Tldr: my wife and I get into verbal fights quite often (once a month or so) I get over it in an hour and it takes her days. Both of us think that the other’s timeline isn’t normal. What’s typical/normal?
I’m ADHD (my current therapist thinks it’s AuDHD) so I’m prone to emotional deregulation and pretty crazy mood swings. I’m pretty sure my parents are somehow ND as well so I don’t have the best basis. My wife is also ND, but it’s audio processing not emotionally related
My wife and I get into fights and arguments sometimes over petty stuff. I feel I hear her out but it’s difficult for her to listen to me straight through as I tend to take a while to get to my point. She interrupts me a lot with either snide comments or questions that if she just waited a sec I’d answer. This leads me to getting frustrated and raising my voice and yelling, which gets her pissed off and raises her voice and suddenly we’re in a shouting match.
Eventually one of us gives up or realizes they’re wrong and we end the fight and go to our separate (safe) areas.
After about an hour I feel I’m back to normal and can talk about other things. (We usually have something we need to do with our kids or work or the house that we need to communicate on).
My wife feels it takes her a day or two to come down from a fight so shes very short with me until that time, where I feel I can talk after an hour or so… She feels that it’s not normal to change in that short of time.
What do people think?
There are two answers for me. Sometimes I stop and think my way out of it and am ok after a couple hours, I can let it go.
Sometimes I just get angrier and angrier as I think about it, and in that situation I must talk to the other party. That usually takes a day or two because it takes me that long to realize I’m not gonna calm down, am still mad. But every time this has happened, the other party has apologized because they, in the same intervening time, have realized they were being asshole-ish.
Nobody I know takes that long to tell me, if I am being asshole-ish. It can take me an hour or so to calm down and apologize.
All of this assumes good intentions on all sides. My ex, you couldn’t back down or apologize with him, he saw it as weakness and would mock, was terrible at fighting.