Dr G's ADHD Chat

Coaching. Is not the same as psychotherapy. People can be coaches witthout without being psychotherapists. People can be psychotherapists without being coaches. Coaching comes out of the positive psychology movement and the basic goal is to help people become the best they can be.The goals are set by the client.Psychotherapy comes from the mental health and involves trying to reduce the distress caused by mental illness, like anxiety or depression. It is much more dependent on the therapist to establish the goals of the therapy. In this podcast, I’ll cover some of the differences in the two approaches based on my experience as a psychotherapist and as a coach.

ADHDers get more criticism than neurotypical children and frequently have lower self-esteem. To help them develop resilience and better self-esteem, it’s important to remember that they have a lot of strengths and positives. On this show I will briefly review the positives and strengths that ADHDers commonly demonstrate.

Parenting an ADHD child does not always end at adulthood especially in our current economic environment, not to mention (but I will) Covid and the disruptive effect that has had. Coupled with the fact that many, if not most ADHDers tend to the sort of creative activities that aren’t particularly robust. As a result, you may get a phone call or more likely the doorbell will ring and there will stand your young man or lady with all their worldly possessions in a duffel bag. You have now entered that parenting an ADHD adult phase of life. I will share some of my experiences both as a clinician and a parent and hopefully some helpful insights.

ADHD has been identified as having an 85% heritability index, which is incredibly High and indicates that if even only one parent has ADHD, it likely that the children will have ADHD. I have a wife who’s family has a number of family members diagnosed with ADHD and she probably has it ,too (I’m not supposed to evaluate or treat family members and as a smart old husband, I’m aware that its probably better for her to decide she’s got it than for mer to say it.) We have three children, two of them have ADHD. And honestly I’m not sure that my family doesn’t”t have ADHD. I think both my brother and my father probably do. SO, it’s not that ADHD runs through your family, the important think to keep reminding yourself is that it’s genetics, it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s also not because of poor parenting.

This is the third in our series of tips for parenting ADHD kids. This time it’s presenting in a do this, don’t do this format. I’m terming to be aware that frequently at least one parent is also ADHD, so I should do some tight lean format material.

This is a time of year for thinking about life, evaluating life, thinking about our decisions, our performance, our loved ones both living and, deceased. This sometimes leads to joy and sometimes leads to anxiety and/or depression. These are my reflections on the season, life and ADHD

This the third podcast in a series about handling holiday for ADHD parents. This episode contains a series of things you can do to make it through the holidays with way less stress. They are simple but proven by research ways of helping deal with holiday stress.

In this, the second episode in our holiday stress series, I’ll be discussing the the reason why the holidays are so stressful. I’ll be identifying the specific causes of the stress that cause so much turmoil and distress, not the least of which is the idea that “ I should be happy while I’m doing all this work on top of my regular duties.”

The holidays are supposed to the time of” peace on earth, good will to all men.” So why is it so stressful? Why do the rates of mental illness go up? Why do I feel so stressed out? I’ll cover the answers to these and other questions about holiday stress in the next three episodes presented over the next three days.

Had so much interesting stuff, I decided I needed two episodes to include it all. ADHD is an increasingly researched diagnosis, so we get more and more information to use to help our ADHDers. This episode talks more about handling the neurological aspects of the ADHD brain, that hyper alert,creative, rapid responding brain can be trained.