Dr. Carole Goguen, PsyD
Licensed Psychologist (CA PSY 17685)
ADHD-Certified Clinical Services Provider
25+ Years of Clinical Experience
ADHD Therapist for Women
Serving All of California
Late-Night Therapy
As Late As 10 pm
Menlo Park sits at the center of one of the most intellectually demanding environments in the world. The venture capital firms, the tech campuses, the biotech companies — the people who built the modern internet work within a few miles of downtown. And among them are women who are brilliant, strategic, creative, and genuinely struggling with things their colleagues seem to handle without visible effort.
If you can architect a product roadmap and lose your car keys four times a week — if you can command a room in a presentation and completely forget a meeting you scheduled — you're not flawed. Your brain might be working differently than the environments you're succeeding in were designed for. At Night Owl Psychotherapy, I offer online ADHD therapy for women in Menlo Park and across the Peninsula, with appointments as late as 10 p.m.
What Happens When Your Execution Catches Up to Your Vision
Women with ADHD in tech and VC environments are often the most innovative thinkers in the room — and the ones who struggle most with implementation, follow-through, and the administrative layer of their own lives. The gap between how capable you know you are and how you actually function in certain domains is one of the most demoralizing parts of unmanaged ADHD.
Therapy doesn't change your brain. It helps you understand it — and build systems and strategies that make the gap smaller. What that looks like practically: a cleaner relationship with time, fewer items dropped, less energy spent on self-criticism, and more actual bandwidth for the work you're here to do.
ADHD in the High-Stakes Menlo Park Environment
The Peninsula's professional culture selects for high cognitive horsepower, and women with ADHD often have it in abundance — along with the creativity, pattern recognition, and lateral thinking that make them exceptional in certain roles. What gets harder is the sustained, detail-oriented execution work. The long email threads. The filing. The calendar management. The emotional regulation in back-to-back meetings when something has gone sideways.
In Menlo Park, where the expectation is that high performers manage all of this with apparent ease, the gap between how you appear and how you feel internally can become genuinely painful. Many women spend enormous energy maintaining a polished professional exterior while quietly managing shame about what they perceive as personal failings.
I'm a licensed psychologist and Certified ADHD Specialist who has spent over 25 years working with women in exactly this kind of high-expectation environment. I understand the specific flavor of ADHD that shows up in tech, in VC, in research — and I know how to help.
Comprehensive Mental Health Care — Beyond ADHD
ADHD rarely arrives alone. Anxiety and trauma frequently travel with it, and treating them together — rather than one at a time — produces meaningfully better outcomes. Here is how I address each.
Anxiety
In Menlo Park, the stakes are often genuinely high — which means anxiety has real material to work with. For women with ADHD, that anxiety is amplified by the pattern of forgetting things, missing things, and then waiting for consequences. Imposter syndrome is nearly universal in this community, and it hits differently when your brain is also working against your best efforts to perform. Therapy helps untangle what's actual risk from what's ADHD-driven catastrophizing.
Trauma
High-performance environments can be traumatic in ways that aren't always recognized as such. A culture that equates worth with productivity. A professional failure with disproportionate consequences. A relationship that eroded under the pressure of two demanding careers. These things leave marks. Trauma-informed therapy takes that seriously, and creates space to heal without having to perform the healing.
Online Therapy That Works Around a Peninsula Schedule
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I serve women across Menlo Park, Atherton, Redwood City, Palo Alto, and throughout San Mateo County and the greater Peninsula region.
Are You Ready for Your Therapy Journey to Start?
I'm Dr. Carole Goguen, a licensed psychologist and Certified ADHD Specialist. I've worked for over 25 years with women who are excellent at what they do and quietly exhausted by how much energy it costs them. I know that world — and I know what changes when ADHD is finally named and treated.
If you're in Menlo Park and any of this resonated, the next step is a free 15-minute phone consultation. Low-stakes, no commitment, just a real conversation about whether I'm the right fit.