Individual Therapy for Adults with ADHD in New York
Individual therapy that goes beyond symptom management, addressing the identity wounds, relational patterns, and executive function challenges that ADHD creates in adult life.
ADHD in Adulthood Is More Than a Focus Problem
By the time most adults with ADHD reach therapy, they’ve been carrying something for a long time. The self-esteem damage from years of being read as lazy, irresponsible, or “not living up to their potential.” The quiet shame from chronic underperformance in relationships, work, and daily life. An anxiety that comes from never quite trusting yourself to follow through. The grief, often late-arriving, of realizing how much ADHD may have cost before there was a name for it.
Standard ADHD therapy tends to focus almost entirely on strategies: planners, timers, reminder systems, habit stacking. Those tools have a place. They rarely touch the deeper material, the core beliefs ADHD has reinforced since childhood, the emotional dysregulation that sabotages relationships and work, the identity questions that emerge when you finally understand your own neurology. Skills without that foundation tend not to stick.
Individual therapy at this practice works at both levels. Practical support for day-to-day functioning, and deeper clinical work on the identity, attachment, and emotional patterns that ADHD has shaped across a lifetime.
What Individual ADHD Therapy Addresses
Identity and Self-Esteem
Rebuilding a sense of self not organized around your deficits. Schema Therapy reaches the core beliefs, defectiveness, failure, shame, that ADHD has reinforced since childhood, often before anyone had a word for what was happening.
Emotional Dysregulation
ADHD emotional dysregulation is neurological, not a willpower problem, not a maturity problem. Therapy builds the capacity to recognize, tolerate, and respond to intense emotional states rather than being run by them.
Executive Function in Real Life
CBT-based strategies adapted for the ADHD brain, not generic productivity advice repackaged as therapy, but tools that genuinely account for impulsivity, time blindness, and the working memory constraints that make standard systems fall apart.
ADHD in Relationships
Understanding how ADHD shows up in your closest relationships, the patterns you keep repeating, the needs that go unmet, the ways you pursue or avoid connection, and making deliberate choices about what you want to do differently.
ADHD and Work
Underperformance, procrastination, the anxiety spiral of missed deadlines, the workplace conflicts that don’t make sense on paper. Understanding the ADHD neurology underneath these patterns changes what’s available.
Late Diagnosis
For adults diagnosed later in life, therapy creates space to grieve what ADHD may have cost, and to build a new, more accurate narrative about who you are, what has driven your struggles, and what’s possible from here.
The Clinical Approach
Individual therapy at this practice draws primarily on Schema Therapy, an approach Travis Atkinson has spent 30 years developing and teaching, with specific adaptations for the ADHD population. Schema Therapy works at the level of core beliefs and early maladaptive patterns, which makes