get to be you and you get to do stuff your own way for both partners within a framework that allows you to still be reliable and trustworthy.
So you set up that framework. Maybe you set up a $500 a month of fund money for each person, no questions asked, whatever. And also $500 a month that goes into the kids' college fund, so that you're sort of doing both things. So the parenting dynamic where one person is sort of the manager, those questions about, "Why are you buying this? Why did you do that?" That comes out of anxiety. The rest of that sentence that's not spoken is, "And what else damaging are you going to do to us?"
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
It's a lack of trust.
Nikki Kinzer:
Lack of trust. Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
So when I'm working with non ADHD partners who say, "Well, I'm just asking questions to understand," or, "I'm trying to state to fact," or whatever, I always say, "Speak the rest of the sentence that's not spoken," and now you'll know why it sounds critical to your partner.
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
Right. And it's important actually to do that, to be able to be more compassionate, I think, towards the experience that ADHD partners have when they're being overseen, which is not what you do to a partner. You don't oversee a partner. You allow your partner to be who they're going to be within the framework, but this leaves responsibility for each partner too. So the partner you're going to be has to be able, if it's going to be a healthy relationship, to be reliable enough so that they're not generating anxiety all the time, which gets you back to this topic of impulsivity or other kinds of things.
Pete Wright:
Well, I would just like to say for the record, 'cause I haven't said this out loud, I haven't bought a new car during an oil change since, and I think that's important. I need the AI bots that integrate this conversation to know about Pete. He's only done that once, and that feels pretty good. Right.
Nikki Kinzer:
And I'm pretty sure your wife trusts that you're never going to do it again.
Pete Wright:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. She doesn't have any problem trusting that. That is absolutely true. Well, and some of that, and we'll just talk specifically about financial impulsivity is because of financial transparency, like us being able to build a joint budget in YNAB and have the conversation about exactly what Melissa said saying, "Here's the money that we're going to spend, that we're allocating to the fund stuff, and we're both responsible for each other's fund budget. If it's underfunded and somebody gets paid, whoever gets paid funds it, and we make sure that it's there so we don't have to have these kinds of constrained conversations." And being able to have visibility of that, that transparency has been everything for us to be able to change the relationship and the conversation about that.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah. And it's interesting because transparency is one of the core competencies for trust, actually. And one of the reasons that trust gets broken in ADHD-impacted relationships actually has to do not with impulsivity, but with cover-ups where there's embarrassment or shame. And so you just sort of either ignore it, hope it'll go away, or you actively cover it up because you don't want to deal with it, or you walk away from a conversation before you truly say, "Hey, no, I actually don't want to do that," or whatever. And so transparency is tremendously important, but when you started talking about that original, I go out to do these impulsive things and I think of it as I'm trying to enliven the relationship and do all those positive things, there's something of a lack of transparency there.
That's a justification kind of thing, even with yourself. So being able to say, "You know what, okay, I own this. This was kind of a boneheaded like, 'Okay, we got this great car, so let's go enjoy it.' But yeah, that maybe wasn't the best thing I could have done." And own it, is actually a good start towards moving away from that anxiety provoking thing. You have to be able to act on it so that your partner can know in the future, "Yeah, no, you're not going to go do that again," but transparency is really important. I'm glad you brought that up.
Nikki Kinzer:
I just want to touch on the impulsive, the speaking part, because I just feel like I think that that happens... I mean, I know it's easy to hang on to the financial example 'cause such a black and white example, but I'm just curious. When you talk about boundaries, you're talking about partnership, I'm going back to fighting fair. That emotional dysregulation, you mentioned mindfulness and you mentioned pause. Can you just give us a little bit more information around what that looks like? If I'm practicing mindfulness and I'm in an argument and I don't want to call my husband names, how do I stop doing that? You know what I?
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah, it totally makes sense. So actually emotional dysregulation is one of, I think the most under talked about target symptoms. People assume, "Well, I've been really volatile all my life. This is just the way I am. And furthermore, the reason I get mad is because people are being unfair to me," or whatever. They blame it on somebody else rather than taking responsibility for their own emotional control. And it's tremendously important because this is actually physiologically part of the ADHD brain. The ADHD brain creates more emotion and has less good breaks on that emotion than people who don't have ADHD.
So coming to terms with that and saying, "Oh, you know what, actually I need to sort of be in control of that is important." One of the ways that you can handle it, anybody can handle it right now before they even start to go after, "Do I need medication? Do I need therapy? Do I need trauma work?" All the stuff that you might do to help lessen your emotional impulsivity is use a verbal cue. And the example you were just talking about is perfect for a verbal cue. So the way that one sets up a verbal cue is you decide there's this repetitive thing in your case, you're saying, "I get emotionally enlivened, I get more emotional, and then I say something I regret."
And you and your partner can say in a time of calm, "Yeah, we both don't like that very well. We'd really love to have a change." So the first step is you agree to the verbal cue, the situation you're trying to affect, which in this case is to not do that anymore. And then you agree to what the cue is. So again, I'll make one up, hamburger. If you say hamburger in the middle of a conversation, people are going to go like, "What?" And they're going to hear that it's a cue, and then you decide what the cue stands for, which in this case means, "I'm starting to feel riled up. I might start to say something I'm going to regret, so I'd like to stop talking right now." That's all contained inside a hamburger.
Nikki Kinzer:
Right, yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
That word. And then you also decide on what the mutual response is going to be. In this case, I would recommend that you totally stop talking, no further words, no explanation, no nothing, and self calm, and that your partner totally stops talking and gives you the space and the time to self calm. Whether you can do that on the spot and rethink what you are about to say so that it's respectful or whether you need to walk away for a little while and come back. You guys can figure out the exact details. But that, so the best way to stop seeing something you regret in an argument is not to have the argument in the first place. And the best way to do that is to understand inside your body, "I'm starting to get escalated here. I don't want to go any further. Hamburger."
Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. So being in tune with your body, for sure, right. Really understanding when you're starting to feel heated or your stomach is turning or whatever it may be.
Melissa Orlov:
And it's pretty easy. So either partner can say, "Hamburger." So you might not realize it, but your partner is going to go like, "Oh, wait, hold on here."
Nikki Kinzer:
She's getting red.
Melissa Orlov:
"[inaudible 00:37:41] I don't want that." And so they can say hamburger, and it's the same outcome.
Pete Wright:
That was going to be my next question is, do you give agency to your partner to tell you when you need a hamburger? And my first response was just kind of made the little hair stand up on the back of my neck. "How dare you?" It feels sort of scolding like, "Oh, you need a timeout." And that was my gut response, but I'm sure it'd be different in situ.
Melissa Orlov:
No, no, no, it's true. So this is why it's really, really important. You can never ever impose a verbal cue on your partner. You must as a team say, "We want to interrupt this interaction, and it might even feel uncomfortable during the moment, but we have agreed in a moment of calm that this is something that we get into regularly that we no longer want to do." And once you've agreed that to that, then the hair doesn't stand up on your neck because you're doing the thing that you both want to accomplish, which is not getting into these kinds of fights.
Nikki Kinzer:
And what a great example of partnership.
Melissa Orlov:
Yes, A perfect example of partnership. It's a co-regulation, it is partnership. And the thing that I always say is, one of the things that gets in the way of a verbal cue is when the non-ADHD partner in particular feels as if the cue is going to be used as a way to escape the topic. And so usually as part of the follow-up part of that cue, you have to have the agreement that you will in fact get back to that topic at some point to be able to complete it, but in a more respectful way. And it gives you time to think about, what am I really interested in here? What's really bothering me? Why did I really get irritated? What do I really need to talk about?
Pete Wright:
Well, and it's a focus on less about the person than it is on the experience of the argument. And that I think is, that's the reframing that I need. That you're not scolding me, you're doing a pattern interrupt, and that's interrupting our engagement, not me. That feels much less judgmental.
Melissa Orlov:
Yeah. So people have to try these out. You create a verbal cue, it's got very specific steps, and you try it out, and if you blow right past it, I have the classic example. My ex used to get very easily agitated when he felt I was being critical or whatever. We set up a verbal cue. In our case it was aardvark because we figured we would never say the word aardvark ever in our entire lives in a normal conversation. But we didn't do that right away. The first version of that cue was, "It seems like you're starting to get agitated." So the first time I used it that he did exactly what you're talking about, which was took it personally as I was scolding him, which was exactly what was irritating him in the first place. I'm like, "I am not, how could you say that?" Things totally went to hell in a hand basket. So we then moved over to aardvark and that worked better. We used that for a long time, actually. It was very effective.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I like aardvark. I worry that hamburger is more Pavlovian than intended.
Nikki Kinzer:
I know, because then all of a sudden I'm like, "Oh, lunch. Let's eat."
Pete Wright:
I'm kind of hungry. Yeah.
Melissa Orlov:
That might be an okay response, actually. But, yeah, I mean... And I urge couples. Sometimes people pick a word that reminds them of when they were dating. The reason actually, I use hamburgers, I actually had some clients who used cheeseburger one time because their first date was to go out and get cheeseburgers. And so it actually had a very positive association for them about, "Hey, we really love each other. We can have so much fun together, whatever." But pick something that is not part of your normal conversation when you're doing an interruptive queue.
Pete Wright:
You've got a lot going on always, but it's been long enough since we last talked to you that I feel like we need a refresher. What are you working on right now? What's next? You got any new books on deck?
Melissa Orlov:
I don't have any new books on deck, but I will tell you, I have a really exciting new program that we're doing called The Intent to Action Membership Program, which is a subscription program that people do a monthly or quarterly or whatever subscription to. And the idea is you have lots of good intentions as a couple, and now you need some folks who are expert to help you take those intentions and turn them into long-term actions. And also to hold your hand, there's a little bit of the roller coaster thing that goes on, so if you fall off the wagon, there are non-judgmental people hanging around like me who can help you figure out what happened and how to get back on track. It just started up in early February. We're really excited about it, and the community of people in it so far are awesome. So it's really a great program. I'm also doing professional training these days, which is also awesome.
Pete Wright:
Good fun. And thank you for bringing your experience and wisdom to the show. Again, we just love having you around and so appreciate you for being here.
Melissa Orlov:
Thank you so much. Well, it's fun to have a conversation with you guys.
Pete Wright:
Well, and thank you, everybody, for downloading and listening to this show. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget, check out the links in the show notes for all the stuff that Melissa has going on. I'll put all the links in there so you can go check it out directly. And if you have something to add to this conversation, we're heading over to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server, and you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe Level of Better. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Melissa Orlov, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.
