Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) is a condition that can cause extreme difficulty in forming relationships, including marriage. It can be challenging to live and interact with someone who has RAD, especially if you don’t understand it fully. This blog post offers tips on how to cope with RAD in a marriage and maintain a healthy relationship.
What is Reactive Attachment Disorder?
Before we dive into coping strategies, let’s first discuss what reactive attachment disorder is. RAD is a disorder that affects an individual’s ability to form secure attachments with people, usually due to early childhood trauma or neglect. People with RAD often display symptoms such as social withdrawal, difficulty expressing emotions, and difficulty developing and maintaining relationships. In marriage, these difficulties can manifest as emotional distance, difficulty communicating feelings, and lack of trust or commitment.
Create a Safe Space
The most important thing you can do when trying to cope with RAD in your marriage is creating a safe space for your partner to feel comfortable talking about their feelings and experiences – both positive and negative.
This means establishing boundaries around what topics are off-limits for discussion and creating an atmosphere of acceptance and understanding. It’s also important not to take things too personally; try not to take any comments or behaviors directed towards you too seriously. Instead, try to focus on why your partner might be feeling this way so that solutions can be found together.
Focus on Quality Time Together
It can be easy for couples living with RAD to become disconnected from each other over time because of the difficulties associated with the disorder. To combat this disconnection, it’s important for couples to spend quality time together doing activities they both enjoy.
This could include taking walks together in nature or just spending time connecting over dinner each night—whatever works best for you both! It’s also essential that couples make sure they are taking care of themselves individually outside of their relationship so that each person feels supported in their own lives as well as within their marriage.
Talk About Your Feelings Openly
It’s natural—and healthy—for couples living with RAD to have disagreements from time-to-time; however, it’s essential that couples discuss these issues openly instead of bottling them up until they explode into arguments later down the road.
When discussing difficult topics like money or parenting decisions it helps if each person starts by focusing on how they feel rather than attacking one another or blaming the other person for something going wrong; this will help create an atmosphere where each party feels heard without feeling judged or attacked by their partner.
Additionally, make sure you’re setting aside time each week where you just talk about how you’re feeling—this could mean having regular check-ins throughout the week or scheduling regular date nights where communication is top priority!
Conclusion: Living with someone who has reactive attachment disorder doesn’t have to be impossible – but it does require extra effort from both parties involved in order to make the relationship work in the long run! By creating a safe space for open communication while making sure you’re spending quality time together and talking openly about your feelings when disagreements arise – couples living with RAD can improve their connection and learn how best to support one another through difficult times! With patience and understanding from both partners involved – anything is possible!
