A Smarter Way to Learn
Adult ADHD
Clinical Interventions

Including for Couples

Solving the Adult ADHD Puzzle for professionals

There's Never Been
a Better Time

Expand Your Skills
and Your Practice

If you have not lived with Adult ADHD—in yourself or a loved one—it’s impossible to grasp the depth, breadth, and sheer variety of potential challenges. That goes double when the diagnosis comes later in life.

Over the years, what started as ADHD in childhood  morphed into a murky mix of symptoms, misinterpretations, negative (or at least distorted) feedback, and counter-productive coping responses (along with some useful ones). 

Loved ones bring their own variations of misinterpretations and counter-productive coping responses.

Helping ADHD-challenged clients stands out as among the most rewarding clinical work. Why? Because clear and marked progress can be made—and retained. But also because this kind of help is so desperately hard to find.

How To Help Clients
with a Cluster of
"High-Priority" Issues?

We begin by puzzling the pieces of the client’s highly individual experience of this highly variable syndrome.  One by one.

This training illustrates how to clearly break out all the moving  parts—and re-assemble in a more comfortable configuration.

Now, imagine your clients also taking this training. 

We do the “heavy lifting” — providing a strong foundation, tools, and language for working with you to address more complex issues in therapy.  

COVID Pushed
Already Strong Demand
for Expertise
Into the Crisis Zone

Pre-COVID, millions of ADHD-challenged individuals and couples were desperate for expertise. 

During COVID,  need reached beyond that to crisis proportions. Previously  marginal coping strategies proved woefully insufficient.

“Denial” started to drop among the the adults themselves and their loved ones. Poorly managed ADHD was taking a clear toll on their lives.

As a result, even more seek help. Now.

 

Praise for 

Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy

Visit the book page to read more professional endorsements, contributors bios, and content summaries

Russell Barkley, PhD

ADHD and the Nature of Self-Control and Taking Charge of Adult ADHD

Excerpted from the Foreword: 

The counseling of couples in which at least one member has ADHD has received scant research attention. Fortunately, this book draws together not only what is known, but also what methods of treatment are likely to address these relationship issues.

Here we find experts in various approaches to treatment contributing to create the first book of its kind, one that provides a thorough review across a diverse array of modalities as well as detailed guidance on implementing them for the ADHD-affected couple.

Congratulations on having the good sense to read it.

Harville Hendrix, PhD

Getting the Love You Want and Imago Therapy 

First came cutting edge theory in Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?, shining light in the darkness for couples living with the amazing complications of one or both partners having ADHD.

Now comes a luminous clinical guide for Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy, helping therapists identify the essential elements of the therapeutic process for successful outcome, including therapy models ranging from medications to cognitive-behavioral to couples therapy. 

The thoroughness and clarity of the theory and therapy, and the voluminous sources and research citations, make these two books a seminal contribution to the field.

The Experts

Before creating the first clinical model for Adult ADHD Couple therapy, psychologist Arthur L. Robin and Gina Pera asked themselves two questions:

  1. How can couple therapists expertly approach the particular but highly variable needs of each person within ADHD-challenged couples—and the relationship itself?
  2. Given what we know about the bi-directional effect of domestic stress on a mental-health condition and vice-versa, how can Adult ADHD specialists providing individual therapy include the partner in an equitable and sensitive way?

We detail our highly endorsed model in Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy: Clinical Interventions, by Gina Pera and Arthur L. Robin (Routledge; 2016).

Yet, our interventions can even help clients who do not have ADHD—but still wrestle with Executive Functions around communication, long-term planning, co-parenting, chore-sharing, managing money, and more.  

When it comes to therapy, these clients typically need an interweaving of pragmatic instruction, emotional exploration, and cognitive restructuring.  One without the others typically is not enough.

For more information on our backgrounds, please visit About the Experts

 

Would You Like to Help Clients Solve
These Common Puzzles?

  • Taking charge of goals large and small, short-term and long-term
  • Getting organized—with time, tasks,  things
  • Honoring agreements
  • Managing reactions
  • Remembering and preparing for important events
  • Getting to bed at the designated time
  • Working as a team—at work and at home
  • Working more pro-actively with prescribers
  • Connecting long-troubling physical issues (e.g. hearing) to ADHD
  • At long last: implementing a calendar & to-do system
  • Bringing “Time Blindness” into sharper view
  • Managing frustration and irritability
  • Communicating more clearly
  • Acting with more consistent empathy (not under-doing or over-doing)
  • Showing appreciation for friends and loved ones
  • Having more time for fun activities
  • Socializing more easily and enjoyably
  • Taking out the trash—with a minimum of pain!
Solving the Four Essential Puzzle Pieces tackles all that and more. 
 

If you say, "That's me!"
to even one of
those questions,
this course is for you

Piecemeal Strategies
Won't Take Clients
To the Finish Line

A tip here. A blog post there.

A strategy and webinar —or ten.

Maybe even a few books and dozens of YouTube videos.

It all has its place—if one can separate wheat from chaff.

What’s that, though, when these clients are up against pervasive challenges?

Where is the framework for fitting all the pieces together—in a way that makes sense?

That is, makes sense for each client, not some generic idea of a person with ADHD or an ADHD-challenged couple.

Learn more in this overview video

The Big Picture:
Why Four Puzzle Pieces?

ADHD Success Training brings to you an unprecedented training series—Adult ADHD: Solving the Four Essential Puzzle Pieces.

Think of them as a jigsaw puzzle’s strategic four corner pieces.  Once in place, they provide a much clearer view of your Adult ADHD puzzle. All that’s left is fitting in the details.

Course 1 is available now—and by itself a foundational game-changer.  

Over the next year, Courses 2, 3, and 4 will dive deeper into three evidence-based strategies.  Above, play the overview lesson.  Below, find brief descriptions of each course.

Your Tour Guide on the
ADHD Roller Coaster:

Gina Pera

In this training, Gina draws from that highly praised professional guide and her other authored works, along with 20 years’ experience in a range of ADHD-related issues, including relationships.  Dr. Robin will join us regularly for virtual Q&A sessions.

Click to open these two categories of quick facts about Gina

  • My husband was diagnosed in 1999, only thanks to my dogged efforts to make sense of seemingly paradoxical behavior
  • Founding and leading for 16 years an online group for the partners of adults with ADHD—10,000 members and 14,000 posts to date
  • Leading two face-to-face groups in Silicon Valley for 15 years: One for adults with ADHD, one for the “partners of”
  • Attending years of high-level conferences on ADHD
  • Reading hundreds of published papers and books
  • Conducting the first and most comprehensive, rigorous survey on Adult ADHD and relationships, the ADHD Partner Survey (2004-6),  findings of which are included in Dr. Russell Barkley’s clinical guide
  • Writing and Speaking
  • Publishing in 2008 the groundbreaking Is It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.?— the first and only book to detail:

—The Executive Functions Framework

—The cumulative impact of living years without diagnosis

—The dual nature of “denial”—and how to get past it

—The potential effect of poorly managed ADHD on intimate partners

—Evidence-based treatment strategies, in layperson’s terms

  • Winner of four national book awards; endorsed by a Who’s Who of preeminent experts
  • By invitation, contributed the first-ever chapter on ADHD couple therapy to the “gold standard” clinical guide edited by Russell Barkley, PhD, a preeminent ADHD expert
  • By invitation, produced with esteemed ADHD authority Arthur L. Robin, PhD, the first clinical guide for treating ADHD-challenged couples: Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy: Clinical Interventions
  • By invitation, speaking at major ADHD conferences internationally

Accessible
Affordable
Comprehensive

Reliable

This Training Is For You If

Is The Consumer Training for
Couples or Individuals?

Both Plus

We created this training so you can better guide:

  • Couples
  • Individuals:
    • Adults with ADHD (already diagnosed or not), in a relationship or not
    • Spouses, intimate partners , and other loved ones (parents, siblings, adult children, friends) 

Key Issues Covered

 

  • The Diagnosis of ADHD and its potential relevance to a client’s life in particular—a client’s particular experience of this highly variable syndrome
  • The “emotional baggage” associated with late-diagnosis—and helping clients revise cognitive distortions and counterproductive coping responses
  • Working within your license purview to help adults with ADHD and their partners be more pro-active with medication treatment
  • Guiding couples in developing  joint strategies that  increase cooperation, good will, and follow through—with “nagging” sidelined.
  • Helping parents of adult children with ADHD reframe their experience through the ADHD Lens and adopt  helpful approaches with their child.
  • Validating the experience of the partners of adults with ADHD before expecting them to adopt ADHD-friendly strategies-

Couple Therapists Should Know:

  • ADHD affects individuals—it’s important to identify how it’s affecting each individual
  • Teamwork is important— so is tracking (and celebrating) progress
  • Providing the emotional space for clients to air their reactions to the diagnosis can be crucial to lasting progress
  • Published research and high-level clinical expertise have shown specific strategies and tools to be effective 

Help is Hard to Find—Anywhere

Friends and family members want to help. But their advice might fall flat—or even compound shame and isolation. 

Standard therapy—individual or couplelacks an orientation to ADHD’s neurobiological challenges.  Therefore, it risks misinterpreting dysfunctional patterns’ causes—and exacerbating them.

Coaching can be helpful—but even the best  efforts can’t “land” on a foundation of entrenched confusion and conflict.

Even well-qualified ADHD psychotherapists often lack the knowledge to extend their expertise to relationships in a fair and equitable way.  For example, recruiting the “partner of” as a secretary or helper can be a recipe for resentment on both sides.  

Based on the work of Baucom and others, there can be a bi-directional effect for adults with a mental-health condition who are in a relationship. Relationship stress can exacerbate that condition, and the condition can exacerbate relationship stress. Each partner—and their relationship—benefits from evidence-based clinical approaches.

Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy Model

A Merging Of Evidence

 Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy™ merges evidence-based principles from both couple therapy and Adult ADHD therapy: 

ADHD-challenged individuals and couples—and other loved ones, too— need a larger framework for “explaining the inexplicable” and “managing the unmanageable.”

In fact, maybe the relationship is strong, though weakening under stress. Such couples benefit not from therapy but from training in doing things differently—with less stress, more fun.

For couples with extra challenges, imagine how much better therapy will go if you’ve already pieced together the ADHD portion of your unique puzzle. 

At its core, our Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy™ model depends on a strong understanding of the:

    • Science
    • Common dysfunctional patterns and how to revise them
    • Approaches proven to work for individuals with ADHD—expanded to include a partner in a fair and equitable way
    • The fact that there is no “one size fits all” for adults with ADHD or their partners

This Course is
Especially Recommended for
Professionals Who:

Imagine How It Feels:

Offering Clients
Solutions to
Annoying, Life-Draining
Seemingly Inexplicable
and Pointless
Life Challenges

What is the Format?

  • Streaming videos, available 24-7, within our website
  • Focused topics divided into clear sub-topics, 10-30 min per video
  • Easily track progress and quickly scan topics for re-viewing
  • Action Step Guides, to personalize lessons (complete on your device or print)
  • Resource folder, for expanding upon cited research
  • Weekly virtual Q&A meetings via Zoom for first 3 months 
  • Case couples walk you through key concepts and interventions
  • Access for the life of the course (at least 2-3 years, probably longer)
online training

Sample Course 1 Views

online training

9 Major Steps
34 videos
16 hours

Bonus Introductory Module

2:22 hours; 13 lessons

You’re Among Friends—and We Get  it—knowing they’re not alone, that their problems aren’t particular to them, that’s the first step toward relieving stress and paving a clear path to progress

Take a Sneak Peek from Course 1: The Double Triple Whammy ADHD Roller Coaster—not a moment too soon, a framework for making sense of  life in the context of ADHD—as an individual and/or a couple

Meet Our Six Case Couples—all experiencing different types of common ADHD-related challenges:  Can these relationship be saved? Use your  Action Steps Guide to note observations and questions (consumers are encouraged to write their own case profile).

Take Another Sneak Peek from Course 1: The Adult ADHD-Focused Couple Therapy Dysfunctional Interaction Cycle ™ — because right away, clients benefit from a solid but simple model for de-constructing their confusing conflicts—and beginning to turn that cycle in a more positive direction.

ADHD gay male couple Jeff and Carlos