You wake at 3am with the same loop running, and by morning you’ve already lost a fight nobody else heard.
Conditions We Treat
Anxiety
It’s 11pm and you’re re-reading a text from this afternoon, trying to decode the period at the end. Your chest is tight, your jaw is clenched, and you’ve already scripted three apologies. When ADHD and anxiety share the same brain, the noise doesn’t add — it multiplies.
Our Los Angeles anxiety therapy is built for that intersection: CBT, structured exposure, and ADHD-adapted mindfulness in a group where you’re not the only one who arrived with a racing mind. Pasadena office, serving adults across the LA metro.
The reality
Anxiety in someone with ADHD doesn’t always look like textbook anxiety. It looks like replaying a conversation from three days ago while simultaneously trying to figure out if you offended someone, forgot a deadline, or missed a subtext everyone else caught. It looks like the paralysis that sets in when your brain generates twenty worst-case scenarios before you’ve even opened your email. You may have been told you’re “too sensitive” or that you “overthink everything.” What’s actually happening is that your ADHD brain, already wired for heightened stimulus and racing associations, now has anxiety adding fuel to every spark.
Recognize the pattern
What this can feel like
You rehearse what you’re going to say in a meeting, then miss half of it because you’re still monitoring your own face for how you’re coming across.
The thought of responding to a text spirals into a full-body dread that keeps you from opening the messaging app for three days.
Your ADHD makes you impulsive and your anxiety makes you regret everything impulsively. You’re stuck between “did I say too much” and “did I not say enough.”
You cancel plans again — not because you don’t want to see people, but because the thought of navigating parking, timing, conversation, and the aftermath has already exhausted you.
Your body knows something is wrong before your brain can name it. The tight chest, the shallow breathing, the jaw you didn’t realize you’d been clenching since Tuesday.
The thought spirals are louder than the facts. You know logically that your friend isn’t mad at you, but your brain has already scripted the entire confrontation, the reconciliation, and the long-term damage to the friendship.
Our approach
How group therapy can help
Anxiety can’t survive a witness
Anxiety thrives in isolation. It feeds on the space between you and other people — the space where you can endlessly revise the story without anyone fact-checking it. Group therapy closes that gap. When you say out loud “I’m convinced everyone in the room is judging me right now,” and someone else in the group says “I was just thinking about whether I left the stove on,” the anxiety loses its monopoly on the narrative. This isn’t just relief — it’s a recalibration of what’s real.
CBT, ADHD-shaped
We use CBT techniques designed specifically for the ADHD-anxiety overlap: thought records that account for the fact that your brain moves faster than your pen, exposure practices broken into steps small enough for executive function, and mindfulness exercises that don’t ask you to sit still for thirty minutes (because we know that’s not happening). You’ll learn to distinguish between anxiety that’s giving you useful information and anxiety that’s just noise — a distinction that’s especially hard to make when ADHD makes every neural signal feel equally urgent.
A library of what works
There is also something uniquely powerful about watching another adult with ADHD describe an anxiety you recognize in yourself, then watching them work through it using a skill you can borrow. The group becomes a living library of what works, tested by people whose brains operate like yours — not by clinicians who’ve only read about it. Our Los Angeles anxiety group therapy sessions are structured enough to feel safe and flexible enough to meet you where you actually are, not where a textbook says you should be.
Ready when you are
You don’t have to figure this out alone
You’ve probably already tried to talk yourself out of being here. That’s the anxiety talking. If you’re tired of managing it by yourself, our adult ADHD group in Pasadena is a place where anxiety gets named, understood, and slowly loosened — alongside people who live it too.
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Can group therapy help if my anxiety is severe?
Yes. Many of our members arrive with significant anxiety. The group environment is structured to feel predictable and safe. You are never required to speak more than you want to, and the facilitators are trained to help you engage at a pace that works for you. For some people, group therapy becomes the first social setting in years where anxiety doesn’t run the show.
How is anxiety different for someone with ADHD?
ADHD-related anxiety often has a different flavor: it’s less about a single phobia and more about a diffuse, chronic sense of being overwhelmed by everything at once. The ADHD brain generates more mental threads to worry about, and struggles more to prioritize or dismiss them. Traditional anxiety treatment often misses this dynamic, which is why our approach integrates both conditions simultaneously.
Will I have to talk in front of everyone?
You set your own pace. Some members listen for several sessions before speaking. The group is designed so that observing is a valid form of participation. You will never be put on the spot or called on unexpectedly. Over time, most people find that the environment feels safe enough to share — but that timeline is entirely yours.
Do you prescribe medication for anxiety?
No. Pasadena Clinical Group provides outpatient therapy only. We do not prescribe or manage medication. If medication is part of your treatment plan, we are happy to coordinate with your prescribing provider. Many of our members find that therapy and medication work well together.
