Psychological treatments for adult ADHD include treatments that help you cope with the secondary symptoms of the disorder — in other words, the feelings of anger, frustration, hostility, impatience, low self-esteem, hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, blame, and fear that arise from the primary symptoms of adult ADHD.

Some types of psychological treatment help you see and understand why you feel the way you do. Others help you find ways to cope with the effects of living with the symptoms of adult ADHD, or modify your behavior and thoughts using conditioning and association.

Changing Your Attitudes Through Counseling and Psychotherapy

Counseling and psychotherapy can involve standard talk therapy, treatments that teach you how to change the way you think and act, and therapies that enable you to vent pent-up feelings. While counseling and psychotherapy can't eliminate the symptoms of adult ADHD, it can help you develop strategies to better cope with your symptoms.

For instance, counseling can help you accept the fact that you have the disorder as well as the problems that accompany it. Once you accept you have the disorder, you can look for ways to adjust your personal and work life so things run more smoothly. Counseling can also help remove any guilt or shame you may be feeling about your symptoms by helping you better understand their neurobiological origins.

Adjusting Your Behavior Through Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

In cognitive-behavioral therapy, you learn to adjust your behavior by identifying patterns of thought and behavior and using various techniques to modify them. This short-term therapy has been shown to work as well as antidepressants for treating mild to moderate depression.

Patients identify and reduce the frequent, intense negative thoughts that lead to their depression, and then replace these self-destructive thoughts with more realistic and constructive thoughts. This relieves distress and helps motivate them toward positive action.

In this type of therapy, your therapist may ask you to write down what you were thinking before, during, and after episodes of negative behavior, and record how often you engage in negative behavior. This allows you to get a better picture of why, how, when, and how frequently negative thoughts and behavior interrupt your life.

Your therapist may also ask you to rate the intensity of emotions that accompany your thoughts so you can see how strongly you feel about a certain behavior or how motivated you feel to act in that particular way.

Monitoring Your Thoughts with Awareness Training

In awareness training, you work with a counselor to develop increased awareness of yourself and your environment. The goal of awareness training is to become more in tune with how you think, feel, and act. Tapping into this “streaming” information can help you consciously change the way you behave.

Psychoeducational Counseling

This type of counseling emphasizes understanding adult ADHD and finding new skills for living with it. Your counselor will likely discuss topics like adult ADHD symptoms, various treatments and medications, alternative treatments, coexisting conditions, support groups, special assistance at work or school, disability issues, and insurance concerns.

Sharing Experiences Through Group Therapy

In group therapy, people with similar problems or issues meet regularly as a group with a therapist to discuss problems, share experiences, and find solutions.

Adults with ADHD typically have poor planning and organizational skills and can be difficult to live and work with. In family counseling, the entire family meets with a therapist to better understand family members with ADHD and to find family solutions for creating harmony at home and supporting family members with the disorder. Couples where one or both partners have adult ADHD may find group therapy helpful in working out issues stemming from adult ADHD symptoms such as forgetfulness, carelessness, lack of patience, and having a short temper.

Developing Specific Skills Through Training

Training is a form of counseling that helps you develop or improve specific skills you may need in a variety of situations, both at home and in your job. It is also a valuable type of therapy for adults with ADHD who aren't comfortable with approaches used in standard talk therapy.

Instead of examining your emotions and what motivates you to think and behave in a certain way, training helps you focus exclusively on improving or developing the concrete skills you need to function in a more efficient way.

Many people discover that developing new skills helps so much that they begin to think and act in a more positive and life-affirming way. As a result, they often find themselves functioning more efficiently and appropriately at work, at school, and in social settings.