ADHD Therapy for Late-Diagnosed Adults in Chicago & Illinois
“There’s no such thing as laziness. There’s only barriers to motivation.” - Unknown
You cleaned your entire apartment before you had friends over last weekend..
“I don’t know how you keep it so together” your best friend mentioned. You laughed because he didn’t see the state of your bedroom. There’s been a bag of returns in your trunk since October and you don’t know the last time you opened your mail. You were in therapy for a few years for the anxiety. It helped with the parts everyone could see. But nobody had looked underneath the performance to see what it was costing you to keep it running.
Your kid’s teacher emailed you last week and you saw it..
But then it disappeared in your brain. You remembered it tonight at 11pm, but now it’s been too long to respond without looking like a bad parent. You snapped at your kid over shoes this morning. Not because of the shoes. But because you were already running late and the shoes were the seventeenth thing to do before 8am. You sat in the car after drop-off hating yourself for it. You would take a bullet for this kid, but you can’t stand how long it takes them to do literally anything. Those things live right next to each other and nobody ever talks about how that feels.
This is not productivity coaching..
You won’t get a worksheet, you won’t get a morning routine, you won’t get a thought record. There is no perfect system standing between you and a functional life.
What you will get is a therapist who knows the terrain and understands that the reason nothing sticks isn’t that you need better tools. It’s that shame has been running the show.
We start with the self-concept built from years of being misunderstood. The grief of late diagnosis. The exhaustion of masking. We address the things that are actually keeping you stuck. The skills come after. They always work better that way.
Online Therapy for Adults Across Illinois
Whether you’re in Chicago or in the suburbs.
All sessions are online, no commute, no waiting room, no performing okayness in a parking lot before you walk in.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Regular talk therapy often misses ADHD entirely. Or it treats the anxiety, the depression, or the relationship problems and never touches the thing underneath. Therapy with me goes after the root.
The nervous system patterns
The shame that’s been accumulating since childhood.
The executive dysfuntion that isn’t laziness and never was.
It's trauma-informed, neurodivergent affirming and built around how your brain actually works.
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It depends on what you need. Some sessions we're doing parts work (IFS) getting curious about the shame and the protective patterns that developed around it. Some sessions we're working on the practical stuff: regulation tools, executive dysfunction, the gap between knowing and doing. Sometimes we're just making sense of your history now that you finally have a name for it. There's no one-size-fits-all. approach here. Your brain doesn't work that way and neither does therapy with me.
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If shame is in the room, and for most late-diagnosed adults it is, therapy is the right fit. Coaching works on behavior. Therapy works on the operating system running under the behavior. If you've tried coaching, or systems, or accountability structures, and something still isn't moving, that something is usually shame. That's clinical work. and that’s what we do here.
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Not exactly. CBT and DBT have useful pieces, but applied uncritically to an ADHD brain they can do more harm than good. Asking someone with ADHD to examine whether their thoughts are rational often pathologizes accurate perceptions.
Therapy here pulls from IFS, somatic approaches, and shame-informed frameworks that actually fit how your nervous system works. We use what works for your brain, not what the manual says to use.
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Yes. and this is one of the most underaddressed pieces of ADHD treatment. Rejection sensitive dysphoria is running the show in most of the relationship decisions ADHD adults think they made freely. The way you communicate, how quickly you dysregulate in conflict, the patterns of overfunctioning or withdrawing. Those are nervous system responses. We will address them directly.
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Yes. Emotional dysregulation is one of the most common reasons late-diagnosed adults finally end up in the right room. You may have been told you were too sensitive, too reactive, too much. The truth is ADHD affects emotional processing at a nervous system level. The feelings aren't the problem. The absence of support for them is. That’s what we’ll fix.
Familiar?
🪫 THE EMPTY THAT DOESN'T FILL
you’re not running low. you’re running on a deficit that’s been accumulating for years. masking takes energy. performing okayness takes energy. doing everything twice as hard to look like you’re keeping up takes energy. at some point the tank just stays empty.
🌀 THE LIST YOU REWROTE TWELVE TIMES
you didn’t forget the task. you rewrote it on four different lists. you just couldn’t start it. that’s not laziness. that’s executive dysfunction. and no planner has ever fixed it because the planner was never the problem.
🔄 THE WORDS THAT WERE RIGHT THERE
you had them. you knew exactly what you wanted to say. someone interrupted you and now they’re gone. and the things that’s hardest to explain is that it doesn’t feel like losing a thought. it feels like losing yourself mid-sentence.
⚡ THE REST THAT DOESN'T WORK
you finally sit down. you’re not doing anything. and somehow you feel guilty for every second of it. your body is still. your brain has seventeen tabs open and three of them are frozen.
🫥 THE SOCIAL MATH THAT NEVER ADDS UP
you’re either completely in or completely gone. texting everyone back immediately or ghosting for three weeks and spiraling about it. there’s no casual. there’s no in-between. and every time you disappear you write another entry in the evidence file about what’s wrong with you.
The work doesn’t stay in the therapy room
I talk about the stuff most ADHD content skips.
Masking. Relational trauma. Shame. The real impact of late diagnosis.
If you’re a producer or journalist looking for a clinician who will actually say something, I’m in.
WORTHY MOTHER PODCAST — ADHD IN MOTHERHOOD
NEWSWEEK — BATHROOM HABITS AS SIGNS OF ADHD IN WOMEN
🎧 Podcast interviews
📰 Article features
🎤 Panels & events
You don’t have to have it together to reach out.
If you’re in Illinois and you’re tired of the gap between knowing and doing — this is where that starts to close.
