Specialties · ADHD
ADHD Therapy
Most people who come in about ADHD have already tried an app, a planner and a fresh start on a Monday. What is usually missing is not information about attention. It is structure that survives contact with an actual week, and a household that has stopped absorbing the difference.
60-Minute Sessions · $200 Individual / $250 Couples & Family · In Person or Telehealth in Utah
The Daily Terms
What Executive Function Actually Means
“Executive function” is a clinical phrase for a set of very ordinary tasks that ADHD makes disproportionately hard. Initiation is the gap between knowing you should start the report and actually opening the document, a gap that can last hours even when the task is short and the stakes are clear. Sequencing is the ability to break a task into an order that works (laundry before the dryer is needed, ingredients out before the pan is hot), and it fails quietly, so the kitchen looks like poor planning rather than a real difficulty.
Time blindness is the felt sense that anything not happening right now is not quite real. A deadline eleven days away and a deadline tomorrow can register as the same distance, which is why the work seems to appear all at once. Working memory is the mental scratchpad that holds a short list while you act on it: the three things you walked upstairs to do, the instructions your manager gave verbally with no follow-up email. When it drops one, it does not feel like forgetting. It feels like arriving upstairs with no memory of why.
None of this is a motivation problem, though it is almost always described as one, by teachers, bosses, partners and eventually by the person themselves.
The Emotional Weight
Years of Being Called Lazy Leave a Residue
By the time most adults with ADHD ask for help, they have heard some version of “you just need to try harder” for twenty or thirty years, from teachers, parents, partners and their own internal narrator. That accumulates into something closer to shame than to a symptom, and it does not lift on its own once a system is in place. Part of the work is separating the trait from the verdict that got attached to it: the sequencing difficulty is real, and the conclusion that you are careless or lazy was never the correct explanation for it.
Rejection sensitivity often travels with this history: a sharp, disproportionate sting at ordinary feedback, a tendency to hear criticism in a neutral comment, and sometimes a pre-emptive withdrawal from situations where you might be judged at all. It is one of the more painful and least discussed parts of ADHD, and it shapes how someone shows up in a relationship long before it gets named.
Structure that is built with you tends to survive; structure handed to you tends to collapse by Thursday.
At Home
When ADHD Lands on a Partner, or on Homework
ADHD rarely stays contained to the person who has it. In couples, it frequently produces an uneven division of household labor: one partner becomes the de facto administrator, tracking appointments, bills and school forms for two adults, while telling themselves this is simply who is more organized. That arrangement can work for years and then collapse into resentment, because the administrating partner is exhausted and the other partner has learned to wait for reminders rather than build their own system. Couples or family sessions can look at that division directly, rather than treating it as a character mismatch.
In preteens and teens, the same dynamic often shows up as the homework war: a nightly standoff where a parent nags, a teenager stalls, both escalate, and the actual assignment becomes almost beside the point. Family sessions can work on what the evening routine is actually doing to the relationship, separate from whatever school is asking for, and on external structure (checklists, timers, a visible calendar, body-doubling for a hard task) that the teen has helped design rather than had imposed. Structure built with someone tends to be used; structure delivered to someone tends to be resisted on principle within a week.
Athena worked for three years under a psychiatrist, during which psychiatric evaluations were a weekly part of the practice and she ran a group for patients with ADHD. That background informs how she thinks about the condition, but it does not change what she offers now: therapy, not diagnosis and not prescribing.
Athena is not a prescriber and does not provide psychological or educational testing, a formal ADHD diagnostic assessment, or IEP advocacy. Medication questions belong with your physician or a psychiatrist; this work focuses on the daily and relational impact of attention and executive function difficulties.
Common Questions
ADHD Therapy Questions
- Does Athena diagnose ADHD or provide testing?
- No. Athena does not provide psychological or educational testing, a formal ADHD diagnostic assessment, or IEP advocacy. She works with the daily impact of attention and executive function difficulties, whether or not a formal diagnosis exists.
- Can Athena prescribe or manage ADHD medication?
- No. Athena is not a prescriber. She worked for three years under a psychiatrist, where psychiatric evaluations were a routine part of the practice, but medication questions belong with your physician or a psychiatrist.
- Does she work with teenagers who have ADHD, or only adults?
- Both. Athena sees preteens, teens and adults, individually or with family involved, and the approach differs depending on whether the daily friction is happening at a desk at work or over homework at the kitchen table.
- What do sessions cost?
- Individual sessions are 60 minutes at $200. Couples and family sessions are 60 minutes at $250. Select Health, BCBS, UBH and University of Utah Health Plans are accepted.
Start With the Contact Form
ADHD work is individual therapy here, and family sessions when the friction is showing up at home. Send the contact form before anything is scheduled.