Discover Balance Blog

A client sits down, and somewhere in the first session, they mention it almost in passing. I was always told I was naughty. I could never sit still. I was the disruptive one. Or, just as often, the quieter version: I was the daydreamer. Always somewhere else. Never quite paying attention. Sometimes it was said with a laugh. Often it wasn't.

What follows is usually the same quiet unfolding. A childhood spent being corrected, rather than understood. And an adulthood spent making sure that never happens again.

The mask that never comes off

Somewhere along the way, many of these clients became extraordinary at fitting in. High-achieving. Attentive to everyone else's needs before their own. The person who says yes, apologises first, over-prepares, and never misses a deadline  while quietly falling apart underneath. Others take longer to find their footing at all years, sometimes decades, of feeling like they never quite landed anywhere, before they give themselves permission to work in a way that actually suits them. Even then, that permission isn't a fix on its own. Without the right structure around them, it's easy to falter again.

This isn't a coincidence, and it isn't a personality trait that just happens to sit alongside ADHD. It's often the adaptation itself. A 2026 study led by researcher Marisa Mylett at Simon Fraser University surveyed 202 adults with ADHD and found that more than 91% camouflaged their traits to some degree, just to get through the day feeling acceptable. Mylett's team found this camouflaging isn't free it takes real cognitive effort, the same attention and focus already in short supply, which is part of why so many of my clients arrive exhausted long before we even begin talking about the ADHD itself.

Male or female, the pattern looks remarkably similar. A child labelled too much, too loud, too distracted learns early that the safest option is to become someone else. It's a strategy that worked, for a long time, to keep them safe.
Why the substance makes sense

There's a piece of this pattern that clients rarely say out loud before they feel comfortable: the reaching for something. A drink. A drug. Sometimes something less obvious food, scrolling, gambling, shopping. Anything that delivers a hit of relief.

It isn't a character flaw. Researchers have described this using what's known as reward deficiency ADHD brains are often working with genuinely altered dopamine transmission, which makes everyday life feel flatter and less rewarding than it does for other people.

Neuroimaging studies reviewed by the Children and Adults with ADHD organisation (CHADD) show this shows up as a measurable preference for small, immediate rewards over larger, delayed ones part of why a fast-acting substance can feel so much more compelling than a slow, structured plan. It fills that gap quickly. It does two things at once it soothes a nervous system that's been quietly under-stimulated for years, and it's often the one part of life that isn't being performed for anyone else. Naming both of those functions, rather than just the "bad habit," tends to land far more gently with clients who already carry enough shame about it.

Retraining, not fixing

This is where I think the work gets interesting. The old coping strategy masking, people-pleasing, numbing isn't an enemy to be defeated. It's a part that stepped up a long time ago, when the child needed protecting, and never quite got the memo that it's safe to stand down.

Part of that reframe is finding room for humour in the chaos laughing at the lost keys and the three half-finished projects, rather than only ever apologising for them. A friend of mine has a lovely way of putting it: not attention deficit disorder, but attention deficit delight. And part of it is exploring the inner artist underneath the "disorganised" label, the creative, associative, wonderfully non-linear way this brain makes connections that a more rigid one simply can't.

You can't argue a lifetime of "evidence" out of someone with logic alone. If you've spent thirty, forty, fifty years being told, directly or indirectly, that who you naturally are isn't quite acceptable, no amount of reading an article is going to undo that. This is where hypnosis earns its place — not as a replacement for insight, but as a way of working underneath it, where those old patterns actually took hold.
In session, this often looks like:

• Taking the mask off, peeking underneath — helping clients learn how they naturally focus, rather than how they've trained themselves to look like they focus, and finding ways to bring that back into other areas of life.Researchers distinguish between deficit-based attention (the effort of forcing focus onto something dull or externally imposed) and interest-based attention, including hyperfocus, a state of intense, sustained concentration widely reported in ADHD adults but not part of the diagnostic criteria. A 2025 study found that 68% of adults with ADHD experienced frequent hyperfocus episodes, sometimes lasting hours — a strong clue that the issue was never an absence of focus, but where it naturally flows
• Rebuilding confidence from the inside, rather than through more achievement
• Finding a safe outlet for perfectionism — golf, cooking, anything where getting it exactly right is allowed, even welcomed, instead of exhausting

That last one surprises people every time. You don't have to get rid of the perfectionism. You just need somewhere it's allowed to belong.

There isn't one ADHD

One of my clients put it beautifully: there are different types of ADHD, he said. The ones who are always late. The ones who are early to everything, organised to the point of rigidity. The ones with an obsession with cleanliness that looks, from the outside, like the opposite of "disorganised."

I think this matters enormously. So many people rule themselves out because they don't match the one version of ADHD they've seen chaotic, forgetful, messy. But it's a spectrum, and it shows up differently in almost everyone who carries it.
Some people are camouflaging so well they'd never guess it about themselves.

The wonderful thing about being human

None of this is really about fixing anything. It's about understanding why a part of you learned to behave a certain way, thanking it for getting you this far, and gently asking if it might be ready to take on a new role  to step back and fade into the background, rather than run the show.

Diagnosed or not, formally assessed or simply recognising yourself in these words — you adapted, brilliantly, to a world that didn't always make room for you. And there's something rather wonderful in that. Being human was never meant to look one particular way.
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If any of this feels familiar, I'd love to talk. 
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I sit with this often in the therapy room. A client arrives wanting to stop something a drink, a habit, a substance, a behaviour that has stopped serving them and they describe it the way most of us learn to describe addiction: as a battle. A war between the person they want to be and the part of them that keeps sabotaging it.

But addiction rarely looks like one thing wanting one thing.
It looks like a part of you that wants to stop, and a part of you that's terrified of what happens if you do.

It Often Starts Inward, Before It's Ever a Dialogue
Long before we get anywhere near confronting a habit, there's a quieter, earlier step one that's easy to skip because it doesn't look like doing anything at all.

The psychologist Eugene Gendlin, working alongside Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago, spent years studying why therapy worked for some clients and not others. What he found was striking: clients who could engage with a bodily, pre-verbal sense of their own experience what he called the felt sense had significantly better outcomes than those who stayed in their heads, talking about their problems rather than sensing into them.

Out of this came Focusing, and the first step Gendlin taught was something he called clearing a space. Not analysing. Not fixing. Just pausing letting each pressing thing take a small step back so you can sense what's actually there in the body. The shape of it. The weight. The pull.

This is where I ask clients to begin, long before we ever talk about willpower or strategy. Because you can't have an honest conversation with a part of yourself you haven't yet let yourself feel.

Meeting the Part That Won't Let Go
In parts work, what's underneath an addictive urge often has a name. It's a firefighter part — language that comes from Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz. And it is, almost without exception, not the villain of the story.

A firefighter's job is to put out unbearable feeling, fast, by whatever means it has available. It doesn't plan. It doesn't weigh consequences. It reaches for the drink, the phone, the substance, because at some point often a long time ago that was the only tool available, and it worked. It's doing exactly what it learned to do.

I think this reframe changes more than people expect. Clients who arrive believing they are fundamentally undisciplined, weak, or flawed begin to see something different: a part of themselves that took on a protective job, at a cost, because no one taught it another way.

Giving the Part a Voice
Once a part has some space and some shape, Gestalt therapy's empty chair technique can give it an actual voice a dialogue between the part that wants to stop and the part that's terrified of what happens if it does. Not to declare a winner. So the exchange that's usually happening silently, underneath awareness, gets to happen out loud.

This isn't just a nice idea, either. Research on chairwork — the broader family of techniques the empty chair belongs to  has found genuinely meaningful effect sizes across individual, group, and family therapy. It seems to work not through catharsis, but by enabling real contact between parts of the self that have become split off from one another.

Getting Curious Instead of Fighting
Change often isn't about willpower alone — it's more a choice. It's about getting curious about that part instead of at war with it.
There are three things I keep coming back to with clients doing this work:

Commitment gives the process a spine. Not the white-knuckle kind the kind that keeps showing up to the work even when it's uncomfortable.

Curiosity keeps you asking what is this part protecting me from? instead of what's wrong with me? It's a small shift in language that changes the entire emotional tone of the work.

Compassion for self is the one people skip. It's also the one that makes the other two possible. You cannot stay curious about a part of yourself you're ashamed of. Shame shuts the door before curiosity can walk through it.

Small, Identity-Level Change
James Clear's work on atomic habits fits here more than people expect for a book largely written about productivity. His central idea that change isn't one big dramatic decision but small, repeated, identity-level choices maps closely onto what happens in the therapy room.

Not "I'm trying to quit," but "I'm someone who does one thing different today." Even a tiny deviation from the usual pattern interrupts the trance the habit runs on. The nervous system doesn't need a revolution to begin recalibrating. It needs enough of a break in the pattern to notice that something else is possible.

Why Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy Work Well Together Here
Hypnotherapy and psychotherapy complement each other in this work because they meet the problem on two levels  the conscious work of commitment and curiosity, and the deeper unconscious groundwork where the firefighter part first learned its job.

You're not just changing behaviour. You're renegotiating an old agreement with a part of yourself that was trying to keep you safe and that renegotiation has to happen somewhere the part can actually hear it, which is rarely the purely rational, conscious mind.
Where This Leaves Us
If you're supporting your own recovery, or someone else's, the invitation is the same: get curious before you get critical, and let compassion for self be part of the discipline, not the opposite of it.
The part of you that won't let go isn't your enemy. It never was. It's been trying, in the only way it knew how, to keep you safe. The work isn't to silence it. It's to sit down, pull up a second chair, and finally have the conversation.
If any of this resonates, I would love to hear from you. 💙