ADHD: Making
Sense of Yourself

There is no single way to have ADHD, and it does not mean that you had to be the stereotypically hyperactive or 'naughty' child.

You may have been quiet, anxious, dreamy or lost in thought. You may have been intensely curious, talkative, restless or impulsive. You may have struggled visibly, or you may have become extremely good at hiding how hard you were working to keep everything together.

Some people recognise their ADHD early in life. Others reach adulthood before beginning to understand why certain things have always seemed to require more effort, more recovery or more self-control than they appeared to require for other people.

You might experience difficulties with attention, remembering, time, organisation, prioritising, changing between tasks, regulating emotions, impulsivity, overwhelm, or beginning and completing things. You may experience some of these and not others. They may also change depending on your environment, your level of interest, stress, relationships, sleep and what else is happening in your life.

And sometimes what other people see bears very little resemblance to what is happening inside you.

Your ADHD is your ADHD. Understanding what it means for you matters far more to me than trying to fit you into somebody else's description of what ADHD is supposed to look like.

ADHD can make aspects of everyday life genuinely difficult, but sometimes the deepest pain comes from what we have learnt to make those difficulties mean about us.

Forgetting something may be frustrating. But the shame that follows - 'How could I forget again? What is wrong with me?' - can hurt far more.

Being disorganised can create real problems. But years of interpreting that disorganisation as laziness, inadequacy or failure can shape how you see yourself.

Losing focus, getting overwhelmed, saying something impulsively, struggling with time, leaving something unfinished or finding it difficult to begin can all have consequences. But I am also interested in what happens inside you afterwards. Do you attack yourself? Panic? Hide it? Work twice as hard? Promise yourself you will never let it happen again?

We can become so focused on correcting the behaviour that we miss the emotional experience surrounding it.

In our work, I am interested not only in what you do, but in what happens inside you around it - the forgetting, the overthinking, the avoiding, the doing, the achieving, the exhaustion and the criticism afterwards - and particularly the meaning you have learnt to attach to all of it.

Not everyone with ADHD looks as though they are struggling.

You may be the person who never stops.

You achieve, organise, anticipate, overprepare and push yourself harder. You may be highly capable, successful and dependable. Other people may even wonder how you could possibly have ADHD because they see what you accomplish, not what it costs you to accomplish it.

Perhaps stopping feels uncomfortable. There is always something else you should be doing, fixing, improving or achieving. You reach one goal and, rather than feeling satisfied, your attention moves almost immediately to the next. What you have done never quite feels enough.

Sometimes achievement becomes more than achievement. It can become a way of staying ahead of criticism, failure or disappointment, or protecting against a much deeper fear of not being enough.

And sometimes we become so accustomed to living this way that we do not recognise it as pressure. It simply feels like who we are.

In therapy, I am interested in what is underneath that relentless doing. What happens if you stop? What does achievement give you beyond the achievement itself? What might failure mean about you? Whose standards are you still trying to meet?

The aim is not to take away your drive, ambition or the things you value about yourself. It is to understand when those qualities feel freely yours and when they are being driven by fear, shame or a belief that you have to keep proving your worth. When we understand what that drive has been doing for you, we can begin to give your system more choice — so you can still achieve, strive and care deeply about things without always having to be driven by something underneath that says you must.

Sometimes ADHD itself is only one part of what brings someone to therapy. The other part is what has happened around it.

Repeated criticism, misunderstanding, correction or comparison can leave us feeling that there is a right way to be human and that we somehow keep getting it wrong.

You may have become very good at masking, over-preparing, perfectionism, people-pleasing, staying busy, controlling everything you can, making yourself small, becoming the funny one, or appearing as though everything is fine. These ways of coping may have helped you belong, avoid criticism, feel safer or make life more manageable.

They may also be exhausting.

You might know intellectually that you are capable and still feel, somewhere much deeper, that you are failing.

I do not see these responses as further evidence that something is wrong with you. I want to understand how they came to make sense and what they have been trying to do for you.

You may already understand yourself very well.

You may have read about ADHD, learnt strategies, recognised your patterns, listened to podcasts, watched videos, made lists and systems, and become very good at explaining why you do what you do.

That understanding can be valuable. But I do not believe that understanding something intellectually is always enough to change how we feel.

Knowing that you are not lazy is different from feeling that you are not lazy.

Knowing that you do not have to be perfect is different from being able to make a mistake without something inside you collapsing into shame.

Knowing that you are allowed to rest is very different from actually being able to stop.

This is why my work is not centred on simply talking about a problem, analysing it, correcting your thoughts or giving you another set of things to practise at home. Practical strategies can absolutely be useful when they genuinely support you, but when something is held more deeply, I believe we need to work with the experience itself.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is at the heart of how I work, and I have found this way of working particularly impactful with neurodivergent clients.

IFS gives us a compassionate way of understanding the different parts of us that can seem to pull in opposite directions.

One part of you may desperately want to complete something while another cannot seem to begin. One part may crave structure while another rebels against it. One part may want to rest while another insists that stopping is dangerous. You may logically know you have done nothing wrong while another part of you is consumed by shame.

Instead of deciding that one side is the problem and needs to be defeated, we become curious about both.

What are they afraid of? What are they trying to protect you from? What have they learnt from your experiences? What do they believe would happen if they stopped doing their job?

This is one of the things I value about IFS: you get to experience and discover rather than simply being told. It is not about me teaching you the correct way to think. It is about creating the conditions for something inside you to be understood and experienced differently.

Very often, the thing that looks like the problem has been trying to solve another problem for a very long time.

I have worked with many ADHD and neurodivergent clients, both with and without a formal diagnosis, and one thing has become very clear to me: the way we work matters.

I do not expect you to sit perfectly still, maintain eye contact, organise your thoughts into a neat sequence, remember everything we discussed last week or communicate in a particular way.

You might need to move. You might jump between subjects. You might lose the question halfway through answering it, follow a connection that seems unrelated and then discover that it is exactly where we needed to go, or need something explained in a different way. You may want more structure in one session and much less in another.

There is no wrong way for you to be in therapy with me.

And if a part of you feels that there is a right way — that you need to say the right thing, make sense, stay on track, make progress or somehow do therapy well — that is welcome too. We do not need to make that part stop. We can become curious about why getting it right feels so important and what it might be afraid would happen if you didn't.

We can work collaboratively to find a pace, structure and way of communicating that makes sense for you. Sometimes practical support, grounding, psychoeducation or strategies may be useful. At other times, the work may be quieter, deeper and more experiential.

The aim is not to make you better at pretending your brain works differently. It is to understand yourself more deeply and find ways of living that genuinely work for you.

I deliberately take a strengths-aware approach to ADHD because so much of the conversation around ADHD has historically focused on deficits, problems and what a person cannot do.

There can be qualities associated with an ADHD way of thinking that are deeply valuable: creativity, curiosity, enthusiasm, spontaneity, humour, intense interest, different ways of making connections, persistence, energy and an ability to become deeply engaged in things that matter to you.

But I do not want to romanticise ADHD either.

Living with ADHD can be genuinely difficult. The effort of managing attention, time, emotions, expectations and everyday demands can be exhausting. The impact on work, study, relationships, parenting, self-confidence and day-to-day life can be very real.

There is room in our work for both.

We can recognise your strengths without dismissing your difficulties, and acknowledge your difficulties without defining you by them.

You do not need a formal ADHD diagnosis to work with me around these experiences.

Perhaps you have already been diagnosed. Perhaps you are waiting for an assessment. Perhaps somebody has suggested ADHD to you and suddenly parts of your life have started making more sense. Or perhaps you simply recognise yourself in some of what you have read.

Wherever you are in that process, we can begin with your experience rather than requiring you to prove a label.

A diagnosis can be enormously validating and useful for some people, and less central for others. Either way, you remain far more than a diagnosis.

There is no single ADHD therapy because there is no single ADHD person.

Some sessions may bring attention to past experiences and the beliefs or shame you have carried from them. Others may focus on what is happening in your life now - work, relationships, family, overwhelm, burnout, decisions or the way you are relating to yourself.

We may sometimes work with practical ways to make something easier. At other times, we may stay with an emotional experience and understand what is happening beneath it. I am not interested in forcing you into a method simply because a therapist thinks that is how therapy is supposed to look.

You do not need to arrive already knowing what you need help with, how to explain yourself, or which parts of your experience are 'ADHD' and which are not.

We can become curious about it together.