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Lena Brailsford Therapy & Support

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Lena Brailsford Therapy & Support

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Helping children, families and communities feel seen, understood and connected.

Through holistic therapies, family support and meaningful conversations, I create spaces where people can pause, reconnect, belong and flourish. 🌿

02/11/2026

Finding my little moments of happy this morning 💛

A walk, beautiful yellow leaves, cold bracing air, birdsong and a bit of peace.

Nothing huge. Just noticing what feels good and letting myself soak it in.

Sometimes that’s enough. 🍂💛

31/10/2026

I’ve opened three treatment appointments next week for anyone who could do with a little time to stop, breathe and reset. ❤️

Monday 2 November – 1pm
Tuesday 3 November – 1pm
Wednesday 4 November – 1pm

You can choose massage, reflexology, Reiki or Indian head massage — or, if you’re not quite sure what you need, we can decide together on the day and blend approaches where appropriate.

You don’t need to have anything to “fix”. Sometimes it’s simply good to have some time where nobody needs anything from you.

30 mins £30 | 45 mins £35 | 60 mins £45 | 90 mins £75

📍 The Hearth Space, above Fig Coffee House, Matlock Bath

Message or text me if you’d like one of the spaces. ❤️

Lena Brailsford Therapies & Support

31/10/2026

I still haven’t read my ADHD report.

I know where it is and I know I could have read it at any point. I just haven’t.

And actually, having spent this month writing about the whole journey, I think I understand that a bit better now.

When I went for my assessment, I wasn’t looking for somebody to explain Lena to Lena. I wanted a qualified answer to a question: Do I meet the criteria for ADHD or not?

The answer was yes.

And in some ways, that yes was all I needed at that point.

I was feeling pretty awesome about myself before I ever went down that route. I knew I was capable, I knew there were things I found harder than other people seemed to, and I already had a whole bag full of strategies that I had collected over more than fifty years because they worked for me. My family loved me for being me before anybody put ADHD on a piece of paper and, unsurprisingly, they carried on loving me afterwards.

But once I had that qualified yes, something did shift.

I started being kinder and more compassionate with myself about some of the things I had always found harder.

And I started looking again at all those strategies I had gathered over the years and asking why they worked for me. I already knew they worked. I just hadn’t necessarily understood what they were supporting.

Perhaps that yes gave me permission to take the same curious, analytical Lena lens I have spent years using to understand children, families and other people and turn it inwards for a change.

Not to pick myself apart.

Just to understand myself a little better.

And that has been genuinely useful.

But I also think timing matters, and perhaps that is one of the things I understand more now than I did then.

There have been years when parenting, work, family life and keeping everything else moving took most of the space I had. Knowing something about yourself and actually having the capacity to sit with it, explore it and decide whether you want to do anything differently are not the same thing.

As my children get older and life shifts, I can feel a little more space beginning to appear. Not masses of it 😂, but enough to notice things, think about things I may have understood intellectually for years and ask whether the strategies I have always used still work for me, whether there might be an easier way, or whether actually I am quite happy carrying on exactly as I am.

And maybe that is why I still haven’t read the report.

Perhaps I didn’t need the detail then.

Perhaps now, after spending a month writing all of this down, I might actually be ready to read it.

I am sure there will be things in there that I can learn from, not because the report gets to tell me who I am, but because I have the space now to hear what it says and decide what, if anything, I want to do with it.

That is probably the bit about agency that I keep coming back to.

Information can be incredibly valuable, but we don’t necessarily have to act on all of it immediately. Sometimes life is already full enough. Sometimes we need to live with something for a while. Sometimes we come back to it when we have more capacity, more curiosity or simply more room to think.

And that feels like quite a fitting place to finish my ADHD Awareness Month posts.

I started sharing these because I wanted awareness to be about more than putting up an ADHD graphic in October and moving on. I wanted to share some of the reality, the questions, the things I have learned professionally and personally, the bits that made me laugh, the bits that made me furious and, inevitably, a few rabbit holes along the way.

I truly hope something in amongst all of that has helped, reassured, inspired or simply made you look at ADHD, yourself or somebody you care about a little differently.

And if any of this has raised questions you’d like to explore, or you’d appreciate some space to talk things through, you’re always welcome to get in touch.

For me, the diagnosis gave me an answer. The understanding has come over time, and what I choose to do with that understanding, when I am ready to do it, still belongs to me.

And underneath all of it, diagnosis or no diagnosis, I am still me.

So are you.

Perfectly imperfect, still learning, still growing, and worthy of being seen and understood exactly where you are.

Lena 💛

29/10/2026

Who teaches the other children to be curious?

I’ve been thinking about something that goes beyond how children with ADHD are treated in classrooms. It’s about what all the other children are learning too.

When a child is repeatedly told to sit still, stop talking, stop rocking, concentrate, be quiet or apologise, their classmates are watching.

And what are they learning?

Perhaps they’re learning that this is the child who needs correcting. The child whose behaviour is irritating, distracting or unacceptable. The child who needs to change to accommodate everybody else.

But what if that child is moving because movement helps them concentrate? What if rocking, fidgeting or getting up is actually their body’s way of regulating so they can engage with the very learning we’re asking them to do?

We can become so focused on stopping a behaviour that we forget to ask what purpose it might be serving.

Of course, the needs of other children matter too. Some need quiet, some need movement, some need space, some need interaction.

And that is precisely my point.

Why are we teaching some children that they must continually adapt to everybody else, instead of teaching everybody how to recognise and accommodate different needs?

There is another part to this that I think deserves consideration.

Some children grow up becoming incredibly practised at apologising. They’ve spent years being corrected, explaining themselves, trying harder, monitoring how others respond to them and taking responsibility for things they may never have fully understood.

But are we giving everybody else the same opportunities to reflect on their own behaviour?

Are we teaching all children to recognise when their words have hurt somebody? To be curious about behaviour they don’t understand? To consider whether their own expectations might need adjusting?

And are we showing them how to apologise, even when causing hurt wasn’t their intention?

Because saying, “I didn’t mean to upset you, but I can see that I have, and I’m sorry,” is such a valuable skill.

So is being able to say, “I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. Can we find a way that works for both of us?”

For me, inclusion has never been about making everybody the same.

It’s about recognising that different people have different needs, strengths and ways of engaging with the world.

It’s about mutual consideration, not one-sided accommodation.

And perhaps, if we taught that consistently in our classrooms, we might raise more adults who approach difference with curiosity rather than correction.

Because respect, understanding and accountability should never be something we expect from only one person in a relationship.

Lena 💛

29/10/2026

One of the strange things that can happen once ADHD has a name is that suddenly it can start becoming the explanation for everything.

The procrastination, the forgotten appointment, the argument, the intense interest, the fact that somebody can do one thing brilliantly and apparently cannot get themselves to do another thing at all.

Well, that’s the ADHD.

And sometimes, yes, it probably is part of it.

But I don’t think the point of ADHD awareness is to learn enough about ADHD that we then start seeing it in absolutely everything somebody does. Surely the point is that we understand it better, so we can be more curious and more accurate about what is actually going on.

When I pursued my own diagnosis, I wanted information. I wanted to know whether the things I had started recognising in myself actually met the criteria for ADHD.

I also wanted to understand myself better as a parent. I wondered whether some of the things I had found challenging might present in similar ways for my children, and whether understanding my own experiences more fully could help me recognise those difficulties, respond differently and support them in ways that worked for them.

When the answer was yes, it gave me another way of understanding myself.

But it didn’t suddenly explain Lena to Lena.

ADHD helps me understand why some apparently simple things can take far more effort than much more complicated ones. Why interest, urgency and meaning can make such a difference to what I can access. Why I can juggle an extraordinary number of things very successfully and then sometimes find the same number of things much harder to hold.

That is useful information.

But ADHD isn’t all of me.

Neither is dyslexia. Neither is my upbringing, my family history, my culture, being a woman, being a teacher or therapist, the experiences I have had, the things that have hurt me, the things I have learned or the values I have chosen along the way.

All of those things sit together and make me me.

A diagnosis can be incredibly useful. It can help somebody understand why something is hard, help the people around them respond differently, give access to support and, hopefully, reduce some of that Why can everybody else do this? What is wrong with me? thinking.

But once ADHD has a name, we also have to be careful that everything about somebody doesn’t start being interpreted through it.

They might be struggling because of ADHD.

Or they might be tired. Hungry. Worried. Bored. Overwhelmed. Excited. Cross. Having fallen out with somebody. Not interested in what they are being asked to do. Or simply having a rubbish day.

They are still human beings before they are a collection of traits.

For me, understanding ADHD gives us more questions to ask, not fewer.

Is ADHD making this particular thing harder? What would help? Is there a strategy that could make a difference? Does something in the environment need changing? Or is something completely different going on?

And sometimes the useful question might genuinely be, Is this actually anything to do with ADHD at all?

That matters because I didn’t seek a diagnosis to swap one set of assumptions about myself for another. I wanted more information so that I could make better-informed choices and understand myself more clearly.

That is what I want ADHD Awareness Month to encourage.

Not spotting ADHD everywhere.

Not reducing people to a list of traits.

But understanding ADHD well enough to recognise when it matters, what might help, and when we need to look beyond it and see the whole person standing in front of us.

A diagnosis adds information to the story of who somebody is. It doesn’t get to become the whole story.

Lena 💛

28/10/2026

Half-term parenting update…

I woke this morning to one of mine shouting at full volume:

“MUM! THERE’S A NEW AVATAR!”

Apparently this counts as breaking news in our house. 😂

After several days of sofas, snacks, screens and everybody becoming extremely accomplished at doing absolutely nothing, I think today we may need to rediscover the outside world.

So the mission is: get everyone vertical, get some fresh air, have a little adventure… and then come home knowing we’ve got something EPIC to watch later. 😂

And yes, I may be nearly as excited as they are

Yay. Watch it. OMG. SOOOOO good. 😂❤️

28/10/2026

If somebody you love is going through an ADHD assessment, one of the most useful things you may be able to do is remember who they are while everybody else is busy looking at what is difficult.

ADHD still carries a lot of judgement.

Lazy. Disorganised. Hyperactive. Argumentative. Aggressive. Impulsive. Too much. Not trying. Undisciplined. Difficult. Inconsistent. Capable when they want to be.

Some of those words may sometimes describe what somebody is seeing on the outside. But when a child hears them often enough, they can very easily stop being descriptions of behaviour and start becoming descriptions of who they believe they are.

Most teachers will recognise the danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy here. If a child repeatedly receives the message that they are difficult, disruptive, lazy or incapable, that expectation can begin to shape how they see themselves, what they expect from themselves and eventually how they behave.

Which is why understanding what sits underneath behaviour matters so much. We can be honest about what is difficult without making the child believe that they are the difficulty.

And by the time somebody reaches assessment, particularly a child or young person, they may already have heard versions of those messages for years.

Then the assessment process itself quite understandably asks about difficulty. What isn’t working? Where are the problems? What happens at school? What happens at home? What has been hard since childhood?

That information matters.

But imagine what it can feel like if you are the person sitting in the middle of everybody discussing all the things you struggle with.

For some people an ADHD diagnosis brings enormous relief. It can make sense of years of experience and open access to support. It may also lead into conversations about treatment, including whether medication is appropriate, alongside other strategies and adjustments.

Medication can be genuinely helpful for many people. This is not an argument for or against it.

It is an argument for remembering that there is a human being in the middle of those decisions.

Someone who may already be questioning themselves.

Someone whose confidence may already have taken a battering.

Someone who may need one person beside them who knows them outside the assessment room and can hold onto the whole picture.

Yes, this is hard for you.

And you are also funny, thoughtful, creative, determined, loving, clever, kind, resourceful and entirely yourself.

For a child, I think this matters enormously.

If school is struggling, home is struggling and professionals are asking questions, the child can very easily begin to absorb the idea that they are the problem.

That is where I think we, as parents, need to be particularly careful.

We can acknowledge the difficulty honestly without making the child feel useless.

We can seek assessment and support without communicating that we are searching for somebody to fix them.

We can consider medication if it is recommended and appropriate without making it feel like the child they are without it is unacceptable.

And we can keep reminding them, through all of it, that a diagnosis describes part of their experience. It does not define their worth.

As a parent If either of my children find themselves in an assessment room, I want them to know that I am not there to argue that everything is fine when it isn’t.

I am there to make sure the whole of them stays in the room. I will advocate.

I want them to know that I see their creativity, their humour, their curiosity, their kindness, their wonderful ideas and all those little qualities that make them who they are.

But more than that, I want them to see those things in themselves. To have enough love and compassion for themselves that, beneath all the labels, expectations and difficulties, they genuinely like the person they are. Even just a little on the harder days, but hopefully a whole lot!

And I want them to go into that room feeling empowered, with their own questions, ideas and understanding of what helps them. Knowing that their voice matters, that they have choices and that they are part of the conversation, not simply the subject of it.

Their difficulties. Their strengths. Their feelings. Their questions. Their ideas. Their choices.

And the person I know and love when nobody is assessing them at all.

An ADHD diagnosis may explain some of the challenges a person is living with. It should never be allowed to become a verdict on the value of the person living them.

Lena 💛

27/10/2026

Hi, I’m Lena 👋

I’m a local child-centred family practitioner, and what I do doesn’t fit neatly into one box.

For more than 27 years I’ve worked alongside children, families, teachers and professionals across mainstream and specialist education, autism outreach, family support and advocacy. Alongside that, I’ve spent more than two decades training and working in complementary therapies and Reiki.

For a long time I thought those parts of my work needed to stay separate. These days I realise the blend is actually the point.

Because people don’t arrive as one problem needing one solution.

A parent might come wanting to understand their child’s behaviour, sensory needs or neurodivergence, but realise they also need space to think, reassurance, or support to work out what feels right for their family.

A teacher or professional may already know a huge amount but value another experienced pair of eyes and a different perspective.

And sometimes somebody has talked, thought and carried enough — and what they need most is to stop for a while, have a massage, reflexology or Reiki session, and let their nervous system settle.

I work alongside capable people, bringing my experience, specialist knowledge and different ways of working so we can explore what might help.

Where it’s useful, I can also provide a written reflective summary after a Clarity & Wellbeing session — bringing together what we’ve discussed, the strengths and patterns we’ve noticed, and possible ways forward.

One parent I recently worked with kindly gave me permission to share this:

“There was something validating about seeing what we’d shared captured so thoughtfully. It helped me feel heard and understood, and built a further sense of trust… The reflections have given us something positive to move forward with.”

That really is what sits underneath all of my work.

Helping people feel seen, understand what may be happening, notice what is already working, and find a way forward that feels possible for them.

Because when the adults who hold, love, teach and support children are supported to thrive too, children have a much better opportunity to thrive.

I’m based locally and offer Clarity & Wellbeing sessions, specialist family support, Reiki, complementary therapies, groups and training through Lena Brailsford Therapies & Support.

If any of that sounds like something you or someone you support might benefit from, you’re very welcome to get in touch. ❤️

27/10/2026

One part of my ADHD assessment I hadn’t really anticipated was what it would ask of the people who love me.

As part of the process, I needed people who had known me for a long time to contribute information about what I had been like when I was younger.

On paper, that makes complete sense. If you are looking for evidence of something that was present in childhood, somebody else’s memories can add another perspective.

In real life, though, it wasn’t quite that simple.

My dad didn’t really want to do it. His view was very much, Your history is your history. You have moved forwards. Why are you going backwards into all of this again? What is this actually for?

My sister found it really emotional.

She is only two years older than me, so when she was being asked to think about things that had happened to me as a child, she was also being asked to revisit experiences she had lived through as a child herself.

She was crying and saying, But Lena, I was only little too. I don’t want you to think that what I write about you then is how I see you now.

That really stayed with me.

She wasn’t frightened of telling the truth. She was frightened that describing a younger version of me, in difficult circumstances, might somehow damage the relationship we have now.

My husband refused point blank at first.

In the end, the three of them sat together and completed the information between them.

And there was something quite moving about that.

Three people who love me, none of whom particularly wanted to go backwards into my history, sitting together because I had asked them to help me answer a question.

I deliberately stayed in another room. I didn’t want to hear them discussing me. I knew that listening to three people I love talk about the ways I had behaved, struggled or coped years ago could be triggering in itself.

And it made me think about something I had encountered professionally before too.

Whenever we ask somebody else to provide information about a person, we are giving them a certain amount of narrative power.

Their memories may be accurate. They may also be shaped by their own age at the time, their relationship with us, their own experiences, what they noticed, what they didn’t notice and what they understand now.

Sometimes the person being asked knows us with enormous love. Sometimes relationships are complicated. Sometimes two people can have lived through exactly the same event and remember it completely differently.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for other perspectives. They can be incredibly valuable.

But in ADHD assessment, where childhood evidence can carry real weight, I think whose memories are being heard, and how those memories are interpreted, matters.

One person’s account is still one person’s account.

It is also one of the reasons I am careful in my own work not to treat one person’s experience as the truth about a family. A child, parent, sibling or teacher can all be describing the same situation honestly and still experience it very differently. Each perspective gives us information, but none necessarily gives us the whole picture.

And amongst all of those perspectives, I think we have to be very careful not to lose the most important voice of all: the person whose life we are actually talking about.

Whether that is an adult going through assessment or a child surrounded by parents, teachers and professionals, they are the person living the experience from the inside. Other people may see things they cannot see themselves, and their observations can be genuinely useful, but nobody else gets to become the sole narrator of somebody’s life.

For me, good assessment brings those different perspectives alongside the person’s own voice. It doesn’t replace it.

And if you are going through an assessment yourself, or supporting a child through one, I think it is worth knowing that involving other people can stir things up too.

Reluctance does not automatically mean lack of support. Different memories do not necessarily mean somebody is wrong. And if the relationship or history makes providing that information difficult, that matters and is worth acknowledging rather than quietly carrying the discomfort.

For me, the fact that my family eventually sat together and did something none of them particularly wanted to do was, strangely, an act of love.

Not because they wanted to analyse me.

Quite the opposite.

They wanted to protect the person I had become from being pulled unnecessarily backwards.

And perhaps that is also why these things matter so much to me now as a parent.

What we understand about ourselves doesn’t stop with us. It affects how we interpret our children, how quickly we judge or get curious, what we pass down, what we choose to do differently and how much room we give them to understand themselves.

I can’t rewrite my childhood and I don’t need to.

But I can use what I understand now to help shape what happens next.

Sometimes understanding our history helps us move forward. And when we are parents, what we do with that understanding can quietly change the story for the generation coming after us.

For me, that is part of ADHD awareness too — not simply recognising traits, but understanding the person, the context and the different stories that may sit around them.

Lena 💛

26/10/2026

My ADHD assessment left me frustrated because, I found myself asking: how neurodivergent-friendly are the systems we use to assess neurodivergent people?

The things I challenged in the room — structure, visual support, processing time, whether what I had already submitted had been read, how I was being helped to stay on track and what happened when emotionally significant material was opened — were not thoughts I came up with afterwards. They were a professional critique I was making there and then, because this sits right inside work I have done for years around accessibility, regulation and individualising support. Part of my anger was knowing that I had the language and confidence to challenge what wasn’t working, when many people going through an assessment may not.

And, as I talked about in my last post, what mattered next was that the clinician listened and actually changed some things.

For me, visual structure would have helped. Knowing where we were in the assessment, what we were trying to establish and what was coming next would have helped me hold the thread rather than trying to keep the whole conversation in my head.

Having some of the questions beforehand helped too. Not so I could rehearse the “right” answers, but because I process better when I have time to think. Asking me to retrieve something from thirty or forty years ago, understand why it is relevant, organise it into something coherent and answer immediately is quite a different task from giving me a little time to reflect first.

Reading what I had already submitted mattered as well. If somebody has spent time writing their history down, asking them to repeatedly retell emotionally significant parts because the information hasn’t been properly absorbed can carry a cost.

And then there was the simple question of keeping me on track.

I think aloud. I make connections. One thought can lead quite happily into six others and, somewhere along the way, I may have given you an enormous amount of interesting information without actually answering what you asked. 😂

That doesn’t mean somebody needs to shut me down. It means a skilled person may need to gently help me notice where I have wandered and bring me back to the question.

For me, accessibility also meant looking at the person sitting there now, not only the child they had once been. My life stage mattered. Parenting mattered. Hormonal change mattered. The strategies I had built over decades mattered. So did the fact that I arrived capable, informed and already carrying a fairly substantial toolkit.

None of those things changes whether somebody meets diagnostic criteria.

But they may change how somebody is best supported to show you an accurate picture of themselves.

And that distinction matters.

Accessibility is not about making an assessment easier so somebody gets the answer they want. It is about removing unnecessary barriers so they can actually participate fully in the process.

That is something I have believed throughout my career in education too.

Giving everybody exactly the same thing is not always the same as giving everybody a fair opportunity to engage.

Some people need more processing time. Some need things written down. Some benefit from visual structure. Some need a pause before answering. Some need help staying with the question. Another person may need none of those things at all.

There isn’t one magical “ADHD-friendly assessment” that will suit everybody.

The point is curiosity.

What does this particular person need in order to show you who they actually are?

That question matters in assessment, but it also matters in schools, workplaces, therapy rooms and families.

Because when somebody is struggling to access the way we are doing something, our first question does not always have to be, Why can’t they do this?

Sometimes a much more useful question is:

Is there another way they could?

Individualising support is not lowering the standard. Sometimes it is what allows us to see a person’s abilities, needs and experiences more accurately in the first place.

If you’re navigating an assessment, school meeting or another process that doesn’t seem to be working for you or someone you support, you’re welcome to get in touch. Sometimes having somebody alongside you who understands both people and systems can help you work out what questions to ask, what adjustments might help and how to make sure your voice is heard.

Lena 💛

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