Lucy Brazier with husband Steve (Image: Supplied)
Lucy Brazier had always struggled with her husband Steve’s mood swings and erratic behaviour but by January 2022 – and after 20 years of marriage – she realised that she couldn’t take it any more.
“It had been particularly hard that Christmas. He’d been especially low, had a sudden high and then a sudden crash. I thought, ‘This is it. I can’t keep doing this’.
Steve agreed. “I have tried everything,” he said to Lucy. “You name it, I have done it… but I still hate myself. I won’t blame you if you want to leave me. I want to leave me… I don’t want you to waste any more time in this marriage.”
Yet rather than the end of their relationship, the decision heralded a new beginning. The moment they agreed to separate felt like, “stepping off a crowded bus you were desperate to leave,” Lucy says. “He was letting me off the hook and that was what I thought I wanted.
“But, as soon as we had that conversation very calmly, I thought, ‘This can’t be it. We can’t give up without one last go’. Even though I’d really hoped to be let off the hook, when it came to it, I don’t know if either of us were actually ready.”
She confided in an old friend about her divorce plans and the friend recommended a book entitled The ADHD Effect On Marriage. She sent Lucy a copy, Steve read it, then he declared, “This is exactly how I feel”.
His mental health felt so precarious that, faced with a two-year wait for an NHS referral, he paid for a private consultation. A week after the appointment, the psychiatrist’s report rated Steve as 98% likely to have ADHD. The moment was, Lucy says, “momentous”.
“It was a huge relief to get the diagnosis because it felt so familiar. It was exactly what we’d been waiting to discover.”
It also gave her a glimmer of hope that their marriage might survive. “We were both quite giddy about the ADHD. ‘You’ll get medication and it’s going to be a whole new you!” We joked about that but it felt very, very exciting.”
Then an NHS psychiatrist not only confirmed Steve’s ADHD diagnosis but also diagnosed ASD (autism spectrum disorder), adding that it was not uncommon for autistic people to suffer from ADHD too.
For Lucy, these diagnoses were the revelation that would save their marriage.
“With the ASD, I felt that relief,” says Lucy. “It made total sense. But Steve plummeted because there’s a big stigma around autism.” It took him a couple of months to accept his new reality.
Lucy and Steve met through a mutual friend in 2002. “Ironically, some of the things that attracted me to him were ADHD traits,” she says. “He was hugely impulsive and that was exciting. He’s very clever, very funny and full of curiosity.”
Lucy Brazier with husband Steve (Image: SWNS)
She was aware early on of his struggles with depression. “I was really nervous about it,” she says. “But his love for me felt very real and safe and secure.”
The couple left London nineteen years ago to raise their three children Raff, now 20, Hebe, 17, and Jesse, 15, near Bridport in Dorset. But Lucy’s frustrations with Steve accumulated steadily over the years.
“The really big thing was that he had struggled with depression and mood regulation for as long as I’d known him.” Steve attributed his depression to a (confidential) childhood trauma. “For a long time, I had felt frustrated and angry, though it was more the day-to-day than the big stuff,” says Lucy.
“Every day, we would come at something from different angles or we’d have an argument. It would build up over small things, like the wrong socks in the wrong drawer and he couldn’t keep it together because he couldn’t find his socks. There was a huge argument about that and we didn’t speak to each other for a couple of days because I felt it was ridiculous.”
Over the years, to tackle his depression, Steve had tried cognitive behavioural therapy, antidepressants, psychotherapy, group therapy, and EMDR, a therapy that uses eye movements to process traumatic memories. He had given up alcohol, taken up yoga, cut out dairy and processed meat.
“I felt exhausted,” admits Lucy. “And a big part of that conversation was, ‘Maybe it’s me?’ I have to be honest about my impatience, frustration and anger. Perhaps someone else would have been more understanding at the right points.”
January was crunch time because Christmas was always a trial for Steve and therefore for Lucy too. “He struggled with some family events, they were triggers. He would be in situations that he didn’t know how to navigate, he would feel unable to judge a mood or a response from someone and, at Christmas, there were lots of those. It was a perfect storm.
“Christmas is much better now,” she says. “He used to mask everything but now we talk very openly about how he’s feeling and whether he needs to go off somewhere – or I do.”
With Steve’s blessing, Lucy started writing to help her make sense of the diagnoses. The Honesty Box’s title refers to Lucy’s passion project of growing vegetables to sell to the local community, which also motivated Steve and Lucy to work together in their garden and helped them to build bridges.
“The ADHD medication really helps but it doesn’t solve everything,” she says now. “And there’s no magic pill for autism. It’s something he has to deal with. Life can be hard work for him.
“But we’ve been very honest with each other. And I respond to things differently now. He is shocking with timekeeping, for example, and, in the past, I would have been cross. Now, we do things in a different way. I do social things like parties on my own because that’s something that he really struggles with.
“There are still times when he hits big lows. But there are fewer of them, and they don’t last as long.
“We thought we were being honest before but I think we were both talking about how we felt, we weren’t listening to the other person. It feels much more of a conversation now.”
Initially, Lucy and Steve had continued to talk about separating. But slowly, Lucy realised that they were beginning to look a little further into a shared future.
“The truth is I don’t know what will happen to us. But I have absolutely no desire for us to separate. And we’ve found a way to move forward. We’ve done so well. We’ve worked hard and we’re still together and we’re really proud of that. We’ve managed to get here somehow.”
The Honesty Box by Lucy Brazier (Bloomsbury), £16.99, is out now