Unleash Your ADHD Warrior offers a combination of personal reflection, practical exercises, and encouragement for adults who want to develop a more supportive approach to everyday life. How did receiving your own ADHD diagnosis at 62 change your understanding of yourself and the clients you had worked with throughout your career?

What makes my diagnosis especially interesting is that it actually became apparent while I was writing the book. The more I researched ADHD and reflected on the people I had worked with over the years, the more I began recognizing myself in what I was writing. Eventually there came a point when I thought, “Wait a minute this isn’t just my clients. This is me too.”

One of the strangest parts of a late diagnosis is realizing how well you can mask, even from yourself. I had spent years developing workarounds, compensating, pushing through, and assuming that was simply what everyone did.

You can even be an introvert who has learned to look very extroverted. You can walk into a room, engage with everyone, do what needs to be done, and appear completely comfortable and then get away from the crowd and collapse. I can laugh about it now, but for years I never really understood why certain things took so much out of me.

Receiving the diagnosis at 62 made so many pieces of my life click into place. I had spent more than 35 years helping other people understand themselves, yet there were parts of my own life I had always explained as, “I just need to try harder,” or “Why can’t I get this together when I can handle so many other things?”

The diagnosis didn’t change who I was. It changed the story I had been telling myself about who I was.

It also helped me recognize that some of the same traits that created challenges in one setting could be tremendous strengths in another. During my military service, for example, I was very good in a crisis. When things became intense, my brain could become incredibly focused. Looking back, I could see that ADHD had not simply made certain things harder, it had also contributed to qualities that served me very well in demanding situations.

That realization changed how I looked back at my work with clients too. I could see how many adults had come into my office carrying shame about things that were often related to how their brains were wired. They weren’t lazy, careless, unmotivated, or failing at adulthood. Many had spent years working twice as hard just to appear as though they were keeping up.

That became a major reason for finishing the book. I wanted people to move away from asking, “What is wrong with me?” and begin asking, “What does my brain need in order to thrive?”

That is a very different question, and sometimes it changes everything.

What are some of the most common misunderstandings about ADHD that you have encountered during your counseling career, and how can adults begin to reconsider long-held beliefs about themselves after receiving an ADHD diagnosis?

One of the biggest misunderstandings is that ADHD is simply a problem with attention. People will say, “You can focus on something you enjoy for hours, so how can you have ADHD?” But ADHD involves much more than attention. It affects regulation, attention, emotion, motivation, energy, time, and even the ability to shift from one thing to another.

Another misconception is that successful people cannot have ADHD. I have seen incredibly bright, capable adults who built careers, raised families, earned degrees, and accomplished remarkable things while privately believing they were somehow failing because everyday tasks felt harder than they “should.”

That word should causes a lot of pain.

After diagnosis, I encourage people to become curious rather than judgmental. Instead of saying, “Why do I always do this?” try asking, “What is happening here? What support would make this easier?”

A diagnosis should not become another label used against yourself. Ideally, it becomes information, a new lens through which you can understand your patterns, recognize your strengths, build better supports, and begin releasing some of the shame you may have carried for years.

For many adults who are diagnosed later in life, there can also be grief. You look back and wonder how life might have been different if you had known earlier. I think we have to make room for that grief while also recognizing that understanding yourself now still matters.

You can’t rewrite the first chapters, but you absolutely get a say in what comes next.

What inspired you to develop the ADHD Wellness Shield™, and how did you determine which areas of well-being to include?

The ADHD Wellness Shield™ grew out of something I saw repeatedly in both my clinical work and my own life: no single strategy is enough.

Someone might have the perfect planner but be exhausted because they are not sleeping. They may understand ADHD intellectually but have no support system. They may exercise and eat well but still become emotionally overwhelmed. Someone else may have tremendous strengths but spend so much energy compensating and masking that there is very little left at the end of the day.

The Shield became a way of asking, “What does this particular brain need in order to function at its best?”

Its seven reinforcements are nutrition, sleep, movement, mindfulness and emotional regulation, tools and strategies, connection and support, and purpose and strengths. They work together rather than becoming another impossible checklist of things someone with ADHD is supposed to do perfectly.

At the center of the Shield is something especially important to me: a stable nervous system and Compassionate Detachment.

I have always been very sensitive to what other people are feeling. That can be a tremendous gift when you are helping people, but it can also become exhausting when another person’s feelings begin to become mixed up with your own.

As I came to better understand both myself and ADHD as well as living with MS made respecting my own energy increasingly necessary. I had to learn that compassion does not require absorption.

I could see someone. I could understand them. I could care deeply about what they were experiencing without having to take that experience into myself.

The way I describe it is:

“I can see you, but I don’t need to feel you in order to be present and helpful.”

That became the heart of Compassionate Detachment.

It is not about becoming cold, withdrawing, or building a wall between yourself and other people. It is about developing enough healthy separation to ask, “What is mine to hold, and what isn’t?”

It also means learning discernment—recognizing who is emotionally safe, where stronger boundaries may be needed, and when someone else’s fear, anger, pain, expectations, or chaos is beginning to become entangled with your own.

That is part of why the image of a shield became so meaningful to me. A shield does not mean hiding from life. It allows you to stay present in life without being overwhelmed by everything coming toward you.

I also knew I did not want the Shield to become another book telling people with ADHD what they should be doing.

Knowing what helps is very different from being able to access it when you are overwhelmed.

That is where my background in clinical hypnotherapy became such an important part of the book. The self-hypnosis scripts give readers a way to practice regulation instead of only reading about it. They are designed to help create a pause, settle the nervous system, interrupt an overwhelm cascade, rehearse new responses, and reinforce healthier patterns.

The 4 Rs: Recognition, Release, Replace, Repeat  give readers a simple structure for working with thoughts, emotions, and habits. The hypnosis and visualization exercises then help them practice those skills in a more experiential way.

One of the scripts, the Shield Visualization, brings many of these ideas together. It gives readers a way to practice Compassionate Detachment before emotionally charged situations rather than waiting until they are already overwhelmed.

That is also why the phrase on the cover, “Breath. Release. Rise.”, means so much to me.

Breath is the pause—the moment of regulation before reaction.
Release is letting go of shame, overwhelm, old stories, and what is not yours to carry.
Rise is moving forward with your strengths, your supports, and a better understanding of the brain you actually have.

In many ways, that is the Shield in three words.

What changes would you most like to see in how society, workplaces, and families understand and respond to adults with ADHD?

I would love to see us replace judgment with curiosity.

When someone struggles with organization, time, follow-through, emotional regulation, or overwhelm, the first response is often some version of, “Why don’t you just…?”

Just use a planner.
Just get organized.
Just try harder.
Just calm down.

Most adults with ADHD have already spent years trying harder.

I would like workplaces to recognize that supporting different ways of thinking does not mean lowering standards. Sometimes relatively small changes clear written expectations, fewer unnecessary interruptions, flexible ways of organizing work, or allowing someone to use the tools that help them focus can make an enormous difference.

Within families and relationships, I would like people to understand that ADHD behaviors are not automatically character statements. Forgetting something does not necessarily mean you do not care. Becoming overwhelmed does not mean you are dramatic. Needing external reminders does not mean you are irresponsible.

At the same time, understanding ADHD is not about removing personal responsibility. It is about finding strategies that actually work so people can take responsibility more successfully.

I would also like people with ADHD themselves to learn that compassion and boundaries can coexist. You can care deeply without carrying everything. You can understand someone without losing yourself inside what they are feeling. You can ask, “Is this mine to hold?” before automatically picking it up.

Most of all, I hope we stop defining people entirely by their difficulties.

ADHD can absolutely create challenges, but the same person may also bring creativity, humor, intuition, persistence, curiosity, empathy, passion, quick thinking, and an ability to make connections other people miss.

My goal is not to pretend ADHD is easy or turn every difficulty into a “superpower.” It is to help people understand their whole brain—its challenges and its strengths—and stop fighting themselves long enough to learn how to work with it.

If I could reduce the message of the book to four ideas, it would be:

Understand your brain.
Regulate before you react.
Know what is yours to carry.
Build the supports that allow your strengths to emerge.

And sometimes it really does begin with three simple words:

Breath. Release. Rise.

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