What's it all about?
'Banish the disorder'!?
ADHD can't be cured! ...can it?
How does coaching work?
Me, my ADHD, and my coaching
What is ADHDharma?
Banish the Disorder.
Bold claim. I know...
If you have ADHD you need to know what you can, and can’t, expect if you’ve any chance of managing the condition and living well with it. Here’s what I believe, why, and why it’s really all you need to set a correct bearing from wherever you are.
Our understanding of ADHD is, really, only just getting off the ground and because of this our language around it is still clumsy and problematic. For example, even the name is misleading; ‘attention deficit’ when hyperfocus—extreme and sustained attention—is a core trait of the condition. Language shapes what people believe is possible, their behaviour, and consequently outcomes.
Now, saying ADHD can or cannot be ‘cured’, without being very precise about what that claim means can be very, very harmful.
Saying ADHD is curable hits some people as saying:
‘You could fix this if you just tried’ ‘You’ll grow out of it’ ‘ADHD isn’t that bad, isn’t real or isn’t serious’
It could set you up chasing an impossible goal – which cruelly is the place most of the suffering associated with ADHD usually comes from.
Saying ADHD is incurable can hit some people as saying:
‘There is no hope, this is just my life’ ‘My suffering is inevitable’ ‘I’m just broken’
It could put a goal which is actually possible, outside of your reach. It could make hope seem unrealistic, naive, or worse irresponsible.
Any talk about ‘curing’ ADHD really needs us to get clear on what ADHD actually is. ADHD and neurodivergence are often talked about as if they are, more or less, the same or thing. Neurodivergence is the actual difference in how your brain works structurally. However, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder is diagnosed exclusively through self-report — by how much you feel like you’re struggling, not what’s happening at the neurological level.
All ADHDers are neurodivergent. Just like all terriers are dogs. But, all dogs are not terriers… and there’s something like that going on in the claim ‘ADHD can’t be cured’.
The disorder isn’t defined by your brain differences, but by your behaviours and your relationship to them.
The things you’ve never really learned how to make work for you are the problem. Yes, these have resulted from your brain differences and development. But the shame, the unrealistic expectations, the not understanding why ‘easy’ things aren’t easy, the self-narratives built up over years of not understanding why things work differently for you are the suffering. The vicious cycles that form around these challenges — these are what create and sustain disorder.
Let’s say, keeping your fridge stocked takes a lot of mental effort for me(I mean) you.
Life’s getting busy. You come to the fridge, there’s nothing.
You let it happen, again. You have to eat, you know that…
What are you stupid… lazy? Broken? …why can’t you just-[you know the rest]
While spiralling, you’re burning energy, mood, self-worth…
…and you’ve not even started thinking about solving the problem yet.
You’re getting physically depleted from not eating, emotionally depleted from the spiral.
Fuck it – takeaway. Not the best option (physically, financially, etc), but the easy.
You escape the loop… ‘til the next meal.
You’re less emotionally, physically, and financially resourced than you might have been.
If you’re struggling, something like this loop is probably happening in multiple places, right now. The dwindling resources will regularly compound into burnout, depression, and cause you problems in every area of your life. That is a disorder. No argument here.
What we’re targeting are the patterns of behaviour. Curing neurodivergence is not the goal. Anyone saying that aims for the impossible. More worryingly, they’re implying ‘different = bad’; an argument made, and overcome, regarding gender, race, sexuality… I hope my point is clear.
We can’t change your divergence. That stays, and frankly, that’s good. Your divergence has positives to offer the world and you… if you can’t feel that right now. That’s okay. I understand.
We can change the self-sustaining suffering built up around, and within, your misunderstood mind.
We can reduce constant friction in your week, build systems that anticipate these problems, and change your behaviour over time.
We can unlearn harmful self-narratives, internalised ableism, and create our own definition of ‘good enough’ and ‘success’.
This will give you back energy, a bit of self-acceptance (maybe even self-respect!), and let those positives come to the surface
This will reduce your suffering… which is the diagnostic definition of the disorder.
You can’t become neurotypical. You can heal the disorder.
What else could you want from a cure?
Who am I?
First and foremost, I’m an ADHDer. My career is all twists, turns, dips, soars, dramatic pivots, and painful crashes too. The common thread is an interest in what makes a good life, and how practically we make it happen.
I’ve explored this academically through philosophy, professionally (in a more ‘typical’ sense) through selling motorbikes, and spritually in my 10 years of Buddhist practice. Outside of work I consume and create myth, story, and music; dabble in some rotation of woodworking, painting, and other crafty hobbies; and trying to keep moving through climbing, hiking, and whatever I can persuade friends to do with me currently… 2 months of obsession and then on to the next thing-you know the drill.
Previously; my life felt a real chaotic mess; but more and more life makes sense of, even draws on, the chaos. I’m able to meet myself, and others, where they are. Figure out what really matters at that moment in time, and tend to it a little more. It sounds simple… doesn’t it always? Getting the misconceptions out the way so it becomes simpler is not easy. The rewards are worth it. For me those rewards include getting to share what I’ve learned with others, and join them on an adventure of experimentation, reflection, and rewriting unhelpful narratives. Chaos is creative, there’s something beautiful in it. In the pain too… eventually.
I won’t gloss over the pain. I know the dark side of the chaos too. At times, I’ve wanted to trade all that ‘creativity’ and ‘beauty’ for normality, ‘to fit in’. I hear you, and with love and understanding… That thinking won’t lead you out. You can’t stop being neurodivergent. You can stop being disordered by your own standards though. I’m here to help you figure out how.
What is Coaching
How does it work?
The disorder consists in patterns of behaviour and our suffering in relation to them, not in simply being Neurodivergent – and patterns, behaviour, relationships… these can change. So, the obvious question – how is coaching going to help you make those changes?
Tackling this alone means finding your way solo, through new territory, with a set of useful but incomplete set of tools gathered-lets be honest-mostly through social media and YouTube algorithms. Bringing in a coach is instead a collaborative and guided journey, with someone who while they haven’t walked this exact path, knows the landscape. They’re packing a comprehensive toolkit, which they know how to use, to create a bespoke and coherent big picture strategy. It can be the difference between wandering in circles, and learning how to orient yourself and find the right path, even while that path changes.
Most people arrive needing help just coping (it’s certainly where my journey started), and many stop once they’re managing their symptoms well enough. That’s the core of what I do. But there’s more to life than just ‘not suffering’, and coaching can-and often should-address what the point of ‘sorting yourself out’ is… what are you going to do with the energy you get back, the confidence you build? People thrive on meaning, hope, and dreams – Neurodivergents doubly so. That’s helpful work while coping, and is most of the work moving from coping to thriving.
In coaching we explore what energises or drains for you, how neurodivergence explains that, and what your profile is. We’ll build your toolkit and strategies from these dynamics, and troubleshoot implementing them into lasting lifestyle changes and develop self-leadership skills that are based in self understanding and acceptance of the way you actually are.
Every coach’s approach is slightly different and our personalities matter too, just like with therapy, the relationship itself is a large and essential part of what drives the change. A great coach might still not be the right coach for you. If we don’t like spending time together… it’s not going to deliver the goods.
Unlike therapy, we’ll be less concerned with why things are the way they are and with how to work with, or around, what is. That’s not to say coaching isn’t your space to be heard and understood for its own sake. If you need to voice experiences that have shaped or embedded these narratives, you deserve and will get a sincerely interested and caring ear. It’s just what we do with that which is different. We’ll be focusing on outgrowing, rather than digging out the roots of, harmful self-narratives.”
The work itself might include working on lifting you out of a life-long burnout cycle, learning to manage time and making inroads into your endless list of projects, or distilling goals like those from the inescapable feeling that ‘something is wrong’. We’ll tend to do this work in iterative cycles.
Starting with more open and exploratory sessions where we learn together, me about you and you about particular aspects of neurodivergence connected to the current struggle. We’ll start narrowing in on particular areas that resonate, strategising interventions, and deciding what success might look like. Then we’ll implement and review; exploring what’s blocking us, adapting, and puzzling it out together. Once we’re making progress, we’ll work on embedding this long term and what the ‘warning’ signs of regression might look like. Then we might agree on a new priority and create a new ‘cycle’, while monitoring to make sure our gains stick.
Our time together might involve lots of cycles, or we might just do one long cycle. The latter tends to benefit individuals who are in a more ‘educational’ chapter with their self-work and the former for those who want an accountability and implementation partner. As with most things in this space-its a spectrum-and we naturally slide around it somewhat throughout our life.
ADHDharma, eh...
What's all that about?
Just another one of the many ADHD-[*insert word*] Business names. Well… it is slightly more than just a portmanteau. Dharma is both the ‘path that leads away from suffering and towards enlightenment’ and ‘the truth about the way reality actually is’ — in Buddhism they are the same thing. So, ADHDharma is that truth about the way reality actually is — including you — and the path away from suffering and towards thriving based on aligning with that truth — including your neurodivergent brain. It’s a place for content and teachings that are either beneficial, or in some way related, to those goals.
You don’t need to know anything about Buddhism to understand, benefit from, or engage with ADHDharma; nor does it intend to ‘turn you into’ a Buddhist. Indeed, this is proven by how many techniques have been lifted out of Buddhism and into modern psychology.
The 2000+ years of work Buddhism has done on the nature of our minds, how unruly attention makes us miserable, and what to do about it has resulted in practical and effective tools. Modern science is allowing us to finally dig into the neurobiological underpinnings of this universal area of human struggle, and the acuteness of the suffering that struggle entails for neurodivergents.
ADHDharma holds the Buddhist and scientific traditions together, giving them both their own space and story, without collapsing one into the other.