The Naughty Child, the Daydreamer, and the Search for a Dopamine Fix

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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