Adult ADHD
For many adults, the experience of ADHD extends far beyond difficulties with attention. Challenges related to organization, sense of time, managing everyday demands, and emotional intensity can become particularly demanding and difficult.
Such difficulties may be accompanied by feelings of shame, guilt, inadequacy, or difficulty recognizing one’s actual abilities and achievements—an experience that, in some cases, may resemble what is known as the “impostor phenomenon.” In this way, the experience of ADHD can affect not only what a person does or finds difficult to do, but also the way they have learned to see themselves.
Often, there may be a continuous effort to keep up with rhythms and demands that are more difficult to manage than they may appear to others. A person may try harder, hide their difficulties, or feel guilty when they are unable to meet what they believe they “should” be able to do.
Within this ongoing effort, contact may be lost both with personal boundaries and with one’s abilities and positive qualities. Difficulties or perceived “flaws” may then begin to take up a disproportionately large amount of space in the way the person sees themselves. Understanding these patterns can allow for a different relationship with oneself, in which personal difficulties and limits are not automatically experienced as failures or flaws.
For me, therefore, psychotherapeutic support for an adult with ADHD begins with understanding, rather than with an attempt to “fix” them. It is important to explore the personal meanings a person has developed around the way they experience ADHD-related characteristics, and how these meanings may influence their relationship with themselves, their emotions, the demands of everyday life, and their personal boundaries.
Through the Focusing-Experiential dimension, there is an opportunity to move beyond the noise of continuous mental processing and make space for what is being directly experienced.
My work with adult ADHD is accompanied by ongoing professional development and active involvement as a member of ADHD Hellas.