Adult ADHD
When I was a child, I was diagnosed with ADHD (then called ADD), and my parents took me to see a therapist.
The therapist taught me how to practice the “focus position” by putting both of my feet on the floor, and sitting up tall, like there was a string connecting the top of my head to the ceiling. She didn’t teach me how to notice that my mind had wandered in the first place, or how to not get distracted by the funny idea of a string coming out of the top of my head, and she certainly didn’t consider the possibility that my brain was simply not built for a traditional classroom structure.
As ineffective as this sounds – and believe me, it was ineffective – it’s a variation on what traditional psychotherapy with people with ADHD looks like. The paradigm is: “Here are society’s expectations, and here is your brain. Your brain doesn’t work well with society’s expectations, so let’s try to change it.”
This is the problem with conventional approaches to working with ADHD, and it starts with the way ADHD is diagnosed. The official “diagnostic criteria” – which is to say, the list of symptoms that mental health professionals use to diagnose ADHD – is a collection of ways that people with ADHD are unable to fit into systems that aren’t designed for us, and the ways that our personalities can be inconvenient to other people, especially authority figures.
When you start from this diagnostic model, where you’re defining ADHD as a kind of brokenness, you miss out on the beauty of ADHD brains. Worse yet, the process of trying to resist the way your magical brain is naturally wired can lead to depression, anxiety, and self-esteem problems.
That’s why I take a strength-based approach to ADHD work.
What if, instead of trying to change your brain to function better in society, you could change the fabric of your life and the rhythm of your routines to be more amenable to the way your brain works?
Because ADHD brains aren’t broken. In a lot of ways, they are finely tuned machines. For example, people with ADHD are amazing at:
- Multitasking
- Hyperfocusing on something compelling
- Enthusiastically throwing themselves into a passion
- Developing a wide variety of interests over the course of a lifespan
- Empathically connecting with others
- Building strong relationships, especially with other ADHDers
- Creativity and thinking outside the box (because that’s where we live)
These things can come with challenges, like forgetting to practice basic self-care while you’re hyperfocusing, or being susceptible to getting hurt since you’re such an emotional sponge. Furthermore, executive functioning (managing things like calendars, bills, and self-care) can be challenging for people with ADHD. I have worked with many clients to tackle these challenges, while building or maintaining a positive relationship with the impact ADHD has on their lives.
How ADHD Can Manifest as Anxiety and Depression
As an adult, I view my ADHD as a superpower, but when I was a child, it made me feel like I was failing at everything all the time. Needless to say, this did not make me feel good about myself.
ADHD often manifests as anxiety and depression. Truly, I’ve worked with many clients who have been diagnosed with these things by previous therapists who missed their ADHD. Many of these same people often struggle with low self-esteem, because if you’ve spent your entire life feeling like you can’t do things that other people seem to do with ease – like focus on something that isn’t riveting – you might start to think something is wrong with you.
If you haven’t been diagnosed with ADHD, but suspect you may have it, you may have been telling yourself that you were simply “worse at stuff” than other people. This can lead to depression and poor self-image, or it can lead to anxiety by way of overcompensation. A diagnosis can be transformative, but it can also cause a lot of grief. “What if I had known this earlier?” you might ask. “How would that have changed my life experience, and the feelings I’ve had about myself for all of these years?”
Even if you were lucky enough to be diagnosed in childhood, like I was, you may have been taught about your ADHD through the diagnostic, deficit-based lens of traditional psychotherapy. If it didn’t help, you may have wondered, “I have a diagnosis, I’ve gotten treatment, why isn’t it helping?”
I’ve worked with many clients who struggle with anxiety and depression, but if the underlying issue is undiagnosed ADHD, interventions targeted at those things are not going to help very much. Once we’ve identified ADHD as something that affects you, we can contextualize your stories about your success or failure, help you manage things that are currently making your life harder, and process the grief of what could have been if you’d had a strength-based perspective on your experience earlier.
Reach out
For help learning how your ADHD is your superpower, and managing its challenges, reach out to schedule a free phone consultation now!