Practices

Working out what someone meant by hurting another person is a conversation for the person who did it. Said to the one who was harmed, they were not really trying to hurt you lands as being talked out of your own experience.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of violence has usually spent a long time being told it was not what it was. Even a kindly meant explanation…

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…

Ask it plainly. Do you think you are a threat to anyone you love? A vague anger problem turns into something workable the moment it has a name attached to it.

Then keep going, because the follow up questions carry most of the weight. Has there been any thought of killing someone, or of dying. What is in the…

Hurting yourself is not always about coping. Sometimes it is aimed at somebody else, and until you know which it is you cannot know what would help.

This is uncomfortable to ask about and it is not an accusation. An act can be a way through an unbearable hour, or a message to someone who has…

See what you made me do to myself. When self-harm is carrying a message like that, naming the message is not dismissing it, it is looking for the thing that could be said instead.

The question can be asked kindly and straight. Do you ever get angry enough with them to want to hurt yourself so that they feel it. People often say…

An act meant to be heard rather than to end a life can still end one. Whatever you believe about the intent, lethality is a separate question and it always gets asked.

The ways this happens are ordinary and awful. A method more dangerous than the person realised. The friend who was meant to arrive, arriving late. A…

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…

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…