Tame the Turmoil, Master Your Impulses, Cultivate Confidence & Serenity.ADHD Therapy in Huntsville and across Alabama
Specializing in teens 16+ and adults.
Does it feel like you are working super hard, always trying to get things done?
But you never seem to catch up?
Or catch your breath?
You have the best of intentions - you sit down to get work done, and the next thing you know 2 hours have passed and you haven’t even started. Your phone distracted you, then that email needed to be answered, but you had to do some research first, and that got you distracted by your social media, and around you go.
Or, you’re trying to clean up the kitchen, but find yourself doing laundry, cleaning off the coffee table, and starting to empty out that drawer in your bedroom when you are looking for something you just remembered you needed.
Then you might be sitting down to look for something on Amazon, or maybe you’re at Target, and $300 later you didn’t get the one thing you went in for. Meanwhile you’re late for picking up your child from soccer, or your own doctor appointment.
And even though you CAN sit still, it’s not your preferred thing to do. So you’re up and down off the couch while your spouse is frustrated that you can’t sit still in the evening.
So now it’s the end of the day, and after a day of non-stop activity, thinking, and frustration, you snap at your kids, or your spouse, or your best friend, and then feel terrible.
You’re tired, but you can’t get to sleep because your mind just won’t shut off.
So now your relationships may be breaking down, with your spouse, your kids, your friends.
Your finances are kind of a mess.
Work is such a challenge, you feel overwhelmed trying to keep your head above water, and maybe you’re worried about losing your job. You’ve moved jobs so often, you were really trying to make this one work.
You’re ready to find your feet and stabilize your life.
How therapy works
You can learn to manage your restlessness, your distractibility, and your impulsivity.
Therapy can help you, so your relationships settle, the understanding of the people around you increases as you advocate for your needs, and you find ways to work with your ADHD in all areas of your life. You can live life feeling more confident, and at peace with yourself and the world around you.
Learning to manage ADHD starts with discovering and then prioritizing the areas of your life where you need to create some order, and working through them one by one. It may involve obtaining medication if that is something you are willing, or able to try. We will work together to educate you on how your ADHD brain works, and ways to coax it into doing what you want it to do when you want it to do it. It will almost certainly involve using technology to help you.
But before any of that - we will likely spend some time working through how ADHD has affected your self-esteem, and helping you believe in, accept, and APPROVE OF YOU. Neurodivergence is a difference. Diversity in our world is good. Your brain works differently - and it is trying to operate in a non-neurodivergent world. Once you can treat yourself with kindness, understanding, and consideration, others will begin to do the same. And that’s when you will be on the path to confidence, peace and joy.
Therapy for ADHD can help you…
Establish ways to help you stay focused
Reign in impulses to keep your finances and relationships on track
Use your energy in productive ways
Regulate your sleep
Live in harmony with the world
Frequently asked questions about ADHD therapy
FAQs
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It can be frustrating to realize that when you have ADHD just willing yourself to focus more won’t work. And there’s science to back this up.
There have been studies that put children doing math problems into a functional MRI (fMRI) machine, and children with ADHD have an actual biochemical deficit when trying harder to do the math problem. You may remember that experience from childhood - that the harder you tried, the worse it got?
So optimizing your attention is about figuring out what your best situation is for getting as much focus out of your brain as it will provide. You might need to look at
where you are working,
when you are working,
whether people being there (ie: a body double, or other people working like you are) is helpful, or too distracting.
You may need to have
a completely quiet environment,
or soothing sounds / music could help.
Every person is slightly different, and it can depend on what you are working on as to which environment will work best for you.
People with ADHD may also have the ability to ‘hyperfocus’ - where they are so deeply ‘in’ the work, creativity, or other activity they are engaged in, that they are difficult to rouse from it.
This is usually because the adrenaline and dopamine are pumping hard, and you are getting so much satisfaction from what you are doing that your brain is ‘all in’.
And finally, while this isn’t for everyone, most people with ADHD will benefit significantly from taking a stimulant medication.
This kind of medicine doesn’t just help with focus, it helps with keeping you from impulsively doing things that aren’t the wisest for you.
The medicine gives your prefrontal cortex the oomph it needs to have you consider the consequences of your choices - something that is harder to do without the biochemicals the medicine provides.
The primary biochemicals that are missing are adrenaline and dopamine. That’s why video games can be so addicting for a lot of people with ADHD - they are fast paced (adrenaline), and they are fun (dopamine). The stimulant medications provide these for your brain.
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There are some excellent articles out on the internet that delve with detail into this question. A great one is ADDitudemag Beat the Clock, which has some excellent tips.
Sometimes long articles like that can be hard to focus on, so a quicker summary is to help yourself create a ‘no excuses’ type habit.
Something like - I always get up when my spouse gets up.
Or I ALWAYS check my calendar before I brush my teeth in the morning, or while I am drinking my morning beverage.
Even though you may miss occasionally, it will be a lot less frequent than having to remember to do it.
Habits are sometimes harder to develop for folks with ADHD because to begin with you have to remember to develop them. So I always suggest pairing a new habit with an existing one. Or with an external cue that you get from your environment at the same time every day.
It’s also a great idea to make your habit a daily habit, either every day, or every weekday. That way you are not having to remember which day it is and whether you are supposed to do that thing.
Overcoming inertia of changing tasks to something that you don’t prefer doing is also more of a struggle with ADHD, so sometimes you have to make your pairing a ‘I am not allowed to until…’ pairing.
So: “I am not allowed to sit down until I have changed the cat litter.”
Or: “I am not allowed to have breakfast until I have changed the bed.”
These guidelines are a brief overview of the types of tips you can find in that EXCELLENT ADDitude magazine article.
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Often when we have ADHD we may have been given a lot of negative feedback over the years, from the time we were daydreaming or frantically moving as kids in school, to being late for things with friends as a teen, to struggling to stay on task at work as an adult. This history can make it feel really hard to own and explain a difference you have to the people you care most about. The number one thing to start with is to say:
I was born with this brain - and it just works differently than the other 95% (that’s the percentage that current surveys indicate don’t have ADHD) of brains in the world
Then move on to some details
When I forget something, am late to something, don’t clean up something, don’t finish something I am 9 times out of 10 NOT doing it on purpose. I am not lazy, or irresponsible, or any of the many negative words that you might think of.
And finally some science:
My brain just has some biochemicals in smaller supply than yours. That’s why (for example):
I am addicted to video games
I have an easier time paying attention to you while we walk together
I need to see and hear something at the same time to really be able to learn it.
And then wrap up with:
Everyone has differences
If everyone had my differences no one would notice
If everyone had your [enter difference here] no one would notice that either
I just have this difference - and it would be nice if you could acknowledge it exists, love me in its context, not give me a free ride - but work with me to deal with the things that the non-neurodivergent world expects from me.