Therapy for women with ADHD in California, and ADHD coaching worldwide. I was diagnosed as an adult too, so I know how long the road to being taken seriously can be.
Most of what the world learned about ADHD, it learned from watching boys who couldn't sit still. Girls who could sit still, who daydreamed, over-prepared, apologized, and held it together right up until they didn't, were rarely the ones sent for evaluation.
Research bears this out. Girls meet diagnostic criteria at just under half the rate of boys in childhood, a ratio that moves much closer to equal by adulthood.1 Females are more likely to present with inattentive symptoms, internalizing difficulties, and socially compliant behavior, which makes the difficulty less visible across settings, and that under-recognition carries measurable long-term cost.1,2
The DSM-5-TR describes three presentations of ADHD: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, and combined.3 ICD-11 codes the diagnosis as 6A05.4 Both frameworks require several symptoms present before age 12 and impairment across more than one setting, which is exactly where a woman reconstructing her own childhood, alone, tends to get stuck.
Inattentive symptoms are internal and undisruptive. A quiet girl losing time in her own head doesn't interrupt a classroom, so nobody flags her.1
Perfectionism, over-preparing, list-making, people-pleasing, rehearsing conversations before you have them. Effective camouflage, and expensive to maintain.2,5
Chronic overwhelm gets named anxiety. Executive shutdown gets named depression. Emotional intensity gets named a personality problem. Sometimes those conditions genuinely co-occur, but treating them while ADHD goes unnamed leaves the engine untouched.2,5
Current theory and evidence point to symptom risk rising at points of rapid estrogen decline, with distinct effects at two phases of the menstrual cycle.6 Care that ignores this asks women to explain a moving target with a fixed vocabulary.
ADHD and trauma are not the same thing, and they are not rare companions either. In adults, the two occur together in roughly a third of cases, and when both are present, day-to-day life tends to be harder and symptoms tend to be more intense.7
Hypervigilance can look like distractibility. Shutting down can look like avoidance. Being called careless, forgetful, or too much for years leaves its own mark, even when nothing dramatic ever happened.
You can understand exactly why you feel the way you do and still feel it. Insight alone rarely settles a nervous system, which is why body-based work sits alongside talking rather than after it.8
Using somatic work in therapy can be powerful and life changing. Whenever I introduce somatic or body work, I always want my clients to know they have full autonomy and I respect their space and comfort. You can always tell me “no, I don't want to do that.”
We will get curious about how your body is responding and reacting to life and to what we are talking about, and bring non-judgmental awareness. You will learn to tune in, and we take things step by step, allowing your comfort and your body to set the pace.
I have been studying and learning from one of the leaders in this work, Dr. Arielle Schwartz. I continue to grow as a practitioner on this topic and look forward to supporting you with somatic work if you choose.
Come as you are, with a half-finished list and three open tabs and a question you have been carrying for years. That is the normal starting condition.
Numbered notes above correspond to the sources below. Where evidence is preliminary or a single study, this page says so rather than overstating it.
Brittni Brady, LCSW, ADHD-CCSPWomen's ADHD CareBrittni Brady is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the State of California, license [#]. Psychotherapy is available only to clients physically located in California at the time of service. ADHD coaching is a non-clinical service. It is not psychotherapy, diagnosis, or treatment of any mental health condition, it does not create a clinician-patient relationship, and it is not billable to insurance.
This website provides general information and is not clinical advice. Reading it does not establish a therapeutic relationship. It is not a HIPAA-secure channel, so please do not submit health information through it. Scheduling and clinical communication take place on a separate secure platform.
[Year] Brittni Brady, LCSW. All rights reserved.