Therapy and Mental Health Support for Women with ADHD

Many women with ADHD come to therapy feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and frustrated by their constant struggles with organisation, focus, and emotional regulation. Whether you've recently received an ADHD diagnosis, suspect you might have ADHD, or have been struggling with these challenges for years, therapy can provide crucial support in understanding your brain, developing effective strategies, and building a life that works with your ADHD rather than against it.

Understanding Your ADHD Experience

ADHD affects how your brain processes information, manages attention, and regulates emotions. For many women, ADHD has been a hidden struggle, masked by years of developing coping strategies or being misunderstood as anxiety, depression, or simply "not trying hard enough." This constant effort to compensate can be incredibly exhausting and often leads to burnout and mental health challenges.

In therapy, we work together to understand your unique ADHD profile - your strengths, challenges, triggers, and the ways ADHD shows up in your daily life. This understanding forms the foundation for developing strategies that honour how your brain works whilst addressing the difficulties you may be experiencing.

Common Challenges We Address in Therapy

Executive Functioning and Daily Life Management

ADHD can make everyday tasks feel overwhelming and unmanageable. In therapy, we work on developing personalised organisational systems that work with your brain, breaking down overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, creating routines that support rather than constrain you, and building strategies for time management and prioritisation.

We focus on finding approaches that feel natural to you rather than trying to force neurotypical organisational methods that often don't work for ADHD brains.

Emotional Regulation and Overwhelm

Many women with ADHD experience intense emotions and struggle with emotional regulation. This isn't a character flaw - it's a core feature of how ADHD affects the brain. In therapy, we explore understanding your emotional triggers and patterns, developing strategies for managing intense emotions, learning to recognise and prevent emotional overwhelm, and building self-compassion around your emotional experiences.

We work on accepting and working with your emotional intensity rather than trying to suppress or control it completely.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)

RSD - the intense emotional pain from perceived criticism or rejection - is common in women with ADHD but often misunderstood. In therapy, we focus on understanding how RSD affects your relationships and self-esteem, developing strategies for managing RSD episodes, learning to distinguish between RSD responses and actual rejection, and building resilience whilst honouring your emotional sensitivity.

This work often involves challenging the harsh inner critic that many women with ADHD develop over years of struggling and receiving criticism.

Relationships and Communication

ADHD can significantly impact relationships, from forgetting important dates to interrupting conversations or struggling with social cues. Therapy can help with understanding how ADHD affects your communication style, developing strategies for maintaining relationships, learning to communicate your needs to partners, family, and friends, and addressing challenges around rejection sensitivity in relationships.

We work on building authentic relationships where you can be yourself whilst developing skills that support connection.

Work and Career Challenges

Many women with ADHD struggle in traditional work environments that don't accommodate their needs. In therapy, we explore identifying work environments and roles that suit your ADHD brain, developing strategies for managing workplace challenges, building self-advocacy skills for requesting accommodations, and addressing perfectionism and imposter syndrome that often affect women with ADHD.

Masking and People-Pleasing

Many women with ADHD develop patterns of masking their struggles and people-pleasing to compensate for their perceived shortcomings. This can be exhausting and lead to burnout. We work on understanding the impact of masking on your mental health, learning when it's safe to be more authentic, developing healthy boundaries, and building self-acceptance around your ADHD traits.

The Complex Relationship Between ADHD and Mental Health

Anxiety and ADHD

Anxiety often co-occurs with ADHD, sometimes developing as a response to years of struggling, feeling behind, or experiencing criticism. Unlike anxiety that exists independently, ADHD-related anxiety is often tied to specific challenges like time management, fear of forgetting important tasks, or social situations.

In therapy, we address both the practical ADHD challenges that fuel anxiety and the anxiety symptoms themselves. This might involve developing better organisational systems to reduce worry about forgetting things, whilst also learning anxiety management techniques that work for ADHD brains.

Many women find that when their ADHD is properly understood and accommodated, their anxiety levels decrease significantly.

Depression and Self-Worth

Years of struggling with ADHD symptoms, receiving criticism, and feeling like you're failing at basic life tasks can lead to depression and severely damaged self-worth. Many women with ADHD develop beliefs that they're lazy, stupid, or fundamentally flawed.

Therapy provides an opportunity to challenge these harmful beliefs, understand how ADHD has affected your life experiences, and develop a more compassionate relationship with yourself. We work on recognising your strengths and the tremendous effort you've been putting in, often without recognition.

ADHD Burnout

ADHD burnout occurs when the constant effort of managing your symptoms becomes unsustainable. This often happens when women try to force themselves into neurotypical patterns without proper support or accommodation.

In therapy, we focus on recognising the signs of burnout, developing strategies for prevention and recovery, learning to pace yourself and manage energy levels, and creating sustainable approaches to daily life that honour your brain's needs.

What to Expect from Therapy

A Non-Judgmental Space

Therapy provides a space where your ADHD traits are understood and accepted rather than criticised. You won't be judged for forgetting appointments, arriving late, or needing to move during sessions. We understand that these are often needs, not character flaws.

Practical and Emotional Support

We balance practical strategy development with emotional processing, recognising that both are necessary for healing and growth. You might learn organisational techniques whilst also processing grief about lost opportunities or anger about years of being misunderstood.

Flexible Approach

We understand that ADHD brains often need flexibility. Sessions might be adapted based on your current needs, energy levels, or where you are in your cycle. We work with your brain rather than expecting it to conform to rigid therapeutic structures.

Strengths-Based Perspective

Whilst we address challenges, we also focus heavily on your strengths. ADHD brains often come with creativity, innovation, enthusiasm, and unique problem-solving abilities. We work on recognising and building on these strengths whilst developing strategies for areas of difficulty.

Moving Forward with Your ADHD

The goal of therapy isn't to eliminate your ADHD or to make you function like a neurotypical person. Instead, we work towards helping you understand and work with your brain, develop strategies that feel sustainable rather than exhausting, build self-acceptance and self-compassion, create systems that support your success, and build relationships that honour who you are.

Many women describe ADHD-informed therapy as life-changing - not because it cures their ADHD, but because it helps them understand themselves and develop approaches that actually work for their brain. This often leads to reduced anxiety, improved self-esteem, better relationships, and a greater sense of authenticity and self-acceptance.

Whether you're seeking support for specific ADHD challenges, processing a recent diagnosis, or wanting to develop better strategies for managing daily life, therapy can provide the understanding, tools, and support you need to thrive with ADHD.

Your ADHD brain isn't broken or wrong - it's different, and it deserves support and strategies that work with rather than against how you naturally function. You deserve to live a life that feels manageable, authentic, and fulfilling.