Radical Acceptance Meets Executive Function: What I Know After More Than Thirty Years about Counseling Women With ADHD
After more than thirty years of counseling women with chronic and severe executive function challenges of ADHD, Sari Solden is turning her attention to helping professionals understand the importance of moving away from a pathological lens and toward a person centered approach to helping women with ADHD; one that moves away from an over focus on symptom elimination as the most important measure of successful treatment or focus of treatment. In this interview Sari discusses the importance of applying the principle of “radical acceptance” to living with ADHD for women and emphasizes that the disowning of oneself is far more destructive and difficult than living with ADHD and the chronic disorganization it often causes.
Sari Solden, M.S., is a psychotherapist, author, speaker, and consultant based in Ann Arbor, Michigan who has counseled adults with AD/HD for over 30 years. She is the author of the pioneering books Women with Attention Deficit Disorder, Journeys Through ADDulthood, and is the co-author of the upcoming book, A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD. Ms. Solden is a prominent keynote speaker at national and international conferences. She serves on the professional advisory board of ADDA and was a past recipient of their award for outstanding service by a helping professional. Her areas of specialization and focus include women’s issues, inattentive ADHD, acceptance of neurodiversity and the shame, self-image, and emotional consequences that occur when one’s self- worth becomes tangled up with brain-based challenges. Ms. Solden trains mental health and helping professionals in the subtleties of the internalized gender role expectations for women and the healing process for women as well as adults who grew up with undiagnosed ADHD. Ms. Solden works with individuals, couples, and groups as well as mental health professionals with ADHD.
Website: soldenfrank.com
Contact: email via website
Registration link for Professional Consultation Group April 25, 2020 @ 3:00 – 4:30PM: bit.ly/solden-nantais
Bonus for Encore & Pink Ticket
Excerpts from A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD
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Globe-Trotting Public Speaker | Author | Founder and CEO of http://www.ArianePoole.com Cosmetics.
Todd Love, PsyD, JD, LPC, BCC is a licensed professional counselor, licensed attorney, and board-certified coach, and runs a men’s counseling and coaching practice in Athens, Georgia, and online. He has published multiple scholarly publications on the topic of behavioral addictions and is an advocate for the awareness of the risk factors people with ADHD face regarding internet-related addictions. Counseling is Dr. Love’s third career. Previously he was a DUI/criminal defense attorney who made a career transition after realizing that he enjoyed counseling his clients into treatment and recovery more than lawyering for them. Dr. Love’s first career was a 14-year tenure in the corporate information technology field. Diagnosed with ADHD as a young child, Dr. Love has a lifetime of experience working with the condition. He considers his ADHD superpowers to be both helpful and unhelpful. Helpful in terms of enabling many exiting life experiences and large amounts of schooling. Unhelpful in terms of overly exciting life experiences eventually resulting in personal bouts of unhealthy behavior patterns. He considers the combination of his personal life experiences with his professional training to greatly aid his ADHD coaching and professional counseling practice.
Although ADHD usually is first noticed during childhood or adolescence, for some ADHD is not apparent until the challenges of adulthood. For some women, ADHD symptoms first appear as their estrogen level drops during menopause. Our group has published research showing that medications used for ADHD can be helpful for women who develop ADHD symptoms at mid-life.