What happens to your sense of self when the coping strategies you've relied on your whole life start to give out? For a lot of us, "pushing through" wasn't just a strategy, it was the story we told ourselves about why we kept making it. And when that story stops being true, what we're left with can look a lot like grief.

Dr. Kathleen Nadeau has spent decades sitting with people in that moment. She's interviewed 150 older adults with ADHD about what the losses actually feel like — the unmet retirement fantasies, the disorientation of late diagnosis, the particular sting of watching younger generations get the support that was never offered to them. She knows what keeps people stuck. And she has a lot to say about what's possible on the other side.

This is the second episode of our ADHD and Aging series, and it goes somewhere we didn't fully anticipate. Kathleen pushes back on the idea that aging with ADHD is mostly a story of subtraction. She makes the case, grounded in decades of research, that our brains are more malleable than we've been told, and that the real question is never "how do I push through this" but "where do I need to plant myself."

Links & Notes

• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (03:08) - ADHD and Aging

"You forgot because you didn't care enough." Most people with ADHD have been told that — or have told themselves that — more times than they can count.

Dr. Daniella Karidi returns to challenge it. She's a PhD researcher from Northwestern who has spent her career studying memory in ADHD, and her opening argument is one of those ideas that reframes everything that comes after: forgetfulness isn't a failure. It's the default of the system.

This episode also kicks off a new series on ADHD and aging — what happens when the structure we've built around our ADHD starts to change, how to tell normal forgetting from something more serious, and why brain fog in perimenopause and menopause is absolutely not your imagination.

Dr. Daniella Karidi is the founder of ADHD Time and a board member of CHADD Greater Los Angeles. Find her at adhdtime.com and on YouTube at ADHD Time on Air.

Links & Notes

• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (00:46) - Join the Community: Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast
• (02:05) - Memory & ADHD with Dr. Daniella Karidi
• (32:35) - Aging Issues
• (39:00) - Declining Cognition, Aging, and ADHD
• (54:39) - Visit ADHDTime.com

If you've ever given everything to a friendship and been left wondering what went wrong, Caroline Maguire has a gentle but clarifying answer: you probably gave too much, too soon, to someone who hadn't yet earned it. That's not a character flaw — it's the ADHD brain doing what it does when it finally finds someone who sees it. The dopamine hit of new connection can tip straight into hyperfocus, and suddenly you're all-in on a relationship that hasn't had time to prove itself. Caroline calls it the impulsive friendship cycle, and she has spent years helping neurodivergent adults find their way out of it.

Caroline is a social emotional learning expert, ADHD coach, and author of the award-winning Why Will No One Play With Me. Her new book, Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults, arrives April 14th — and it's not another book that asks you to fix yourself to fit a friendship model built for someone else's social battery. Instead, she starts with a reframe that carries the whole conversation: our friendship struggles are not a personal failing. They're a neurological mismatch between the way we were taught to connect and the way our brains actually work.

In this conversation, we dig into the masking vs. adapting distinction that has already sparked significant conversation in our Discord community — including what makes the difference between reading a room and suppressing yourself entirely. Caroline walks us through the ice cream scoop method for building trust slowly, what "emerging friend" means and why it matters, how to troubleshoot a friendship before you decide it's over, and the unmasking story she never expected to tell — including the moment Ned Hallowell called her out on a mask she didn't know she was wearing.

This episode is part of our ongoing relationships series, and it may be the most practical and personally honest conversation we've had in it yet. The book is available for pre-order now, with bonus resources, at any major bookseller.

Links & Notes

• Caroline Maguire
• Support the Show on Patreon
• Dig into the podcast Shownotes Database

• (00:00) - Welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast
• (01:51) - Introducing Caroline Maguire
• (03:19) - Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults
• (15:48) - Adapting versus Masking
• (28:35) - Over-extending "Friendship"
• (41:32) - About the Book