What is the secret to making your marriage special while also parenting a child with special needs?
Approximately 10 percent of individuals within the general population have a disability. Now, with the rise of certain disabilities like autism disorders, many couples are parenting special needs children. In those instances, making your marriage special can be more like a chore. When so much extra time and energy is put into taking care of a child with special needs, what ends up happening to the marriage?
Becoming a parent for the first time is a challenge and usually involves a degree of adaptation. For parents with a special needs child, however, adaptation can be much more difficult. These parents must learn to adjust to the unique and sometimes scary path of raising a child with a disability. And with the many extra demands that it places upon parents as individuals, having any time to work on the marriage might seem impossible.
Our guest today is Dr. Barbara Lowe-Greenlee, a licensed psychologist with Greenlee Psychological & Support Services in Chapel Hill, NC. She works to help families with special needs children succeed and thrive despite the tough challenges they face. To find out more about Barbara and her practice, visit her website or call (919) 824-5743 to make an appointment.
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Can we become stronger while managing ADHD within a marriage?
It’s no secret that navigating and maintaining a marriage can be difficult sometimes. But what if your spouse has ADHD or is undiagnosed and living with ADHD? In either case, communication is extra challenging and can seem impossible at times. Oftentimes the partner dealing with ADHD within a marriage is inconsistent, and that can lead to tension. If your partner can be forgetful about simple household tasks, or seems uninterested or distracted more often than not, he or she might be living with ADHD or another attention deficit condition.
Though the issues are small, they often build up to be one large problem in the relationship. Having a partner with ADHD can create a level of frustration that’s hard to understand, but luckily there is a fix. Nowadays, we know a lot more about the characteristics of ADHD. And that makes treatment and maintenance much easier. Today, psychiatrist Dr. Jennie Byrne of Cognitive Psychiatry of Chapel Hill is our guest, and she has answers to some of the burning questions about conditions like ADHD within a marriage.
To find out more about Jennie and her practice, or to seek help for a similar situation, visit her website or call (919) 636-5240 to schedule an appointment.
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If there was an instruction book for a happy marriage, would you use it?
No one makes such a great commitment, like marriage, with the assumption that they will one day end up as anything other than happy. So what is the key to a happy marriage when small squabbles and large debates muddy the waters of your love? We often don’t consider these issues unless they’re directly affecting our own marriages. Is it possible to turn a bad situation around when we’re being reactive to a situation rather than being proactive?
In a lot of cases, many little issues add up to become one big issue. If you can identify what some of those “little things” are, you can make any necessary adjustments in your marriage that can help you stay happy as a couple. But how exactly do you work to discover what these problem triggers could be?
Dr. Tina Lepage shares 10 of the humorous secrets to staying happily married from a marriage counselor’s perspective. Tina is founder of Lepage Associates in Durham, North Carolina, where she specializes in couples and marriage therapy. To find out more about Tina Lepage and her practice in Durham, NC, Lepage Associates, you can visit their website or call (919)572-0000 for an appointment.
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