Counselling, ADHD and coaching articles by Carl Argent
Articles on counselling & coaching.
Understanding everyday life.
Articles by Carl Argent, counsellor and coach on ADHD, anxiety, relationships, grief and personal change. Find practical ideas and reflective questions to help you understand your experience. Choose an article below or search for what is on your mind.
AI Therapy: Can a Chatbot Really Replace a Therapist?
Why people turn to AI for support, what an understanding reply can miss, and how psychological learning can be explored alongside a human therapist.
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Texting Your Partner: How Messages Can Drive You Apart
A text can arrive instantly while understanding never arrives at all. Explore how misread messages can damage connection, and how relationship therapy can help you hear each other.
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Living Your Values: How Your Strengths Help You Put Them into Practice
Values guide what matters. Strengths help you put it into practice. Explore everyday choices, competing priorities and how to make sense of your assessment results.
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When Your Partner Offers Advice: Why You Can Still Feel Unheard
When your partner offers advice but you still feel unheard, explore what understanding might involve, why timing matters and how relationship counselling can help.
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Feeling Guilty When You Enjoy Yourself: Making Room for a Good Moment
Feel guilty when you enjoy yourself? Explore care, responsibility and the expectations that can interrupt a good moment, and how counselling offers space to understand them.
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Replaying Conversations: When Your Mind Will Not Let Them End
Keep going over what you said? Explore when reflection becomes an exhausting replay, what feels at stake and how counselling can offer space to understand it.
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Outgrowing Your Job: Testing a New Direction
Feel you have outgrown your job but do not know what comes next? Explore what no longer fits and try one small part of a possible direction before making a bigger decision.
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Your Feelings Are Not the Enemy: Rethinking Positive and Negative Emotions
Fear, anger, frustration and sadness can be difficult to experience. But what changes when we stop treating them as evidence that something is wrong with us?
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Caught Between Fear and Hope: Finding a Way Forward That Feels Real
Fear can make the future feel dangerous. Reassurance may offer a brief escape. Explore a steadier kind of hope, with something that matters, a possible route and room for the barriers along the way.
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Positive Psychology in Therapy: What Else Is True About You?
Your difficulties are real, but they are not all that you are. Explore how strengths, values and creative possibilities can become part of therapy without ignoring what hurts.
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Busy All Day but Not Moving Forward: Making Meaningful Progress
Busy all day yet unsure what has moved forward? Explore meaningful progress, the value of necessary everyday work and one small experiment to give your effort a clearer purpose.
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The Self Between Us: How Relationships Shape Your Sense of Self
How old expectations and the patterns between people can shape our sense of self, familiar roles and anxiety, without reducing anyone to a label.
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My Teenager Will Not Talk to Me: Why They Go Quiet and How to Reopen the Door
Why teenagers often go quiet, what the silence can stir up in you as parents, and what tends to make talking feel safe again.
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When Your Child Won’t Go to School: What Might Be Behind It?
When school feels impossible, the morning can become a battle. Explore what may be happening for your 8 to 12 year old and how parents and school can begin to understand it together.
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Autism and Your Child: What Their Behaviour May Be Telling You
Look beyond behaviour alone. Explore communication, sensory needs and predictability with curiosity, without assuming one explanation fits every autistic child.
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ADHD Forgetfulness: Why Important Things Disappear from Your Mind
Why things that matter can slip your mind with ADHD, and how visible cues at the right moment can help good intentions become everyday actions.
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ADHD Masking: Why Fighting Your Own Brain Backfires
Why adults with ADHD hold their own mind down, what masking costs in attention, energy and trust, and how to work with your brain instead.
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ADHD Time Blindness: Why Time Keeps Running Away
Why time can slip away with ADHD even when you care about being on time, and how making time more visible can ease lateness and transitions.
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When Parents Disagree About Your Child: The Fear Beneath the Argument
Parents can be trying to protect the same child in different ways. Explore the fears beneath a parenting disagreement and how adults can keep children out of the middle.
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ADHD Procrastination: Why Is It So Hard to Start?
Why a task you care about can still be hard to begin, what urgency, overwhelm and shame have to do with it, and how a smaller starting point can help.
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Stuck on One Big Decision: How a Clarity Session Works
Why a single decision keeps going round without settling, what tends to loosen it, and what ninety minutes of focused attention can add.
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When Counselling Ends but You Still Want Change: Life After Therapy
Why understanding yourself is not the same as living differently, and how change is actually built once the sessions have ended.
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Why You Keep Playing It Safe: Security, Reward and the Life You Want
Why the safe option keeps winning, what the part of you that wants more is asking for, and how to hear both sides before you decide.
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ADHD and Your Employer: When, How, and What Support to Ask For
When it tends to help to tell your employer, how to say it so that you are heard, what the Equality Act gives you and what support to ask for, including Access to Work.
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When Your Week Belongs to Everyone Else: Setting Boundaries That Matter
When other people’s requests fill your week, explore boundaries that protect your priorities, respect real responsibilities and leave room for what matters to you.
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Is Executive Coaching Worth It for a Senior Leader? How to Tell Before You Pay
You are good at your job and someone has suggested a coach. Explore what coaching can and cannot add for a leader, when it is not worth the money, and how you would know it was working.
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What Happens in a First ADHD Coaching Session? What to Expect and What You Leave With
You have booked it, or you are thinking about it. Explore what a first session actually involves, what is asked of you, and the written roadmap you leave with.
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Understanding Your ADHD: Learning to Work With Yourself
You may understand what ADHD is and still struggle to understand yourself. Explore how therapy or coaching can help you work with your needs, strengths and everyday life.
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Too Many Options: How to Decide Without Certainty
Clarify what matters, compare realistic options and take a considered next step without needing to know exactly how everything will turn out.
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When Perfectionism Delays Satisfaction: Finding Your Way
When doing it properly keeps you stuck, explore useful standards, a realistic stopping point and practical ways to finish without losing the care you bring.
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Why Confidence Comes and Goes: How It Is Actually Built
One day you feel capable and the next it has gone. What confidence actually is, why it moves so much, and what tends to build the kind that lasts.
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How to Choose an Access to Work Coaching Provider (and What a Good Quote Contains)
What to check in a coach, the questions to ask in a first conversation, the warning signs, and what a quote needs to contain before it goes on your application.
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ADHD Coaching vs Therapy: Which One Do You Actually Need?
How to tell whether coaching or therapy fits the difficulty you carry, when you need both and in what order, and what each costs in the UK.
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Is ADHD Coaching Worth It? What It Costs in the UK and How to Tell
What ADHD coaching costs in the UK, what the research supports, when it is not the right buy, and the questions to ask before you pay.
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Sunday Night Dread: Why the Week Starts Before It Starts
The weekend is still here and already it does not feel like yours. Why Sunday evening turns heavy, what it is usually attached to, and what may give you some of it back.
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Why Knowing Your Strengths Matters More Than Fixing Your Weaknesses
Fixing weaknesses feels responsible and rarely works. What the research on character strengths, hope and if-then planning says about making change stick.
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What Actually Changes in Six Sessions of ADHD Coaching
Session by session: the mapping session, four working sessions, the review, what you leave with and what the evidence says.
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Just Diagnosed with ADHD as an Adult? What Happens Next in the UK
Treatment, shared care, telling work, funding and the part nobody schedules for you: a plain guide to the months after an adult ADHD diagnosis.
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Access to Work for ADHD Coaching: How the Funding Works
Who can apply, whether you need a diagnosis, what it pays for, who contributes, how long it takes and what a good coaching quote looks like.
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ADHD Hyperfocus and Flow: When Being Absorbed Stops Feeling Like a Choice
You can be deeply absorbed and still feel stuck. Explore hyperfocus, flow and how ADHD coaching can help you understand your interest, attention and ability to pause.
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Becoming Yourself: When Your Life No Longer Feels Like Yours
Explore the gap between what you feel and how you live, and how small, honest choices can help your life feel more like your own.
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Feeling Good and Living Well: Making Room for Pleasure and Purpose
Explore the balance between enjoying life and finding it meaningful, and how curiosity can help you discover a direction that matters to you.
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When Motivation Disappears: What Is Missing From Your Day?
Losing motivation can raise questions about choice, progress and connection. Explore the conditions that help you feel involved in what you do.
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ADHD Attention: What Is Competing With You?
Explore ADHD attention, digital distractions and interruptions. Consider practical ways to make returning to a task easier, without adding shame.
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Your Teenager Has an ADHD Diagnosis: What Happens for You Now?
After a teenager’s ADHD diagnosis, parents may feel relief, uncertainty and new questions. Explore what it can stir up for your family and where support may help.
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Big Feelings in Young Children: When Anger Takes Over
When a child aged 3 to 7 has angry outbursts, it can leave everyone on edge. Understand what may be happening, how to hold a safe boundary and where parents can turn for support.
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Stress and Distress: The Upside and Downside
What is the difference between stress and distress? Explore pressure, overload and how to notice when you need more support or space to recover.
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Why Living with ADHD Can Feel So Exhausting
Explore ADHD exhaustion, masking and the effort of everyday tasks. Reflect on what drains your energy and how understanding and support may help.
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The Four Horsemen: 4 Negatives Jeopardising Your Relationship
Explore criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling in relationships, with compassionate ways to notice conflict patterns and begin repair.
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ADHD Self-Trust: What Happens When You Stop Believing Your Own Promises
Explore how ADHD, shame and inconsistent follow-through can affect self-trust. Consider smaller, more realistic promises and support that fits you.
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Meditation and ADHD: What If You Cannot Quiet Your Mind?
Meditation with ADHD need not mean an empty mind. Explore wandering attention and shorter, flexible mindfulness practices that may feel more workable.
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ADHD Emotional Regulation: Feelings Can Get Overwhelming
Explore ADHD emotional regulation, intense feelings and rejection sensitivity, with reflection on creating more space between feelings and actions.
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ADHD Is Not Laziness: Start with Understanding
ADHD difficulties are often mistaken for laziness. Explore attention, motivation, shame and why support should start with understanding the individual.
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The Cost of Living Crisis Is Also an Identity Crisis
Explore how money, work and achievement can become tied to identity, and reflect on your worth and direction when familiar roles or expectations change.
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Why Do I Keep Playing the Same Role in Relationships?
Different partner, familiar role? Explore repeating relationship patterns and how noticing expectations, reactions and needs can open up more choice.
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From Surviving to Thriving. Mental Health for Young Adults
Explore anxiety, loneliness, social media pressure and identity in young adulthood, with reflection on support and the pressures of growing into yourself.
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Self-Esteem and Comparison: The Pressure to Be the Best
Explore self-esteem, social comparison and the pressure to perform. Consider how achievement and status can shape your relationships and sense of worth.
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When Trauma Changes the Timeline
Explore how difficult past experiences can shape present-day reactions, relationships and expectations, with a compassionate perspective on making sense of them.
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Why Children Don’t Need Perfect Parents
Explore good enough parenting, conditions of worth and childhood expectations, and how these experiences can influence self-understanding in adulthood.
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Why the News Feels So Hard to Switch Off
Explore why distressing news can hold your attention and leave you unsettled, with reflection on boundaries, uncertainty and making room for recovery.
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Grief Has No Deadline, and That’s Okay
Grief has no fixed deadline. Explore the changing experience of loss, pressure to move on and what compassionate support might look like for you.
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7 Signs You’re Still Together But Emotionally Drifting Apart
Explore signs of emotional distance in a relationship, from fewer conversations to lost affection, and consider ways to talk about what each person needs.
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Men and Emotional Support: You Don’t Have to Cope Alone
Explore how expectations of strength and self-reliance can affect anxiety, anger and relationships, and why making room for support can matter.
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Why Does Anxiety Feel So Physical?
Explore why anxiety can feel physical and how stress responses affect the body. Read a compassionate explanation of overwhelm and ways of finding support.
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The Stress Trap. Why Pushing Through Leads to Burnout
Explore the stress trap, threat, drive and soothing systems, and why constantly pushing through can make it harder to notice your needs and recover.
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Private vs Free Counselling Explained
Compare private counselling, NHS talking therapies and charity support. Consider costs, access, choice and continuity to find support that fits your needs.
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Imposter Syndrome 101: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Safe
Successful on paper but struggling to believe it? Explore imposter feelings, self-criticism and the pressure to keep proving your worth.
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‘Man Up?’ It’s Time We Saw The Wrong in That
Explore how being told to man up can silence difficult feelings, shape shame and discourage support, with a different view of strength and masculinity.
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The 5 Surprising Truths about Anxiety
Explore five perspectives on anxiety, including fear, uncertainty and the body’s alarm response, to reflect on your experience with less self-judgement.
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If an article connects with something you are experiencing, we can explore it in your own circumstances. Discover counselling ADHD therapy ADHD coaching or coaching for practical goals and change or talk with me about the support you need. There is no obligation to book further sessions.