Practices

Sometimes the help you need is not insight. It is someone sitting with you while you sort out what actually happened this week and which bit of it mattered.

When anxiety is running at full speed, everything arrives at the same volume and nothing can be ranked. A bad week becomes one undifferentiated bad…

If most of the difficulty is happening at home, most of the work needs to happen with the household in the room. Otherwise the hour of good conversation gets quietly undone by Tuesday.

In a settled stretch, seeing the young person on their own with occasional family time is fine. In a crisis, turn it round: everyone together,…

Worry done on your own goes round in circles. Said out loud to one other person, it usually turns into a problem with edges, and sometimes into a next step.

The rule is short enough to remember at midnight: never worry alone. It does not have to be someone who can fix anything. A friend, a colleague, your…

Instead of stopping the worry, follow it all the way to the end. And then what happens. And then what. At each step, ask whether you could bear that.

Most catastrophes stop being catastrophes somewhere along the chain, and the place where you say no, I could not bear that, is the useful discovery.…

When someone says their heart races on their medication, ask whether it ever did before they started. It is the cheapest question you have and it usually sorts the answer out.

Go looking for the old settings: waiting to be called on in class, standing outside a room before a difficult conversation, three in the morning with…

Rolling or throwing a ball back and forth with someone is more useful than it looks when one of you has gone blank. It gives the body a job and the two of you a rhythm at the same time.

It works over a video call as well: ask them to fetch a ball from another room and bounce it while you talk. Say what you are doing and why, so it…

Put something in before you take something out. Removing the only way a person has of coping leaves them with nothing, which is not safer.

In practice this looks like smaller steps than a promise to stop: cutting the frequency, changing what is used, agreeing to wait ten minutes and do…

Run the same moment twice. The second time, change nothing except what you do with it, and let yourself not mind what the other person might be thinking.

Keeping the situation identical is the point, because then the only thing that moved was you. In a session that means the same silence and the same…

Telling someone it was not their fault often bounces straight off, and there is a reason for that. Self blame can be the safer of the two stories, and you are asking them to give up shelter.

So do not lead with the correction. Say instead that it makes complete sense they landed there, that a child needs their parents to be good more than…