Anger

Harm that comes out of feeling threatened and harm that is done coldly, to get something, are not one problem wearing two faces. Before deciding what would help, work out which one you are looking at.

The first kind runs hot. A person feels cornered, the body goes off, and the damage is done inside a few seconds. The second is quiet and aimed, with…

Some true things cannot be said early. A reframe that would land well in the tenth conversation will end the second one.

Ideas about what really drives harm, or about a person being more than the worst thing they have done, are easily heard as excusing it or as blaming…

When someone introduces themselves as an abuser, take the word seriously without treating it as the finding. A label names a category of offence, not what is actually going on in them.

Some people arrive with the language of a programme or a court already fitted to them, and it closes down the question of what drives the behaviour…

Some of what a person does to a partner is not defence and not temper. It is a script they watched at home, absorbed as ordinary, and never once held up to the light.

The tell is that it does not feel like a decision. There was no rush of heat and no sense of crossing a line, because at some level this is simply…

Ask whether the anger is really about this person at all, or whether it is contempt for a whole category of people that happens to have someone standing nearby.

It sounds different once you listen for it. The complaints come out in the plural, about how women are or what wives do, and the particular person in…

If the harm has only ever happened when someone had been drinking, the drinking is not the background to an anger problem. It is the anger problem.

Families often know this long before anyone says it aloud: he is fine, except. Go through it honestly, every incident, drunk or sober, and if…