Therapy for Adults with ADHD in California

If you’ve spent years painting over your authenticity to pass inspection, you already know the cost. Holding it together at work, then crashing at home. Reading every room, every face, every rule, then wondering why the rules never seem to fit you. You play along to be accepted, then feel the shame and exhaustion that follows. Even a drive-through coffee can feel like a social test you didn’t sign up for.

It doesn’t have to stay like this.

Why the old advice falls short

Systems were built for the majority. Productivity advice built around “just try harder.” Feedback that confuses emotional intensity from experienced injustice as a character flaw. Culture that calls your camouflage “professionalism.”

Your wiring is not a moral failure. ADHD and other neurodivergences are not behavioral but neurodevelopmental, with high rates of inheritance, and modern diagnostics finally recognize how traits can overlap. Many people carry both ADHD traits and autistic traits, which is why generic one-size solutions miss the mark. You’re not a problem, the systems stigmatizing neurological difference as pathology are. And the way we were taught to look at and diagnose neurodivergence left generations of women unseen and unsupported.

You are different, and difference needs a different frame.

From Camouflage to Congruence

This work is an integration journey. We move in three parts that build atop one another.

1) Understand your brain as difference, not dysfunction

• Name why conventional advice stalls for an interest-based nervous system.

• Map regulation challenges across emotion, time, and tasks in plain language you can use.

• Reframe intensity and sensitivity as signals to be worked with, not against.

2) Build a life that prevents the sprint and collapse cycle

• Visual organization that bypasses working-memory bottlenecks.

• Body-doubling and structured starts for sticky tasks.

• Simple advocacy scripts for work and relationships, including how much to disclose and when.

• Sensory regulation plans that reduce overwhelm before it spikes.

• “Dopamine bridges” to make initiation possible and “novelty nudges” to sustain engagement.

• External scaffolds that make executive function a shared job, not a solo grind.

3) Heal what masking has cost

• Treating the anxiety, depression or substance use that show up alongside ADHD.

• Move through the grief of years lived without language or support.

• Unwind internalized shame and the reflex to self-criticize before anyone else can.

• Work directly with rejection sensitivity and the protective patterns around it.

• Recover strengths that were pathologized and learn to use them on purpose.

Life on the other side

Picture a day where you no longer spend half your energy pretending. Your relationships get the real you, including the playful and spicy parts. Work is organized around strengths of difference, not a constant attempt to be average. Self-trust replaces the running commentary of self-critique. You spend more time creating, less time compensating.

Why this approach works

• Trauma-informed, evidence-based: Modalities are adapted for neurodivergent minds so the method fits the nervous system, not the other way around.

• Non-pathologizing: We honor difference and design around it.

• We Get It: Providers who understand the difficulty of living while masked; remembering to take it off when safe.

Your next step

Let’s talk about what integration could look like for you.
Schedule a free consultation to explore fit and start building a life that does not require camouflage.