Lindsay Ryan, a registered psychotherapist shares her personal experience of being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and offers insights from her clinical work with others who have gone through the same journey. In this 10 minute video learn how late diagnosis can bring both relief and new challenges — from reframing past experiences to finding the right tools and supports for daily life.
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Hey, everybody. My name is Lindsay Ryan and I am a registered psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada. I am late diagnosed with ADHD myself and I work primarily with a client base that also has ADHD and has been diagnosed later in life as well. I’m gonna share with you a little bit of the experience of a later-in-life diagnosis and what that means or what that looks like.
So, first things first. Late diagnosis doesn’t mean late onset. A lot of people have been struggling, internally, quietly, for a lot of years. Because that struggle is internal or because maybe they had a lot of compensating strategies that worked for them when they were younger, no one could observe what was going on and that they needed help or support. That’s why some of the reasons why people are diagnosed later in life.
I got my diagnosis around 36 and it actually happened after I had read a book by my friend, Dr. Kara Dymond. She actually wrote the book for autism. It’s called The Autism Lens. I was looking at some of the tools and supports that she was suggesting in that book, and I was like, “Wow, I probably could have used a lot of these when I was a kid. This book is good for anybody.” I was telling her that, and she kind of went “Lindsay if you’re identifying with some of the things in this book that I wrote about autistics, maybe that’s something to think about.” And so that is when my eyes were kind of opened to this idea of neurodivergency – different things like autism and OCD and ADHD – just looking different in different people and that’s when I did a deeper dive and decided to seek out an assessment myself.
For me and for a lot of my clients, getting that diagnosis comes with just an onslaught of emotional experiences. In the beginning, there’s a lot of validation and there’s a lot of relief because this is when we’ve told our story. We’ve usually unearthed a whole bunch of stuff from our past and handed it over to professionals, who’ve gone through and said, “Yeah, I see you. I see the struggle behind the sort of veneer and facade that you have curated and created for yourself.” Then there’s relief because now there’s help, right? A lot of the times, now that you know what’s going on, you can seek proper medical care or you can seek out tools that might work better for your brain – lots of validation, lots of relief, [a] sense of community.
A lot of people find kinship with a lot of content that’s created online in social media platforms. And also there’s a lot of grassroots social groups, support groups, or even therapist-led or you know, community-led supports available for ADHD now. Finding community, finding connection has also been a positive experience that a lot of my clients have felt and I have felt myself.
And then there’s another side of it too, right? There can be a huge grief experience that comes along with this because a lot of people will look back at their lives and in fact, they’re sort of asked to look back at their lives during the assessment process. And now you’re starting to see where, oh, if I had that support, maybe that would have gone differently. Or you’re starting to reprocess memories with this new context and you’re going, oh, maybe I lost that friendship because maintaining friendships is hard for me because of executive functioning requirements in a friendship. Maybe this is why it’s hard for me to maintain my basic needs and also a social life and also a career and also a family, which is demanding for everybody. With ADHD, there comes with it some extra barriers as well. There’s some grief processing that kind of has to happen too – maybe the kind of life you might have lived had you had those supporters earlier – and that can be incredibly disruptive to your life. That can bring up more executive dysfunction. As you work through that grief process, it can sometimes feel like a setback, even though it is part of the healing journey and it is progress.
There can also be a lot of anger. A lot of people will look at the adults in their life when they were children and kind of go how did you not see this? or how did you allow me to struggle for so long? And that anger can live along with compassion for our parents and our teachers, and along with the knowledge that we didn’t have all the tools we have now back then and those things can both be true. We can be angry and we can also understand our unique sort of circumstance[s] that led to this.
And many more things can come up. Everybody is an individual and everybody is going to have different emotional experiences that come up. Sometimes there is a little bit of a withdrawal that happens as you sort of start to reprocess this in your life. Sometimes it can bring up additional tension in our primary attachment relationships, whoever we’re living with, because all of a sudden now we want to start unmasking, we want to start to meet ourselves with a little bit more kindness. That might mean not over functioning and not living up in our stress response and our high adrenaline rushes to get things done. We might want to feel a little bit more [at] ease and that means that the other people around us might need to take up more slack or pick up the burden or if they can’t. That also comes with a host of other complications.
It is an incredibly difficult journey, even though it is amazing. And for me, my entire life burst open because I was able to live more authentically and live more freely and live in a way that I wanted to. All of a sudden, I can figure out how to get to the gym when I want to, I can figure out how to do my painting when I want to and I can find those tools that work for me, that work for my unique brain and not against it.
If anybody’s going through the early stages of assessment or diagnosis, my recommendation for you is slow. Meet yourself with kindness and self compassion and find your community. Congratulations on first steps and welcome to the ADHD club. It is great here, actually, and there are lots of supports for you if you look around. Okay, bye.
About the speaker
Lindsay Ryan is a registered Psychotherapist Grey Matter Psychotherapy & ADHD Service, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Her clinic offers individual and couples therapy with a focus on providing care for people with ADHD.