What I wish I had known about separation as an AuDHD woman: One parent’s lived experience of family violence, money, safety and trying to work out what to do next

Yellow Ladybugs Note:

This anonymous guest blog shares one AuDHD parent’s lived experience of separation and family violence. Some details have been left out or kept general to protect the author, their children and other people involved. This is one person’s experience. Other victim-survivors may recognise parts of it and have had a very different experience of other parts. It is not legal, financial, specialist family violence or therapeutic advice. What is safe to do can be very different from one situation to another, so please seek advice that takes account of your own circumstances and safety. Some readers may find parts of this blog confronting. Support information is included at the end. If a safer device is available to you, consider using it to read this article if somebody may be monitoring your phone, computer or accounts. If you need support now and do not know where to begin, 1800RESPECT is available nationally on 1800 737 732, and Safe Steps provides 24-hour support in Victoria on 1800 015 188. If you or somebody else is in immediate danger, call Triple Zero on 000.

What will you take away from this piece…

·        Practical tips from an AuDHD woman on how to make the process a little bit easier and safer for those experiencing separation and family violence.

·        Things to consider as an AuDHD woman if you think separation may eventuate in the near future

What I wish I had known about marriage separation as an AuDHD woman

When the separation happened after a very long marriage I was not prepared for how many urgent decisions would fall to me at once. Everything felt urgent and every decision seemed to have another decision attached to it.

I was still trying to go to work, parent, get children to school, answer emails, remember appointments, make dinner and try to keep everything looking OK. All while trying to understand bank accounts, Centrelink, legal processes and whether action might make things worse.

There is plenty of advice online. Open a bank account in my own name, gather important documents, change passwords, get another phone, apply for relevant Centrelink payments and speak to a lawyer. It seemed simple enough but starting one task would end with 5 more tasks.

I had not made the final decision to end the marriage so I was caught off guard which I recognise now as a tactic to maintain control when he finally pulled the trigger. In recent years he had also made false accusations about me “planning to leave the marriage”. These sorts of accusations had an effect because they made me scared to do even the smallest thing to prepare for what I knew was coming. If you have experienced similar you are not alone, I often felt like I was waiting for him to call it, the self-blame that I should have been more prepared for the inevitable.

When I was finally diagnosed with ADHD as an adult I felt happier in myself and started to find some support. However, I never expected the diagnosis to have such a negative impact on the marriage. Suddenly it felt as though the diagnosis was going to be weaponised forever. All roads led back to ADHD, every problem could be explained as mine, and sadly I do not think this is a unique experience.

Couples counselling did not help. In therapy the conversations always came back to how we could communicate better. The real issues where never discussed so the sessions felt almost “pretend”. I did not want to rock the boat. What was put forward in sessions and the behaviour we experienced at home simply did not match. Another form of manipulation but the family was almost entirely financially reliant on him and I was too scared of what might come to address much at the time.

I did not always know it was family violence

I’ve known people in abusive relationships who spent years believing they were the problem, thinking that if they could communicate differently things might improve. That wasn’t really my experience. In the final years I knew the dynamic was not OK. The patterns were there early in the marriage but it was a slow slide from happy, to content, to dysfunctional, to abusive.

Not all forms of family violence are easily identifiable. Some people hold outdated views that there needs to be physical violence or threats. I knew what coercive control and emotional abuse looked like. Financially I was also very vulnerable as I had spent so many years as an unpaid carer of our children. I quickly found the right language and was able to acknowledge how bad things had become.

I spent a lot of time thinking ahead. Navigating the separation process I came across labels such as “high conflict” which often made a separation involving abuse sound mutual as though it was simply two people who could not get along. For years I tried to smooth things over. Not every day was terrible. There were good memories, children and all the ordinary practical parts of a life we had built together. I knew the end was coming and that it would be bad. What I didn’t know was whether these things would be understood as family violence by anybody else.

The post-separation financial abuse was brutal.

Lots of people still believe that financial abuse means having absolutely NO access to money. We had some money at the very beginning of the separation but zero income for months. We survived off vouchers and a crisis grant from the Escaping Family Violence program. Some friends would dismiss the financial aspect entirely “she MUST have money somewhere, she’ll be fine”. For years I wanted to return to more secure work but his career and income always came first. It was so much easier for him to control the trajectory of our marriage when I had limited income. Women commonly put themselves last and the long-term financial impact can be devastating.

Having access to money was one of the central issues. Could he remove the family income that we relied on while I was supporting multiple children with complex needs? Could I spend money without being questioned? For some autistic and ADHD people their capacity may effect how much involvement they have with financial matters prior to separation which can make it even harder to know where help ends and control begins.

Looking back, I wish we had talked about fairness in our finances much earlier in our relationship, especially when caring responsibilities affected paid work. As time went on the gap in financial security grew and it became a real power imbalance.

For me staying connected to paid work mattered but I’d never tell another woman to simply keep her job as though it were that easy. She may have been prevented from working for years or maybe carrying nearly all the work of caring for children. The micro aggression… “Why aren’t you working more?” was so common... Well actually I worked tirelessly but most of it was unpaid caring work. This was problematic with a lot of advice. It told me the sensible thing to do without acknowledging all the reasons it might be difficult or even completely impossible to do.

After the separation, the decisions kept coming and coming

It is easy to think that once the relationship ended the biggest decision was made. It is hard to really grasp how many major decisions follow. Best to accept you will never understand the whole separation process end to end. I could gather information while I was trying to work out what the next decision even was. For me there were the children, the house, money, work, school and medical needs.

The end of the relationship was sudden and we had not discussed anything about living arrangements. In my situation, the other person wanted to continue living in the family home and I did not believe that was safe. One of the first things I had to do was work out what options existed and get legal advice. I had to acknowledge that the children had lived through the moods, the patterns, the silence, the arguments too and now it was finally time for this to stop.

Abusive behaviour often escalates after a relationship ends. Separation is a dangerous period when family violence is already present. Knowing this helped me understand why decisions about the home, the children and what happened next all had to be made with safety in mind.

During these weeks I was hypervigilant and paralysed at the same time which is a strange combination because my brain was scanning everything for danger while I could also be completely unable to begin a basic task or decide which problem came first.

I had been accused of planning to leave for so many years. I was so tired of the false accusations, which I now see clearly as manipulation, that it made me avoid planning completely which was a big mistake.

Being AuDHD in the middle of all of this

One reason I wanted to write this is that I found practical information was still missing from many resources. I needed advice for me as an AuDHD woman. I had no idea how much administration separation involved until I was in it. When there are family violence considerations one task was never just one task.

Making one phone call might mean finding the correct number, opening hours, calling when I wasn’t working or had kids with me, trying to hold back tears, waiting on hold for hours and answering questions I had not expected. If children were sick it might mean missing appointments completely which had a huge knock-on effect.

I could understand that something was urgent and still be unable to begin it.

I could spend hours trying to make one email exactly right while several other things sat untouched. One phone call could use everything I had for that day. There were forms I opened, saw how many questions they contained and closed again, sometimes more than once.

I needed people to ask clear, specific questions rather than assume I knew what they were trying to find out. Sometimes I found it difficult to work out which part of the story I needed to focus on! Under stress I might remember one detail very clearly and then lose track of when it happened or remember something important two days after an appointment and feel frustrated that I had not said it at the time.

I could sound calm while I was speaking because I had spent most of my life learning how to mask and sound capable. I mostly hid how overwhelmed I was. I was using every bit of available energy just to communicate in a way I hoped would be believed. Also being aware that Family Law often involves aggressive tactics. Would his lawyers try to suggest I was too overwhelmed to parent properly? It is the world we live in that disabled women/mothers experience this type of discrimination and neurodivergence can be very deliberately weaponised in Family Law matters.

I also kept returning to questions of fairness, particularly around shared income, years of caring responsibilities and the way abuse could be described as mutual conflict. These things were not easy for me to put aside simply because there was another form to complete or phone call to make.

Safety means more than just somewhere to go

I had thought a safety plan mostly meant knowing somewhere else to go in an emergency. I came to understand that this should also cover whether home was safe, the children, transport, medication, money, documents, communication and what I might do if money suddenly became unavailable.

Medication, familiar belongings, sensory needs and the things the children relied on still mattered in a crisis, in fact they mattered even more. I needed somebody with knowledge to go through my actual circumstances with me.

The technology advice sounded simple, create a new email address, change passwords, turn off location sharing and get another phone. However, our children all shared various accounts with me and this was difficult to sort out. Once a co-parent stops cooperating and becomes hostile even the simplest things become almost impossible. He never shared his accounts with anyone (!) yet mine were all very easy to access.

Before changing anything, I needed to know whether I might lose information I still needed which was exactly the kind of layered problem I had little capacity for. I worked on tasks whenever I had capacity. I did not need a beautiful folder with everything labelled correctly. I needed enough information to answer the next question.

Money, legal words and all the ordinary bills

Opening a bank account in my own name sounded like one of the clearest jobs people suggested but as soon as I thought about redirecting income, joint accounts, mortgages, debts and bills, it stopped being simple!

I had to work out what money I could access and where income was being paid. Sorting out finances was not a linear process. I could manage it much better when I approached it in small steps and allowed myself time to process things. Centrelink and child support were long detailed processes too. Much longer than anyone tells you. I needed to make sure my payments and rebates went into my new personal account that he could not access.

The legal part was similar. I had written down terms such as urgent financial orders, interim parenting orders, child support and protection orders but it was hard to know how one decision might affect another.

What helped, and what did not

People would often tell me that “divorce was always messy but you’ll get through it”. I know they were trying to “stay positive” but those comments framed what was happening to us as an ordinary difficult separation when we were dealing with controlling and abusive behaviour. OK he never punched me in the face but the distress was felt daily and ongoing over a long period of time which has profoundly affected us and will never be forgotten.

Being passed from one service to another was exhausting. Every referral meant another call, another intake process and another explanation of what had happened.

Some of the people who helped me most were people I barely knew, especially when people I had expected to be safe had stayed silent. In your darkest moments please call a support service. There were phone calls with support services that gave me so much comfort, particularly when the person at the other end slowed things down and stayed with one problem.

What I needed from services was quite practical. I needed information in writing because I would not remember a whole phone call. I needed time to process things before making decisions. Sometimes I needed somebody to tell me which one of the 3 new organisations should come first. A new form to complete may look like a small follow-up task but most days early on I was already overloaded. It helped having somebody stay with me in that moment and work out what needed to happen first knowing I might not have capacity for the rest until later.

My capacity could change enormously from one day to the next. There were days when I could make several calls and others when I could barely open an email. Fear, exhaustion, trauma and executive functioning overload were all happening at the same time.

I wish somebody could have handed me one clear list because when everything was happening at once I desperately wanted to be told clearly what to do. I understand now why a basic checklist could not tell me which action was urgent, what the children needed or how much I could do that day. To a degree I had to accept the chaos. It was survival.

In the end I did it in bits, stopping and starting, putting calls off, opening forms and closing them again and asking for the same information more than once. It did not feel organised but that was what getting through it looked like for me.

The process was gruelling and at the time I could not see much further than surviving each day one at a time. However, separation did eventually give me the chance to break the cycle and later the gift of freedom. For those of us that survive there is hopefully freedom at the end and I do not want to leave that part out!