Practices

When somebody manages a partner through anger, it is worth asking what the control is guarding. Very often the answer is a fear of being left.

Telling someone that nobody else would have them is that fear turned into a weapon, and it usually arrives when the person feels furthest away.…

Someone who will tell you the part that was not good is someone whose 'that was fine' you can believe. That is what settles the doubt, not reassurance.

Blanket praise carries no information, so it slides off and the doubt is back within the hour. If you tend to worry about how you came across, ask…

If your break turned into disappearing for the night, look at it as fear rather than as a discipline problem. Anger is often a way out of feeling afraid, and so is running.

Shame teaches badly here. Telling yourself you failed at the skill tends to produce more heat, and heat is the thing you were trying to leave behind.…

Ask what the feeling is trying to do for you. Anger clears an obstacle, fear gets you out, sadness calls for comfort, shame hides you from being seen.

Once a feeling has a job it stops being a defect you have to apologise for. That matters, because the ones we treat as shameful are precisely the…

Say the frightened thing rather than the sharp thing. It is far more exposing and it is the only version that tends to get a kind reply.

Under most rows sits something like I think there is something wrong with me, or I have already lost you and I am pretending I have not. Sharp words…

Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.

This hurts but I do not know why usually means the event, the feeling in the body and the meaning are being held separately. So join them up out…

If the size of the feeling does not match the size of what just happened, it is probably carrying something older into the room.

Feeling has no real sense of when. An old injury arrives in the present body with all its original force, which is why a small remark can flatten…

Going numb is a good way to survive something and a poor way to live near someone. It shuts the line in both directions at once.

When you cannot feel your own signal you also stop picking up theirs, so the room goes quiet even when they are reaching for you. The loneliness that…

Once the feeling is actually in the room, ask the plain question: what did you hear her saying about you? The answer is usually where the sting really lives.

A comment about the washing up does not floor anyone by itself. It floors you because of what you heard underneath it, something along the lines of…

You do not have to reflect back everything a person just told you. Pick up the part that carries the weight and say that much.

A long, careful summary can flatten what someone has just risked saying. If the heart of it is that he feels defeated and frightened of never being…

The thing worth admitting is not that you were angry. It is what you were frightened of underneath it: being made a fool of, being left, being counted as useless.

Anger is the easy half to say and it rarely lands well. The fear underneath is harder to say and it is the part that gets you heard. One sentence…

Partners of people with ADHD tend not to name the lateness or the lost keys as the real injury. It is the size of the reactions. That is where the damage collects.

Annoying is survivable and frightening is not. If you are working through things in a rough order, the temper comes before the calendar, even though…

Being good at apologising is a real skill, and it loses value each time the same apology comes round. After a while what repairs things is something visibly different, not a better sentence.

So keep the apology specific and small. Name the thing, do not explain it away, say what you will do differently, and then let the doing carry the…

The reason your partner follows you out of the room is usually not control. It is the fear that if you leave now, this will never be finished.

So say the return out loud and mean it. I am not dropping this, I will be back at nine and we will finish it. Then be back at nine. A few kept…

A real apology has no because in it. I would not have shouted if you had not looked at me like that is the argument again, wearing an apology's clothes.

Name the thing you did, own it flatly, and stop there. Then do something that shows it: the phone call you dodged, the mess cleared up, the thing you…

You may not get to be a calmer person any time soon. What can change quickly is what you do in the twenty minutes after you lose your temper, and that is the part people remember.

Reactivity shifts slowly if at all, while repair is a skill you could be noticeably better at by next week. Go back sooner than feels comfortable.…

When someone says they feel nothing, find out where the nothing reaches. All the time, or only towards good things, or only here, in this conversation, when criticism is in the air?

The three answers point in quite different directions. Numb everywhere, day and night, is worth taking to a doctor. Numb to good things while the bad…

If a medicine has taken the edge off everything, including the good things, that is worth raising with whoever prescribed it. Taking the sharpness out of pain is one thing. Feeling nothing at all is not a way to live.

It matters practically as well as personally. Anything you are trying to change, in a relationship or in yourself, needs some feeling to work with,…

The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.

A therapist repeating what your partner said is information. Your partner turning to you and saying it, in their own voice, is an event. That is why…

Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.

Said warmly, this is not a challenge. It sets out what a person would usually feel and leaves them to notice the gap between that and what they are…