Shrinking Reserve

No, and it does not behave like one. It is a structured reflection exercise with no validated norms, cutoffs, or psychometric properties. It cannot tell you or your client whether she has ADHD, is in perimenopause, or which is causing what. It is designed to be used alongside your clinical judgement, never in place of it.

She will, unless you tell her otherwise. The Clinician Companion devotes a section to this exact moment and gives you the language for it — how to redirect from the score to the function, and how to answer the question "does this mean I have ADHD?" without either validating or dismissing the exercise.

Women roughly 40 to 60, in perimenopause or recently past it, with a change in functioning their workload does not explain. Most usefully, the woman with a lifelong history of effortful compensation — lists, rigid routines, overwork, chronic reliability at real cost — that has recently stopped working. The companion names seven clinical features suggesting a fit and six indicating it is not the right starting point.

Active suicidal ideation or psychiatric hospitalisation in the last twelve months. Acute grief or crisis within roughly three months. Active moderate-to-severe substance use. Prominent dissociation needing a trauma-informed frame first. A client seeking a diagnosis rather than a method. The workbook is not a crisis tool and was not built to be one.

Four to six. The companion maps each session to one barrier, with a single-variable experiment between sessions. You are not teaching the chapters — the client reads them. Your time goes on the experiment design and reviewing what happened.

Be clear about what this means. The eight-barrier framework and the 32-item reflection exercise are original and unvalidated. The individual strategies inside are translations of well-established findings — implementation intentions, behavioural activation, prospective memory cueing, the planning fallacy, friction effects — and the workbook's references page names the source for each so you can judge them yourself.Collaborative, honest, and straightforward. We're here to guide the process, bring ideas to the table, and keep things moving.