These are optional Flourish tools that can be used alongside the core teaching. They are designed for specific situations, reflection, practice, and community use without making the main workbooks denser.
The tools on this page can be reused as workbook extras, Mighty Networks prompts, handouts, printable one-page tools, or discussion exercises.
Caring Without Carrying
Purpose: Help ADHD women notice when supporting someone has shifted into feeling responsible for fixing, absorbing, mediating, or regulating another person's emotions.
Sometimes another person is upset and you genuinely want to be there for them. But somewhere in the conversation, listening can turn into something else.
You may start searching for solutions, worrying about saying the wrong thing, feeling responsible for making them feel better, listening long after you have run out of capacity, or leaving the interaction drained, irritated, anxious, or guilty.
That reaction is useful information.
Start by noticing
When someone brings you a problem, what tends to happen?
- I immediately start looking for a solution.
- I feel pressure to say exactly the right thing.
- I worry they will feel rejected if I set a limit.
- Their distress makes me anxious.
- I keep listening even when I am overwhelmed.
- I have trouble ending the conversation.
- I think about their problem afterward.
- I feel guilty if I cannot help.
- I monitor their voice, face, texts, or mood afterward.
- I start wondering whether I caused the problem.
- I feel responsible for getting them into a better emotional state.
- I become irritated and then feel guilty about the irritation.
- I avoid the person because I cannot handle another heavy conversation.
What might your reaction be telling you?
Instead of deciding that you are uncaring, ask:
What am I reacting to?
Maybe:
- I am already overloaded.
- I do not know what this person expects from me.
- I think I am supposed to fix this.
- I am afraid of disappointing them.
- I have learned that other people's emotions become my responsibility.
- I am trying to prevent conflict.
- The conversation has gone on longer than I can manage.
- I need more predictability.
- I need a break before I can listen.
- I care, but I do not have capacity for this right now.
Separate caring from responsibility
I care about:
I can reasonably offer:
I cannot control:
I am starting to take responsibility for:
You can care about someone's marriage without repairing it.
You can care about someone's disappointment without making it disappear.
You can care about someone's anger without automatically agreeing with them.
You can care about a family conflict without becoming the messenger.
You can love someone and still have limited emotional capacity that day.
Check your capacity
Plenty of room — I can listen and stay connected to myself.
Some room — I can listen, but I may need a limit.
Very little room — I am already overloaded and this conversation may push me past capacity.
Then ask:
What would make this easier?
Maybe:
- knowing whether they want listening or problem-solving
- talking for a shorter amount of time
- finishing what you are doing first
- switching from phone to text
- taking a sensory break
- having the conversation later
- not discussing the same problem repeatedly
- declining to mediate between other people
Before you jump into fixing
Ask yourself:
Did this person actually ask me to solve this?
You can also ask:
“Do you want me to listen, help you think it through, or help you figure out what to do?”
Afterward
Notice what your system needs.
Do you need:
- time alone?
- movement?
- food or water?
- lower sensory input?
- to write down what you are thinking?
- reassurance that the problem is not yours to solve?
- connection with someone else?
- a clear transition into your next activity?
Recovery is part of accounting for your capacity.
Reflection
- Think about one relationship where you regularly become overloaded by someone else's emotions. What usually happens?
- At what point do you begin feeling responsible?
- What are you afraid might happen if you stop fixing, soothing, or listening?
- What belongs to the other person?
- What belongs to you?
- What could you change the next time?
Group discussion
- When did you first learn that someone else's distress required action from you?
- How do you know when supporting someone has become carrying too much?
- Which emotional boundaries are easiest for you?
- Which are hardest?
- What would supportive connection look like if fixing were removed from the job?
Is This Mine to Carry?
Purpose: A quick check for emotional over-responsibility when another person's mood or problem starts taking over your attention.
1. What did I actually notice?
Stick with observable information first.
Examples: They spoke more sharply. They stopped texting. They are crying. They said they are angry. They told me they are having a terrible day.
What I noticed:
2. What am I adding to it?
What is your brain predicting or interpreting?
Examples: “They're mad at me.” “I have to make this better.” “They'll think I don't care.” “I shouldn't have upset them.” “If I don't help, something bad will happen.”
My interpretation:
3. Do I actually know that?
- Yes
- No
- Partly
- I need more information
If more information would help, consider asking instead of continuing to monitor.
4. Is there something here that belongs to me?
Maybe you hurt someone and want to repair it. Maybe you forgot something important. Maybe they have made a reasonable request.
My part is:
Taking responsibility for your part is different from taking responsibility for the entire emotional situation.
5. What belongs to them?
Their feelings. Their decisions. Their relationship with someone else. Whether they agree with your boundary. How quickly they recover. Whether they use the support available to them.
Their part is:
6. What is my capacity?
- I have room for this.
- I have some room, with limits.
- I am near capacity.
- I cannot take this on right now.
7. Choose your next step
I can:
- listen
- ask what kind of support they want
- offer one specific form of help
- ask a clarifying question
- set a time limit
- come back to the conversation later
- decline to mediate
- allow them to be disappointed
- remind myself that unresolved does not always mean unsafe
- step away and regulate myself
One final question
Am I responding because I want to, or because I feel responsible for preventing someone else's discomfort?
That distinction is worth noticing.
Words for When You Care but Have Limits
Purpose: Practical language for moments when you care about someone but need a clearer boundary, limit, or role.
When you are willing to listen but do not know what they need
“Do you want me to listen, help you think it through, or help you figure out what to do?”
When you care but are already overloaded
“I want to hear about this, but I don't have much capacity right now. Can we talk later?”
When you have some capacity but need a limit
“I can talk for about fifteen minutes, and then I need to switch gears.”
When the same problem keeps coming back to you
“I know this is still really hard. I'm noticing that I don't have anything new to offer, and I don't think continuing to go through it together is helping me.”
When someone wants you to solve something you cannot solve
“I can help you think about your options, but I can't make this decision for you.”
When someone wants you to take sides
“I care about you, but I don't want to be put in the middle of this.”
When someone wants you to carry messages
“I'd rather you tell them that directly. I don't want to be the person passing messages between you.”
When someone keeps giving you details about a conflict you do not want to join
“I understand that you're upset. I don't need more details to believe that this has been difficult for you, and I still want to stay out of the conflict.”
When another person's mood activates your hyper-monitoring
“I noticed something seems different. Are we okay, or is something else going on?”
Then let their answer give you information. You do not have to keep interpreting punctuation, facial expressions, tone changes, or every possible explanation.
When someone is disappointed by your boundary
“I understand that isn't what you wanted.”
Sometimes that is enough. You can acknowledge disappointment without reversing your limit.
Practice
Choose one situation where you usually overexplain, fix, soothe, stay too long, take sides, or monitor afterward.
Write the sentence you want available before you are in that situation again.
My sentence:
Practice saying it in language that actually sounds like you.
Widen the Frame
Purpose: Help you notice when one difficult detail has become the whole story in your mind.
Sometimes something goes wrong and your attention locks onto it.
You miss one question in a meeting. Someone sounds irritated. You forget something important. You get mostly positive feedback and one correction. Hours later, the correction is still the part your brain is replaying.
The difficult part may be real. Widening the frame does not mean talking yourself out of it.
It means asking whether your attention is giving you the entire picture.
Step 1: Name what grabbed your attention
The part I keep replaying:
Describe what actually happened as simply as you can.
Step 2: Notice the meaning your brain attached to it
What I started telling myself this meant:
Examples might include:
- I messed everything up.
- They are disappointed in me.
- I am bad at this.
- They do not like me.
- I should have handled that better.
Step 3: Put the rest of the information back in
Ask:
- What else happened in that interaction?
- What went fine?
- What was neutral?
- What happened before and after the difficult moment?
- What evidence supports my interpretation?
- What information does not fit it as neatly?
Three things that were also true:
- ---
- ---
- ---
Step 4: Ask why this particular detail had so much pull
Some moments carry extra weight because they connect to older experiences.
Maybe this touches:
- years of correction
- fear of disappointing people
- perfectionism
- shame about ADHD
- previous rejection
- pressure to appear competent
- uncertainty about what other people think
- a history of being misunderstood
Why might this have landed so hard for me?
Step 5: Make the story more complete
You do not need a positive reframe.
Try a fuller one.
The hard part was:
And the larger picture also includes:
The aim is not to erase the negative information. It is to keep one piece of information from automatically becoming the verdict on the whole experience.
Flourish connections
- Self-awareness: noticing where your attention goes under stress
- Self-compassion: understanding why some cues carry extra weight
- Self-accommodation: writing down the larger picture when your working memory cannot hold it all at once
Feedback, Opinion, or Disrespect?
Purpose: Help you evaluate difficult feedback without automatically dismissing yourself or automatically accepting another person's judgment.
Some feedback is useful and uncomfortable.
Some is poorly delivered.
Some is simply another person's opinion.
And some crosses a line.
When criticism hits hard, especially if you have spent years being corrected or second-guessing yourself, it can be difficult to sort these apart in the moment.
Start with the actual words
What was said or communicated?
Was feedback invited?
- Yes
- No
- Partly
- I am not sure
Unasked-for commentary is different from feedback you requested.
Separate content from delivery
Ask two different questions.
Is there information here I want to consider?
Was the way it was communicated acceptable to me?
You can decide there is something useful in the content and still dislike the delivery.
You can also decide the content itself does not belong to the other person.
Look at the interaction
Consider:
- Was it specific or was it a broad judgment about me?
- Was it said privately or in front of other people?
- Was there room for me to respond?
- Was I being given information or being shamed?
- Is this a one-time clumsy interaction or a repeated pattern?
- Is this person someone whose perspective I trust in this area?
- Does this concern something that is actually theirs to comment on?
You may not know their intention. You can still evaluate the impact and decide what kind of communication you are willing to continue.
Choose what belongs to you
Useful information I may want to think about:
What I do not need to take on:
What I want to say or do next:
Possible language
When the point may be worth considering but the delivery was not:
“I want to think about what you're saying. I also need you to say it differently.”
When you did not ask for feedback:
“I wasn't looking for input on that.”
When someone comments on something personal that is not open for discussion:
“That's not something I'm inviting feedback about.”
When someone hides behind ‘I'm just being honest’:
“You can be honest, and I can still decide how I'm willing to be spoken to.”
Reflection
- What kind of criticism is hardest for you to evaluate clearly?
- Do you tend to dismiss yourself, defend immediately, overexplain, or accept too much?
- What helps you decide whether feedback is actually useful?
- What communication boundary would help you stay connected to your own judgment?
Flourish connections
- Self-awareness: noticing your patterns around criticism
- Self-compassion: understanding why feedback may carry extra emotional weight
- Self-advocacy: deciding what kind of communication you will participate in
- Self-trust: considering feedback without handing over your judgment
Fair Does Not Always Mean the Same
Purpose: Help you look at shared responsibilities through effort, capacity, and sustainability rather than assuming fairness always means a 50/50 split.
In relationships, people often count visible tasks.
Who did the dishes? Who paid which bill? Who drove? Who made dinner?
But the visible task is not always the whole load.
One person may be remembering, planning, anticipating, following up, researching, noticing what is running out, managing appointments, or carrying the emotional fallout when something does not get done.
Two people can have the same number of tasks and still be carrying very different amounts of effort.
Pick one area that feels off
Examples:
- household tasks
- finances
- parenting
- caregiving
- social planning
- appointments
- family communication
- errands
- emotional labor
- relationship maintenance
The area I want to look at:
Make the invisible work visible
What I am currently carrying:
What the other person is currently carrying:
Now look for the work underneath the task:
- remembering
- initiating
- planning
- deciding
- organizing
- following up
- monitoring
- switching attention
- recovering afterward
Check actual capacity
Fairness has to account for what each person can realistically sustain right now.
Capacity may change with:
- sleep
- work demands
- burnout
- health
- hormones
- caregiving
- sensory load
- grief
- stress
- executive-function demands
My current capacity:
Their current capacity, as best I understand it:
Ask a better fairness question
Instead of:
Are we each doing half?
Try:
Is the total load being shared in a way that is workable for both of us?
Look for the actual friction
What feels unsustainable right now?
What could be adjusted?
Could you change:
- who owns a task?
- how often it happens?
- the standard being used?
- the timing?
- the number of steps?
- whether something can be automated or outsourced?
- how money is divided?
- how much planning one person carries?
- whether responsibilities shift temporarily when capacity changes?
Conversation starters
“I don't think counting tasks is showing us the whole load. Can we look at effort, planning, and capacity too?”
“I want the arrangement to feel sustainable for both of us, not just equal on paper.”
Reflection
- Which parts of your contribution are easiest for other people not to see?
- Which responsibilities cost you more energy than they appear to from the outside?
- Are there parts of someone else's load you may not be seeing?
- What would a more sustainable arrangement look like?
- What needs to be discussed instead of assumed?
Flourish connections
- Self-awareness: understanding what actually costs you energy
- Self-accommodation: changing responsibilities to better fit capacity
- Self-advocacy: making invisible effort easier to explain
- Self-care: creating arrangements that can be sustained rather than merely counted
Where These Can Be Used
- Workbooks: optional inserts or bonus pages
- Mighty Networks: weekly practices, prompts, or discussion posts
- Substack: expanded educational pieces
- Groups: reflection exercises or discussion tools
- Therapist materials: boundaries, emotional over-responsibility, interpersonal hyper-monitoring, people-pleasing, and capacity work
Flourish Model Connections
- Self-Awareness: noticing what happens inside you when someone else is upset
- Self-Compassion: recognizing limits without turning them into a judgment about how much you care
- Self-Accommodation: changing the timing, format, length, or demands of an interaction
- Self-Advocacy: communicating what you can and cannot offer
- Self-Care: recovering after emotionally demanding interactions
Conversation Compass
Purpose: A quick preparation tool for important conversations when you know what you want to say but are worried the discussion may become scattered, overly long, defensive, or emotionally loaded.
1. What is this conversation for?
Finish the sentence:
By the end of this conversation, I hope we have:
Keep it concrete. Maybe you want to make one request, clarify what happened, set a boundary, understand the other person's view, repair one misunderstanding, or agree on a next step.
2. What would count as enough?
You do not have to resolve the entire issue in one sitting.
A good-enough outcome for this conversation would be:
Examples:
- I said the boundary clearly.
- We identified the next decision.
- I understand what they are asking from me.
- They know what I need.
- We agreed to return to the larger issue later.
3. What is not my job here?
Check anything that fits.
What am I not asking this conversation to accomplish?
4. What tends to pull me off course?
Maybe you:
- start defending your character instead of discussing the issue
- add more examples because you do not feel believed
- switch to a different unresolved problem
- focus on the other person's reaction and forget what you needed to say
- agree too quickly because the conversation feels uncomfortable
- keep talking after the important part has already been said
My usual detour is:
5. What sentence brings me back?
Write one sentence that returns to the point.
Examples:
“The main thing I want us to decide today is…”
“I hear that. I want to come back to the request I was making.”
“I don't think we need to solve that part right now.”
“I need more time before I can answer that.”
My return sentence:
6. What support do I need?
Afterward
Ask:
- Did the conversation do the job I needed it to do?
- Did I take on a job that was not mine?
- What helped me stay clear?
- What would I change next time?
Source inspiration: Greg McKeown's 1-Minute Wednesday clarity series, August 2025, especially the distinction between defining an intended aim and identifying what a conversation is not intended to accomplish. This Flourish tool substantially reframes and expands that idea for ADHD women, communication load, boundaries, overexplaining, and capacity.