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
Looking to Find
Your Way Back?
Maybe it was one moment that changed everything. Or maybe it was years of smaller wounds that accumulated so quietly you didn't even recognize them as trauma — you just thought something was wrong with you.
For many women, trauma doesn't look like a single dramatic event. It looks like growing up feeling like you could never get it right. Like being told you were too sensitive, too emotional, too much — and eventually believing it. It looks like relationships that hurt you, situations that overwhelmed you, or a childhood where you never quite felt safe enough to just be yourself.
When trauma goes unaddressed — especially when it's tangled up with undiagnosed ADHD — it doesn't stay in the past. It shows up in how you respond to conflict, how you talk to yourself when you make a mistake, how hard it is to trust people, and how exhausted you are from carrying all of it alone.
You don't have to keep carrying it. Healing is possible — and it starts with feeling safe enough to finally look at it.
Carole Goguen, PsyD
When Trauma and ADHD Are Part of the Same Story
Most of the women I work with who carry trauma don’t arrive knowing that’s what it is. They arrive exhausted. Hypervigilant. Convinced they’re too sensitive, too reactive, too broken to function the way everyone else seems to.
What they’re carrying is trauma — but it’s often trauma that developed in the context of undiagnosed ADHD. And that combination is one of the most underrecognized and undertreated patterns in women’s mental health.
Here’s what that often looks like: years of being told you were lazy, scattered, irresponsible, or not living up to your potential. Teachers who were frustrated with you. Parents who didn’t understand. Partners who felt let down. Employers who questioned your reliability. And through all of it, a quiet voice inside that agreed with every one of them.
That’s not just self-doubt. Over time, that’s trauma. The accumulated weight of chronic misunderstanding, chronic shame, and chronic failure to meet expectations that were never designed for your brain — that leaves real marks. It shapes how you see yourself, how safe you feel in relationships, and how much you believe you deserve support.
This is the intersection I work at. Not trauma in isolation. Not ADHD in isolation. The place where they live together — and where healing one without the other so often leaves women feeling like something is still missing.
What Trauma Looks Like When You Have ADHD
Trauma doesn’t always look like flashbacks and nightmares — though it can. For women with ADHD, it often shows up in quieter, more pervasive ways that are easy to mistake for personality traits or character flaws.
A body that’s always braced.
Hypervigilance — the nervous system’s constant scanning for threat — is both a trauma response and something that mirrors ADHD’s dysregulated arousal. For women carrying both, it can feel like you’ve never once in your life been fully relaxed. Like rest is something that happens to other people.
Shame that feels like a fact.
Not “I made a mistake” but “I am a mistake.” Not “I forgot something” but “I am the kind of person who always lets people down.” For women with undiagnosed ADHD, decades of evidence seem to confirm this story — and trauma makes it feel permanently true.
Relationships that feel like minefields.
When you’ve been criticized, dismissed, or misunderstood enough times, closeness starts to feel dangerous. You either pull away to protect yourself or work yourself to exhaustion trying to be enough. Rejection sensitive dysphoria — the intense emotional pain of perceived criticism that comes with ADHD — makes this even harder to navigate.
Emotional responses that feel out of proportion.
You know the reaction is too big for the moment. You can see it happening and still can’t stop it. This isn’t weakness or drama — it’s a nervous system that has been overwhelmed too many times and hasn’t had the chance to heal.
A deep disconnection from your own story.
Many women with trauma and ADHD have spent so long managing, masking, and surviving that they’ve lost track of who they actually are underneath all of it. Therapy is often the first place they’ve been asked — and given real space — to find out.
Why Trauma Work Needs to Account for ADHD
Trauma therapy has come a long way. There are excellent evidence-based approaches — and many women have benefited from them. But when ADHD is part of the picture, standard trauma treatment sometimes needs to be adapted in important ways.
Processing traumatic memories requires sustained attention, working memory, and emotional regulation — all areas where ADHD creates real challenges. A woman with ADHD may find that trauma therapy moves too fast, or that she can’t hold onto insights between sessions, or that the emotional intensity of the work sends her into a crash that takes days to recover from.
This doesn’t mean trauma therapy can’t work. It means it needs to be paced and structured differently. It means the ADHD has to be part of the conversation from the beginning — not treated as a separate issue to address later, but understood as part of the context in which the trauma developed and in which healing will happen.
My background is unusual in this regard. Before founding Night Owl Psychotherapy, I worked as a staff psychologist at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System treating veterans with PTSD, and as Associate Director for Research and Education at the National Center for PTSD. I bring that depth of trauma training specifically to women whose ADHD has been part of their trauma story — which, in my experience, is most of them.
Here’s What We Work On Together
We begin where you are — not where a treatment protocol says you should be. The first work is always safety: building enough trust, stability, and internal resources that deeper processing feels possible rather than overwhelming.
From there, we work across three interconnected areas:
Understanding your full story.
Not just the traumatic events, but the context they happened in — including the ADHD that may have shaped how those experiences landed and how you’ve carried them. This isn’t about excavating every painful memory. It’s about understanding how your past connects to how you feel and function today.
Processing what needs to be processed.
Using evidence-based approaches adapted for how your brain actually works — at a pace that feels challenging but not destabilizing. We work with the memories, the beliefs, and the body responses that trauma leaves behind, building your capacity to hold difficult material without being overwhelmed by it.
Building the life that comes after.
Trauma therapy isn’t just about reducing symptoms. It’s about reclaiming the parts of yourself that got buried — your sense of safety, your trust in your own judgment, your ability to be present in relationships, your belief that you deserve good things. That rebuilding work is as much a part of the therapy as anything else.
Some weeks this work is hard. Some weeks something shifts in a way that surprises you. The pace is always yours. And you are never doing it alone.
Ready to Heal Your Past, Empower Your Future?
It’s important to remember that healing is a journey and trauma therapy provides a supportive framework for that journey. I am here to guide you every step of the way, at your own pace, in a safe and compassionate space. Whether you’re just beginning to confront your trauma or are looking to deepen your healing process, we can work together to achieve your therapeutic goals. You don’t have to face this alone; support and healing are within reach.
That's what I'm here to offer. When you're ready, I'd love to talk.