George
ADHD, anxiety, and a stalled career
George was self-employed as a legal consultant and had been diagnosed with ADHD later in life. He called me because he wanted help setting up a home office. He had moved from across the country two years ago but had never created an effective workspace in his new apartment. This made it nearly impossible for him to work and establish his practice in his new community.
It became clear that the lack of a workspace wasn’t the real culprit preventing George from moving forward. The real problem was several boxes of mixed personal and professional papers sitting in the middle of the room. Most of the papers could eventually be purged, but George still needed to sort through them and pull out the important ones to keep. He felt he couldn’t devote energy to anything else until the papers were sorted. The problem was that he wasn’t doing anything about the papers and, consequently, nothing else on George’s to-do list was getting done either.
The papers were a major trigger for George’s anxiety. Living with undiagnosed ADHD had created a long string of traumatic insults to his ego. The ADHD diagnosis offered an explanation for many of his earlier job performance inconsistencies, but it was hard for George to reconcile all that he had experienced. He was hypersensitized and often had a post-traumatic stress response when exposed to the papers and the unpleasant memories and regrets attached to them. George’s therapist was helping him to work through and resolve the trauma, and I was able to offer moral support and encouragement as George practiced the various coping strategies he was learning.
Together, George and I developed strategies that helped him break down his seemingly insurmountable projects into smaller, more manageable tasks. He worked his way through the dreaded boxes and discovered the liberating joy of watching those painful triggers being demolished at his local shredding company. He gradually started checking things off on his to-do list and started feeling in control.
With the elimination of all those papers and the burden they represented, and invigorated by his success at working through his to-do list, George was able to move forward and revitalize his career.
Names and demographic information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
