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The Bread Aisle Breakdown: How IEMT Helped One ADHD Client Reclaim Decision-Making

  • Writer: Laura Horn
    Laura Horn
  • Jul 2
  • 5 min read




The Bread Aisle Breakdown: What IEMT Taught One Client About Her Own Mind


She stood in the bread aisle for eleven minutes.


Wholemeal or white. Sliced or bloomer. Own brand or the "nice" one.


Eleven minutes, over bread. And she left with nothing, because by the time she'd talked herself into one loaf, she'd already found four reasons it was the wrong choice.


This wasn't about bread. It was never about bread.


Why She Came to Me


She came to me through Access to Work, for ADHD coaching and nervous system regulation. On paper, that's what we were there to build: strategies, structure, workplace support.


But you can't regulate a nervous system that's still bracing for an old threat. Underneath the work stuff sat two things doing the real damage. Rejection sensitivity, and childhood trauma that had never been named as trauma, just "how things were."


The bread aisle wasn't the presenting problem. It was where the pattern was easiest to see.


The Voice in the Aisle Wasn't Hers


When we unpacked it together, the pattern went back decades. A childhood soundtrack of you should do this, you should do that, well-meaning, relentless, and never once asked for. Not cruelty exactly, but not safe either. Constant correction, dressed up as guidance, in a household where getting it "wrong" carried a cost.


By adulthood, the voices didn't need the family in the room anymore. They'd moved in. Every decision, bread, a birthday card, which route to drive, an email at work, came with an invisible committee weighing in before she'd even had a chance to think. The fear of getting it wrong felt every bit as real as it had at seven years old.


That's not indecisiveness. That's rejection sensitivity, running on a nervous system that never fully stood down. Exhausting doesn't begin to cover it.


Why This Shows Up So Hard With ADHD


ADHD brains already do more work per decision than people realise. Weighing options, managing working memory, fighting through executive function friction that neurotypical brains don't have to think twice about.


Now stack a lifetime of you should, and a nervous system wired to expect rejection, on top of that.


Every choice isn't just "what do I want." It's "what do I want, filtered through what I'll be told is wrong about it, filtered through what it cost me last time I got it wrong." No wonder the bread aisle felt like an exam she hadn't revised for. No wonder Access to Work coaching alone wasn't going to touch it.


What Is IEMT?


IEMT stands for Integral Eye Movement Therapy. It's a brief, structured technique that uses guided eye movements to change how the brain holds an emotional memory or belief. Not the facts of the memory, just how it's felt.


Think of it like this. The brain doesn't file a bad memory as "something that happened once." It files it as "who I am now." IEMT works with that filing system directly, without needing you to talk through the whole story first.


It's fast, usually a handful of sessions rather than months, and it doesn't require re-living the original event in detail. That's exactly why it worked so well alongside the coaching and Access to Work support this client already had. It reached the part the strategies alone couldn't touch



Why IEMT Works So Well Alongside ADHD


Most talking therapies ask you to sit still, follow a linear thread, and revisit painful material in detail, session after session. For a lot of ADHD brains, that's exactly the wrong shape of task. Sitting with one thought for long stretches is hard. Talking around something for weeks before it shifts can feel like it's going nowhere, and that's often where people give up.


IEMT doesn't ask for that. It's brief. It's active rather than reflective, you're doing something with your eyes and body, not just talking. And it doesn't require you to explain the memory in full before it can be worked with, which matters a lot for anyone whose executive function makes it hard to organise a story into neat, chronological sentences on demand.


There's also the masking piece. So many ADHD clients have spent years explaining themselves, justifying themselves, narrating their own struggles to be believed. IEMT sidesteps that. You don't have to convince anyone the memory matters. You just have to notice where it lives in you, and let the process do its work.


That combination, quick, physical, and low on the pressure to perform a coherent narrative, is exactly why it paired so well with the coaching and Access to Work strategies this client already had in place.


What We Actually Did


We didn't talk about bread. We didn't spend weeks retelling her childhood.


IEMT works differently. It goes straight for how the imprint is held, not the story around it. We found the felt sense of that "you should" voice, and the rejection sensitive flinch that came with it. Where it lived, what it did in her body when it fired. Then we worked directly with the eye movement patterns tied to it.


No re-living the childhood scenes in detail. No digging through years of "why." Just addressing the imprint that had quietly been running her decisions, her relationships, and her sense of safety at work, all at once.


What Changed


A few weeks later she text me. Not about bread, about a work decision she'd made in under two minutes, without asking anyone.


"I didn't even notice I hadn't checked with the committee," she said.


That's the part that gets me every time. It's rarely dramatic. It's just quiet. The absence of a voice that used to be so loud she couldn't hear her own.


She still doesn't love shopping. But she buys the bread she wants now. And that's not nothing. That's someone getting her own judgement back.


If any part of this sounds familiar, the internal committee, the exhaustion of decisions that shouldn't be this hard, you're not broken, and you're not alone in it. This is exactly the kind of pattern IEMT is built to work with.


Ready to quiet your own internal committee? Get in touch @ creatingchangeiemt@gmail.com


Please note if you are coming through access to work, I start the work with you as soon as it has been agreed this means you don't need to wait and I wait for payment as i understand how difficult it can be.








 
 
 

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