Therapy for ADHD
What is ADHD?
ADHD (or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects all areas of your life. ADHD is often misunderstood as a disorder of hyperactivity or lack of attention, but at its core, ADHD is a disorder of regulation. Those with ADHD have neurological differences that make regulation more challenging than neurotypical individuals. That means regulating your attention, your focus, your emotions, your appetite, your impulses, your time, are all different ways that ADHD can influence your life.
Some symptoms of ADHD in adults include
Chronic procrastination or difficulty starting tasks.
Overwhelm with planning, prioritizing, or follow through.
Mental fatigue from constant overthinking or masking.
Time blindness - difficulty managing time, frequently running late or underestimating how long things take.
All or nothing work patterns, like hyperfixations or hyperfocus followed by burnout.
Emotional reactivity, sensitivity to criticism, or mood swings.
Forgetfulness or frequently misplacing items.
Inner conflict between high standards and inconsistent output.
Persistent self criticism or shame for “not meeting their potential”.
Justice sensitivity and low tolerance for unfair or inequitable situations.
High levels of emotions when being told what to do.
High levels of anxiety or perfectionism.
Chronic stress from overworking to “keep up”.
Depression or low self worth rooted in years of internalized failure.
Burnout from constantly pushing beyond your limits.
Difficulty relaxing or “turning off” a busy mind.
Relationship strain due to communication breakdowns or emotional volatility.
If you struggle with any of these things, it doesn’t mean that there is something ‘wrong’ with you, or that you’ve failed. It may simply mean that your brain is set up differently than most people in our society.
Masking
“Isn’t ADHD a diagnosis for kids?” “If I had ADHD, I would have known about it!” No, ADHD isn’t just for kids, and yes, it is very possible that you’ve had ADHD your entire life and just didn’t know about it. Historically, most research and understanding of ADHD was primarily based on white boys, who can exhibit very different symptoms of ADHD than girls, or people of color. Unfortunately, because our understanding of ADHD was very limited, it also meant that many people with ADHD who did not fit those dominant stereotypes were not able to get the proper diagnosis and support they needed. Now that there is more equity in our understanding of ADHD, many adults are now finding out that they have ADHD.
Paradoxically, the more high achieving you are, the more likely it is that your ADHD will be missed. For many adults, they don’t get diagnosed with ADHD until there’s a big life change, such as entering parenthood, because they’ve become such experts at masking their neurodivergence.
“Masking” refers to the the strategies that ADHD-ers (and other neurodiverse individuals) have come up with to compensate for their different brains to be an accepted and functioning member of society. While masking can help us perform, maintain relationships, avoid judgment, meet expectations, and fit in, it also can be exhausting, leading to emotional distress, and feeling out of touch with our own selves.
Common Examples of Masking
Overpreparing or overcompensating to avoid making mistakes or appearing “scattered”
Hiding struggles with basic routines like paying bills, replying to emails, or keeping the house organized
Downplaying emotional overwhelm or “pushing through” burnout to maintain appearances
Avoiding asking for help due to fears of being seen as incompetent or dramatic
Scripting conversations in advance to avoid going off-topic or interrupting
Working late into the night to meet deadlines others completed during business hours
Creating highly structured systems (calendars, task lists, color coding)
Using humor or charm to redirect from memory lapses or forgetfulness
Just because we figured out how to manage the ADHD by coming up with elaborate masking strategies doesn’t mean that the ADHD magically went away. It only means that we’ve subconsciously or consciously put in a lot of time, energy, and effort to wrangle our brains into submission. And while masking can be incredibly effective in the short term, it can also come with a lot of shame, anxiety, and challenges.
The Grief and Compassion of Late Diagnoses
Many adults who finally receive an ADHD diagnosis later in life have lived through decades of silently struggling with focus, time management, overwhelm, and emotional regulation. For many, these struggles have often been internalized, hidden behind perfectionism, people pleasing, or a constant push to “hold it all together”, all hiding a private battle of chaos and inadequacy.
Because of that, a late diagnosis can feel like both a blessing and a curse. Often, late diagnoses come with a lot of grief. Grief and a yearning for the life that you could have lived if you had gotten the proper attention before. Grief and sadness for the young child that didn’t understand what was going on with their brain, and internalized their struggles as their own moral deficit and failures. Grief and anger for all the years that you were struggling without the right support.
While those feelings of grief, sadness, pain, and anger are all normal with late diagnoses, late diagnosis of ADHD can also unlock a new portal of self compassion that wasn’t possible before. The more you understand your ADHD, the more you’ll be able to see yourself differently. While it may have been automatic to attribute your executive dysfunction as a moral and personal failure, the more we understand your ADHD, the easier it will be to see it with compassion and acceptance. A late diagnosis can help you replace your harsh and critical judgment of yourself with a more loving, kind, and compassionate connection with yourself in ways that would have seemed impossible before.
Hardware vs Software: How can Therapy Help with ADHD?
Your ADHD is the hardware, and your responses to it are your software. The hardware you were given at birth is unchangeable. We can support our hardware by taking medications, but the size of our anterior cingulate cortex, the rate of development of our prefrontal cortex, the amount of dopamine in our brains are all some of the many things we cannot change in our brains.
In response to this hardware, we develop software to accommodate it. An example of software is be the masking strategies we’ve come up with to compensate for the seeming shortcomings of the hardware. Other kinds of software can be the way we view ourselves, the harsh critical judgment we put on ourselves, and the way we’ve made meaning of the ways we are limited by our hardware.
When it comes to our software, that’s where therapy comes in. Therapy, specifically IFS (Internal Family Systems), can help us change our software. Especially if we were late diagnosed, we may have ‘software’ from carrying burdens from being constantly misunderstood for decades, from not meeting our own or external expectations, and the constant pressure to perform to fit in in neurotypical environments. Therapy can help us unburden from those experiences, and change the software that colors the way we see the world and ourselves.
If you’ve been recently diagnosed with ADHD, or if you think that you may have ADHD, therapy can offer you a much needed safe space to rewrite your old stories, and begin relating to yourself with more clarity, kindness, compassion, and courage. You don’t have to keep holding it all together alone. If you’re curious about changing your own relationship with ADHD, please reach out for a free consultation.
Therapy can help you
understand your own reactions to the expressions of your ADHD.
build a compassionate relationship with the Parts of you that criticize, avoid, or overwork.
acknowledge your overwhelm and exhaustion from trying to hold it all together.
learn helpful strategies to coexist with your ADHD to live a fulfilling life in a neurotypical world.
grieve for all the things that could have been, and acknowledge the pain that you’ve endured.
unburden the harmful inner narratives you have about yourself as a result of a lifetime of perceived failures.
create internal harmony and lessen the reactivity and sensitivity.
strengthen your connection with your own self, the calm, centered core that brings you clarity and confidence.
learn what it’s like to see yourself with compassion, instead of judgment and criticism.
understand how your hardware and software have been influencing your personal relationships, and how to manage them to experience a fulfilling connection with your partner.
The purpose of therapy isn’t to get rid of your ADHD - your ADHD is neither good nor bad, it just simply is a neutral fact about you. But what it can do is help you have a loving and compassionate relationship with all parts of you, including your Hardware. And that makes all the difference.