Friendship Skills for Neurodivergent Adults with Caroline Maguire

The path to friendship takes, time, participation, practice, and a mindset to understand that we build trust, connection and friendship over time. Caroline Maguire will lead participants through how to reframe and shift your friendship mindset and approach in ways that works with your ADHD neurology so you can find authentic connection rather than masking, people pleasing and burning out.

Walk away with a new mindset about friendship that can end a lifetime of pain and open doors to a new outlook. Caroline will offer concrete scripts, role-play style examples, and step-by-step strategies to help you pace new relationships, notice red and green flags earlier, and recover after awkward moments without spiraling. She’ll also talk about how to put parts of friendship on “autopilot” by using reminders, routines, and templates so it takes less executive function to keep connections alive. You’ll leave with a kinder lens on yourself and a realistic plan to create friendships that fit your brain, your energy, and your life, whether you are rebuilding a social world after burnout or cautiously ready to try again.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify Social Patterns (oversharing, underinvesting, overinvesting, scarcity thinking, and all-or-nothing friendship expectations) and how to sidestep them; and understand how traits like boredom, hyperfocus, emotional intensity, forgetfulness, and disorganization affect friendships and how to work with those traits instead of against them
• Learn to Use the 3 P’s (Participation, Practice, and Perspective) as a step-by-step framework to slowly build trust and connection over time, and pace new friendships so you don’t rush in, overshare, or burn out, while still getting the closeness you crave
• Create Realistic ADHD Friendly Habits (check-ins, follow-ups, “flavors” of friendship, low-pressure contact) that keep relationships going without overwhelming your executive function or emotional bandwidth