Therapy for ADHD

Supporting High-Achieving Professionals in Bellevue and throughout Washington State

From the outside, things look successful: maybe you’re in a high-paying job, at a well-known company, or others wish they were in your position.

Except there may be cracks in the facade: overlooked details, or a nearly missed deadline... and that constant feeling of having forgotten something important.

It’s common for people with ADHD who are in demanding careers to feel exhausted, as if they’re one misstep away from everything collapsing.

What is ADHD?

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition, meaning that it’s something people are born with, and typically start to see signs of in childhood and early adolescence.

ADHD folks deal with significant difficulties managing attention, impulses, and activity levels. However, rather than the “bouncing off the walls” or “can’t seem to manage their life” versions of ADHD, people who have been able to achieve and look successful will have a different presentation of ADHD.

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How Do High-Achieving
Professionals Struggle with ADHD?

Aspects of ADHD might have actually helped you to get to where you are in your career. You might have noticed that you’re able to move through a million tasks and demands that would make your peers shut down. Maybe there are times that you’re in almost a flow state of concentration on a project, able to make significant progress on something that your manager thought would take weeks.

The downside of ADHD is that this kind of performance might not be reliable. Where one week, you might have gotten 5 hours of deep work in, this week you might struggle to do 30 minutes. Or your feedback has sounded like, “That was really great work, but that wasn’t quite the thing to be focusing on.”

Your ADHD makes it hard to figure out what to focus on, and to actually commit to that task.. and good luck getting any of it done if it’s boring or tedious. Instead, it feels like playing whack-a-mole with whatever potential crisis is coming up. This is the executive dysfunction that can show up in work, especially for people who might have been able to coast through school, or have been able to make a deadline just in time.

ADHD can be increasingly difficult to manage as you advance in your career because of the following:

  • more important meetings means less flex time to recoup and organize yourself

  • moving into leadership roles means more room for imposter syndrome and the need to be calm and confident all the time

  • you get pinged more, disrupting your train of thought more often

  • being part of more projects means more to juggle and track

  • communication can become more implicit, but you prefer explicit expectations

  • deadlines can be more vague or moveable, leading to more procrastination

  • you’re expected to react calmly to stressful situations instead of your first reaction

You've probably tried just about everything by now: productivity apps, medication, endless to-do lists, and promises to yourself about getting organized. Some may have helped. Others may have added more stress. What's often missing isn't another system. It's a different relationship with how your mind works.

Why ADHD Gets Harder as Your Career Advances

Our approach to ADHD therapy is grounded in neurodiversity-affirming care. ADHD is not something broken that needs fixing. It's a different way of your brain working that deserves understanding and support. There isn’t a magical app that will suddenly help you feel on top of your workload, and the “just try harder” approach isn’t it either.

Much of the struggle you experience comes from living in a world designed for neurotypical functioning, not from personal failure or lack of effort on your part. Our goals in therapy include being able to understand how you actually operate, and find ways for you to find success as you are – and not as a copy of someone else.

Why Neurodiversity-Affirming Care
is Important

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What You Can Expect:

Realistically, we are not going to get rid of your symptoms. Some weeks you will feel like you have a handle on things, and other weeks, you will feel like you are losing it. We will also discuss how management options, such as medication and coaching, can be used. 

We’ll help you to:

  • Step by step, we'll clarify your goals. People with ADHD have various issues, including task management, organization, planning, and prioritizing.

    What we do first is get specific about your goals:

    • What kind of professional do you want to be?

    • What kind of relationships do you want to build?

    • When ADHD symptoms show up, what is going wrong?

    These questions inform what we focus on.

  • After identifying goals, you’ll start noticing patterns, develop mindfulness to recognize what is happening, and learn to stop your immediate reactions and impulses.

    This means we may work on:

    • Noticing when your attention wanders without beating yourself up about it

    • Recognizing the urge to switch tasks without automatically following it

    • Sitting with the discomfort of boredom or frustration without trying to escape

    This willingness to be present with difficult experiences often reduces their hold over you.

  • We also work on approaching your thoughts differently by changing how you speak to yourself.

    Instead of "I should be better at this," we find compassionate ways to approach yourself. We practice shifting from "being better" to accepting that you cannot be perfect and that you will make mistakes.

    We also challenge unhelpful thoughts. Is "I'm lazy" actually true? What effect does thinking that have on you?

  • Together, we take small, concrete steps to help you live more of the life you want. We identify the specific behaviors to practice outside of sessions.

    We practice these behaviors consistently and likely imperfectly. We also explore what gets in the way — usually avoidance, perfectionism, or waiting for motivation — and find ways to move past those barriers.

  • Lastly, we use our therapeutic relationship to practice the new patterns. Some of your difficulties may show up in the relationship—attention wandering in session, perfectionism, or shame-based language. When they show up, we can call them out and challenge them in a safe, supportive environment.

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Moving Forward with Purpose

Living with ADHD as a high-achieving professional doesn’t mean that you’re not competent or successful. It just means that your brain works differently, and the strategies others use may not work for you. Effective therapy to manage ADHD symptoms is going to offer more than coping skills. It will help you practice self-compassion, approach your symptoms flexibly, and focus on what truly matters to you, professionally and personally. 

You don’t have to keep pretending that everything is fine. It is okay to admit you feel like you are drowning. There is another way forward, a way that acknowledges your challenges without defining you by them, and honors both your capabilities and struggles.

Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with Dr. Faraha Hasan or Dr. Diana Hu, licensed psychologists in Bellevue, WA, specializing in ADHD & working with high-achieving professionals.

Serving clients in Bellevue, Seattle, and throughout Washington State via telehealth.

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