I am an ADHDer. *
When I first started out as a therapist, I worried that some of my ADHD traits would cause me difficulties in my work…
– distraction –
– forgetfulness –
– difficulties with routines –
– struggles with sensory overload –
…but I have my ways of coping with these.
Having experience much criticism in my life, I was surprised to realise that some of the other traits I possess enhance my work, and offer a unique flavour to the way I connect with and support my clients. What I used to feel were curses, have become gifts I am truly grateful for.
These traits include:
– my ability to see patterns –
– my capacity to feel how someone else feels within my own body, my brand of empathy –
– my ability to see into someone’s mind, through images that come to me –
– the way my mind drifts down tangents, and makes surprising connections –
– hyperfocus –
The tangential way that I work enables me to pull together threads that my clients bring to me, to make sense of them, and to help them rebuild a tapestry that better represents their reality. Sometimes the words don’t come, on one or both sides, and we share images or feelings that emerge, which for many clients can help them connect more deeply to their truths, or that resonate more easily with their experiences. A picture can be worth a thousand words.
I don’t expect eye contact, and I don’t see issues with differences in how people use eye contact. For example, I don’t experience reduced eye contact as a client trying to avoid connection, but instead as a client trying to be authentic, reduce overload, and make connection. Or just who someone is and how someone walks through the world. I don’t assume that wanting to switch to audio or SMS means something is wrong either – for many clients it can indicate an experience of increased overload or demands, but for others it is simply a preferred way of working.
I regularly check in with clients about noises, like fans, ticking clocks, or body-made sounds like swallowing or coughing. I offer to make changes to my environment to suit others, including changing the arrangement of the environment so that it doesn’t distract or cause discomfort. To me this is normal, and this can also normalise or give permission to my clients to expect such modifications when we work together. I have had clients say to me that they were told by previous therapists to ‘suck up’ the bright lights or loud clocks, because they need to learn to cope outside the therapy room. This, to me, is akin to a modification in a school or workplace that is designed to move someone along in the organisation’s quest to help everyone to fit in – rather than, what it ought to be, simply supporting someone where they are, without requiring impossible change. Our work should be about helping our clients with unmasking, not with reinforcing the mask. The mask is what can lead to making the ‘wrong’ connections with others, burnout, or dissatisfaction.
While I can become very distracted in my personal life, I seem to have a great capacity for hyperfocus during sessions and I never lose concentration when with a client. While I may regularly forget what I say to clients or where my phone is, I never forget a session, and I can remember tiny details from months or years prior that my clients have said to me.
I am also very accepting and understanding when clients forget to pay or are regularly late for sessions, issues we bring into our sessions and discuss. I am fully aware that for many ADHDers, being late or forgetting to pay are not signs of problems within the therapeutic relationship – which can be assumed as a given with a neurotypical therapist – but instead just a feature of an ADHD brain, which occupies a different way of moving through time, and struggles to remember what is not a key focus. We still have boundaries around these sorts of things, but we also find solutions that work for both sides, such as my client giving me permission to send a reminder for payments or before sessions, especially during the weeks following a change of time or day, or my client agrees that they will set reminder alarms or automatic payments.
We talk a lot about the neurotypical blueprints and norms we have grown up around, and how there are limited blueprints for neurodivergent adults, partners or parents. We have to make all this up ourselves, often with a lack of support, and with added gaslighting from the medical and education professions – usually born of ignorance rather than malice, but the impact is the same.
Self-disclosure, with Irvin Yalom as my guide, is often important in my work, so clients know that they will be understood and not judged, our operating systems will work well together, and we are not having to shout across a chasm of different lived experiences. There are many ways we can be empathic to those that are different to us, but neurodivergence is one area that is so poorly understand by those ‘on the outside’, that I very strongly believe a lived experience is vital for real and authentic connection. Of course, who you work with is still important, not all neurodivergent therapists will be right for you, but I do believe there is a higher chance of connection if the wires connect more easily. Maybe this will change over time, with increased societal knowledge and understanding, but I sadly feel that currently we are a long way from the ideal version I hold in my head as a goal to aim for.
If you want to work with a neurodivergent therapist, especially an ADHD brain type, please get in touch. If we speak and you decide I am not right for you, I will happily recommend other options for finding another ‘one of us’.
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* NOTE: I self-identify as an ADHDer and have done so for 20 years, since I watched a TED talk on how ADHD can present in women, and experienced a huge light bulb moment. I have been accepted for a full ADHD assessment on the public health route, and am currently awaiting dates. My kids and partner, as well as vast swathes of my extended family and all my closest friends also have ADHD.