ADHD Therapy Group Eastbourne | Dr Claire Stubbs
ADHD: Designing Your New Scaffold
An eight-week ADHD therapy group in Eastbourne for adults who want to understand themselves and their ADHD in a different way.
ADHD: Designing Your New Scaffold is an eight-week ADHD therapy group in Eastbourne for adults who want to understand themselves and their ADHD in a different way.
Living with ADHD can often feel like a lifetime of trying harder.
What if, instead of asking “How do I try harder?”, we started asking: “How do I build a life that asks less of a brain that’s already working so hard?”
The Scaffold We Build Around ADHD
Sometimes the systems that help us cope become exhausting to maintain.
When ADHD goes unrecognised or misunderstood, we can spend years absorbing messages about how we should be: Try harder. Be more organised. Don’t be so sensitive. Don’t be too much. Get it right.
Eventually, we find ways to adapt. We might become perfectionistic because making a mistake feels too risky. We might over-prepare because we don’t trust ourselves to remember. We might push through exhaustion, hide parts of ourselves, or become very good at anticipating what other people need from us.
In many ways, we build a scaffold around ourselves that helps us function.
And that scaffold isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It was often built for good reason, at a time when we didn’t have the understanding or support we have now.
But it can also become exhausting to maintain.
A Different Way of Understanding ADHD
This isn’t simply about finding better ways to manage ADHD.
There are many valuable approaches to ADHD coaching that can help us develop practical strategies for the challenges we experience today. This group goes a little deeper.
Rather than only asking “What strategy will help me manage this?”, we’ll also become curious about why we’ve learned to manage ourselves in the ways that we have, and how we can respond to ourselves with a little more compassion.
The programme brings together ADHD neuroscience, Internal Family Systems (IFS), attachment theory, relational therapeutic work, and practical strategies to explore both the brain you’re supporting and the scaffold you’ve built around it.
The aim isn’t to tear everything down and start again. It’s to understand what has served you, what is taking more energy than it gives back, and what you might now choose to build differently.
What We'll Work on Together
A good scaffold shouldn’t require you to constantly hold it up.
The routine works, but only if we remember to maintain it. The organisational system works, but keeping it organised becomes another job. We make plans to reduce overwhelm, then find ourselves overwhelmed by the plan.
Over the eight weeks, we’ll move from understanding to noticing and then to designing practical supports around the brain and nervous system you actually have.
1. Understand your ADHD brain and nervous system
Develop a clearer understanding of how ADHD affects attention, motivation, emotion and executive function, and what that means for the demands placed on your nervous system.
2. Recognise where the load is
Explore where everyday life is placing unnecessary demands on your executive functions, and begin noticing the patterns, strategies and adaptations you’ve developed to compensate.
3. Design a scaffold that fits
Identify what’s genuinely supporting you, what is taking more energy than it gives back, and begin developing practical supports that work with your brain rather than continually asking it to work harder.
Why Work With ADHD in a Therapeutic Group?
There are some things we understand differently when we experience them together.
You may understand that struggling to start something isn’t laziness. You may know why you become overwhelmed, lose track of time, or find yourself working incredibly hard to manage apparently ordinary demands.
But sometimes understanding why we struggle is only part of the shift. Hearing another person describe an experience that feels familiar can help us see our own difficulties differently and with a little more compassion.
Working in a small therapeutic group provides an opportunity to see parts of your experience reflected in other ADHD adults, to learn from different ways of approaching familiar challenges and to notice what happens when you don’t have to mask or explain yourself quite so much.
For people who have spent years feeling too much, not enough, or simply different, that shared experience can itself become part of the therapeutic work.
The group is intentionally limited to a maximum of eight participants, creating enough shared experience while keeping the space small enough for meaningful therapeutic work.
If you are interested to explore what it might mean to build a toolbox that works with the brain you already have, enquire below about our next group:
