Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
If you run a group for people with ADHD, keep it to about five or six, or bring in a second facilitator. Past that you spend the session keeping order instead of doing the work.
The limit is not really about behaviour. It is about how many people one person can genuinely track while also holding the thread of the session. With a co-leader you can afford a fuller room, because one of you can follow the member who has drifted while the other carries on. If a second pair of hands is not possible, a smaller group is the better compromise.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart' (Quran 8:46). A room that stays workable is what keeps everybody's heart in it.
وَأَطِيعُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُۥ وَلَا تَنَٰزَعُواْ فَتَفۡشَلُواْ وَتَذۡهَبَ رِيحُكُمۡۖ وَٱصۡبِرُوٓاْۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
Obey God and His Messenger, and do not quarrel with one another, or you may lose heart and your spirit may desert you. Be steadfast: God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 8:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a study of 102 children with ADHD, difficulties with emotion made their own contribution, separate from executive difficulties, delay aversion and variable reaction times. It is a useful reminder that a group is not only managing distraction, it is holding feelings as well. The study was in children and it tests nothing about group size, so the number itself comes from practice.
Sjöwall D, Roth L, Lindqvist S, Thorell LB. (2013). Multiple deficits in ADHD: executive dysfunction, delay aversion, reaction time variability, and emotional deficits.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Attention is the resource the room is short of, including yours.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.
You cannot ask anyone to work harder on your difficulty than you are working on it yourself. That is the condition attached to every adjustment you ask for.
Some of what you believe about yourself is not a distortion. Things really did go wrong, often for years. What can be argued with is the conclusion you drew from them, that this is simply what you are.