How Does Therapy Help With ADHD? Part 1

One of the most common questions I get from potential new clients is “how will psychotherapy help with my ADHD?” It’s normal to wonder how chatting with a therapist once a week or so will help with something that is often so misunderstood and ignored in adults even as it impacts every area of our lives. After all, why would you invest your time and money in something if you don’t know what you are going to get back? 

In this ongoing series, we will explore how psychotherapy can benefit people with ADHD.  Since ADHD affects just about every area of our lives, each post is going to focus on a different aspect otherwise, I would be writing this blog post until the end of time and you, oh wonderful reader, would either get very bored eventually or send a rescue crew to find me and take my laptop away. This post focuses on how psychotherapy can help ADHD humans with their relationships, particularly how it can affect our attachment styles and how we can learn to foster better connections between ourselves and others. 

All humans are born with the internal wiring to seek out connection in order to survive because we are pretty helpless when we come into this world. Since we rely on the connection to those around us to survive,  we quickly develop patterns of interactions that get our needs met. The ways we interact with our first caregivers form our basic attachment style which becomes a blueprint for our relationships with others. There are four attachment styles, namely secure, anxious, fearful avoidant and dismissive avoidant. Here’s a quick rundown of how they operate:

Secure - this style is low anxiety and low avoidance, which means that you often feel relatively safe in your connections to other people.

Anxious - this style is high anxiety, low avoidance, which means that you are often preoccupied with your connection to those around you and may feel like it’s not stable unless you are vigilant about it. 

Fearful Avoidant - this style is high anxiety and high avoidance, which means that you often feel like you have to stay in close proximity to not lose connection with others but that you simultaneously fear that being close to others will engulf you, rather like stepping on the gas and brakes of connection at the same time. 

Dismissive Avoidant - this style is low anxiety and high avoidance, which means that though you appear calm on the outside, your connections to those around you may actually feel threatening and thus you often remain at a distance even when seeking connection.

There’s no such thing as a “bad” attachment style and they can shift over time. There are lots of productive and not so productive behaviors that are associated with each attachment style but we can always choose positive and adaptive ways to get our needs met and meet others too as we are grown ups now and not infants. 

Essentially, untreated adult ADHD can actually look like different attachment behaviors and can cause lots of chaos in your relationships if you are unaware of what’s going on. Adult ADHD therapy can help you sort out how your particular flavor of brain spice might be affecting your attachment behaviors within your relationships. You and your therapist might chat about hyperfocus in the context of relationships, which might result in us over-investing too quickly in new connections or becoming disenchanted by relationships once the rush of dopamine wears off.

One of the best things that you can do in all of your relationships is to foster a sense of security and consistency, which can be super challenging for ADHD brain but incredibly worthwhile. Trying to create consistency and care for other people is really hard when you don’t have that internally. Adult ADHD therapy can help you create the structures you need in your life to help you foster better relationships because you have a more solid base to support yourself. Unlike treatment for children, therapy as an adult focuses more on your internal experience than on the behaviors that others might see on the outside. 

If you think that psychotherapy might help you with how ADHD shows up in your life, get in touch to schedule a free consultation with one of the wonderful therapists on our team. We are so excited to help you get to know your best self.