Practices

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…

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…

Friends who know what this feels like are worth a great deal. Leaning on them as your therapy is a different thing, and it tends to go badly for everyone.

One young woman put the line in exactly the right place. She wanted people who understood her, and she did not want to use them as counselling. Being…

Good help leaves you more able to do it yourself next time. If the whole thing only works while the other person is in the room, something has gone sideways.

There is a real difference between someone building your schedule for you and someone sitting beside you while you build it. The second is slower and…

When you agree to something, agree who follows up. Do you tell them if it slips, or do they check in with you?

Most of the hurt around late work comes from nobody having said. You assume they will ask, they assume you will speak up, and the silence in between…

There is a kind of anger that floods a room and a kind that arrives with a request inside it. The second one gets answered.

The difference is audible before it is anything else: the voice steadier, the sentence shorter, an actual ask at the end of it. I am angry, and what…

When someone pours out a lot at once, catch the two or three words carrying the weight and give those back to them, in order.

You said you felt cold in your own house, and like a nuisance. Nothing added, nothing solved. It sounds almost too simple, and it does the thing a…

Let what they say land in you before you answer. The word that catches somewhere in your own chest is usually the live one.

Cold. Empty. A nuisance. Take each one for a second rather than sailing past it to the reply. Then give back the one that carried the charge, and you…

I am used to it is not the same as I feel nothing. It usually means a great deal of practice at feeling nothing, and that practice costs something.

Believe the person when they say they are used to it, and hear what is inside the sentence: this has happened often enough that they have built…

When somebody says they just get on with it, take the getting on with it seriously. That is the door, and arguing with the nothing is a wall.

This happens a lot, I just roll with it, I forget about it: there is a whole strategy in that sentence and it is visible, unlike the feeling…

Repeating back what your partner said proves you were listening. It does not prove you were touched by it, and they can tell the difference.

Reflective listening can be done perfectly and still land cold, because the words check the content while your face and body report that nothing…

You do not have to jump straight to understanding. Try the step before it: hands open, honestly puzzled, help me see what just happened here.

It has to be a real question. The rhetorical version, asked with your jaw set, makes things worse and both of you know it. Ask, then stay quiet long…

Their account makes sense from where they are standing. So does yours. Granting the first does not cost you the second.

This is the part people refuse, because they hear it as folding. It is not. You can say plainly that from where they sat it looked like that, and…

You can be completely right and still lose the room. Usually the trouble is not the point you are making, it is the edge you are making it with.

Softening how you say something is not conceding it. It is the difference between being heard and being braced against. Listen for the tells in your…

When your child comes to you in a spin, the kind thing is to stay warm and steady rather than to promise that it will be fine. Reassurance settles the next ten minutes and feeds the asking.

It sounds cold and it is not. What your steadiness says is two things at once: this feeling is real, and I think you can carry it. Keep it short and…

Tell your partner, on a good day, that the things you say at full volume are not a fair record of what you think. Not as an excuse. As information about how you work.

It changes what lands. If they know in advance that the heat is real but the words are unreliable, they can wait for the version that arrives twenty…

Hypervigilance after trauma and ADHD scanning look much alike from outside. Often the honest answer is that both are present, and the real question is how much of each.

Watching that comes from threat is aimed at something and tends to switch on in particular situations. ADHD distraction is not fussy about where it…

Damage to the front of the brain can produce something that looks a great deal like ADHD: poor impulse control, blunted judgement, a person their family says has changed.

The nineteenth century railway worker who survived an iron rod through the frontal lobes is the standard illustration, and what altered in him was…

When you need a date, hand people events rather than months. Was that before or after the holiday? Same year as the move?

Asking whether something happened between October and January invites a guess. Asking whether it was before or after a wedding, a house move or a…