Does ADHD make your life miserable?
Do you feel like you’re constantly struggling to keep up with the demands of life, be it school, work, or maintaining relationships.. The daily challenges of living with ADHD can make keeping up with work/school demands, emotional self-regulation, and processing information frustrating, and contribute to self-doubt. When faced with repeated let downs you start creating a narrative of yourself that is negative, leading you to believe that you don’t have any control over your issues. This can make you feel incapable of bringing change, feeling defeated, and less confident.
Often coexisting with other conditions like dyslexia and learning disabilities, folks with ADHD benefit from psychodynamically oriented counseling because it offers a unique non-pathologizing way in helping individuals explore the underlying emotional and psychological factors that contribute to their struggles. While traditional behavioral interventions and medication can be helpful, psychodynamic therapy digs deeper, focusing on how early or past experiences create unconscious assumptions and beliefs about the self and aids in shifting those beliefs to create truer and a more hopeful self-narrative.
It’s not just the symptoms of ADHD or a learning disability that create difficulties—it’s the lack of a supportive environment and how a person emotionally responds to these challenges that matters. People with ADHD often grow up feeling different from their peers. They may have struggled in school, faced criticism from teachers and parents, or felt misunderstood by others who didn’t recognize the nature of their challenges. These early experiences can leave deep emotional scars, leading to feelings of shame, guilt, low self-esteem and inadequacy that persist into adulthood. These feelings can limit a person's ‘perception’ of their own capabilities.
How Psychodynamic Counseling Helps with Self-Understanding and Growth
One of the primary goals of psychodynamic therapy is to bring unconscious emotions, beliefs, and patterns into conscious awareness. For individuals with ADHD and/learning differences this can be incredibly empowering. By understanding the emotional forces driving their behaviors—such as impulsivity, inattentiveness, or frustration—individuals can start to develop greater self-compassion and a renewed self-perception.
Psychodynamic counseling helps individuals explore the emotional consequences of these early experiences. For many, the frustration of not being able to meet expectations—whether academic, social, or familial—creates a cycle of negative self-perception and a poor relationship with learning. Over time, these feelings may turn into unconscious beliefs they are “stupid”, "not good enough" or "incapable," shaping their worldview and behavior. In therapy, uncovering and addressing these deeply held beliefs is key to overcoming low confidence and recognizing one's own capabilities. Therapy shifts the narrative from one of shame and frustration to one that's more self-confident, resilient, and resourceful.
