Getting an ADHD diagnosis can open up a serious can of worms.

As you start to reflect on the life you've lived, you might start to see relationships, jobs and experiences that didn't go the way they should have. Moments you were deeply sad. Huge burnouts. Judgement coming at you from every angle — teachers, family, colleagues, your own inner voice. Suddenly there's a name for it all, and that's a lot to sit with.

I know this one personally. Long before I trained as a coach, I was having private CBT therapy. It was a genuinely practical tool — it gave me techniques, it helped with some patterns — but it never once helped me understand why I felt so anxious about things, or why my sensory limits kept tipping me into rage seemingly out of nowhere. Not once, in all that time, was it suggested that what I was experiencing could be ADHD or autism. I just felt scared and overwhelmed, all the time, with no explanation for it.

So when people ask me "should I see a coach or a therapist?" — I really do understand why the question feels so tangled. Here's how I think about it, both from research and from having lived both sides of it.

The honest difference

Therapy and coaching aren't competing options. They do genuinely different jobs.

Therapy is a licensed clinical service. It's designed to help you process the emotional and psychological weight of living with ADHD — the "why": why certain experiences hurt as much as they did, why old patterns formed, why some feelings still feel so big. A good ADHD-informed (and importantly - neuro-affirming) therapist can also formally diagnose, treat co-occurring conditions like anxiety or depression, and hold space for grief, trauma, or deep emotional processing.

Coaching is action-oriented and forward-facing. It's the "how" — practical, neuro-affirming strategies for the challenges you're facing right now, built around how your specific brain actually works rather than how you've been told it "should" work. A coach isn't there to diagnose you or process deep-seated trauma — that's not our training, and it's not what coaching is for. 

Think of it like sports coaching - they aren't there to handle all life's problems but they do offer compassion, allowing it to inform their approach. Ultimately, they are there to help you win the game, building on your strengths and developing areas you don't yet feel strong in. They want to see you succeed at whatever your goals are.

Neither one replaces the other. Plenty of people benefit from both, sometimes at the same time, sometimes one after the other.

Why the past matters in coaching too — just differently

Here's the bit that surprises people: coaching does look backward sometimes. It has to. But it uses the past as information, not as somewhere to stay and dig.

There's real research behind why this reflection happens in the first place. A peer-reviewed study on ADHD diagnosis and narrative reconstruction found that adults commonly reframe their past in light of a new diagnosis, and that this reframing often brings up real anger and sadness alongside relief — it's a well-documented part of the process, not something to feel strange about. Colorado Therapy Collective describes this well too: experiences once filed away as personal failure get looked at again through a new lens, and that can be both freeing and genuinely painful at the same time.

When clients come to coaching, they're usually standing at a point where they need to move things forward. But all of that backward-pulling stuff — the grief, the "what if I'd known sooner," the reassessment of everything — can drag against that, if there's nowhere for it to go.

You may even have noticed since being diagnosed that your capacity has shifted, it's gotten harder to put up with the stuff that you've masked through your entire life and this can affect your professional life and family life too.

That's exactly why coaching isn't the place to process it deeply. It's important to deal with — genuinely important — but coaching uses it as context to move into practical, accessible strategies for what's happening now, rather than sitting in the processing itself. If that deeper emotional work is where you're at, that's therapy's job, and it's worth honouring that rather than trying to force it into a coaching session. 

My own turning point

Back when I first sought out coaching, I'd already done some of that initial digging and processing. And there was a moment — I remember it clearly — where I realised I didn't want to keep looking backward. I wanted to be proactive. I wanted to make changes that moved me toward a more stable future, and toward actually understanding who I was — which, at the time, I genuinely wasn't sure of.

Coaching did that for me. It helped me start recognising what I actually believed, what I actually wanted, what I was actually capable of — not the endless limiting beliefs fed to me by the massive circle of influence that is family, friends, and the wider world.

I always say to clients: coaching is about taking action, moving forward, overcoming. We use the past as information and as a guide — but we don't stay there. Coaching helps you grow up and out of it. (Using all that manure as fertiliser!!)

So which do you need right now?

A few honest questions worth sitting with:

• Is the emotional weight of ADHD — shame, grief, relationship strain, anxiety, depression — the loudest thing right now? That's a sign to start with therapy, or to make sure you have therapeutic support in place alongside anything else.
• Do you feel relatively emotionally steady, but stuck on the practical stuff — organisation, follow-through, routines, communicating your needs at work? That's exactly where coaching does its best work.
• Are you doing both already? That's genuinely common, and often the most effective combination — therapy and coaching addressing different layers of the same picture rather than competing for the same ground.

There's no wrong door to walk through first. But it does help to know which room you're actually standing in.

If you think coaching is the right next step for you — practical, forward-facing, built around how your brain actually works — I'd love to talk it through.

Book a free clarity call