Practices

You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.

A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am…

Often the feeling fits the situation perfectly and the size of it does not. You were right to be annoyed. The ten out of ten is the part that caused the trouble.

This is a useful thing to say to yourself afterwards, because it stops you throwing out your own read of what happened. Your sense that it was unfair…

The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.

Worth saying, because a conversation about emotional control can easily become a list of everything wrong with you. The aim is not a flatter version…

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…

Do not walk into a hard event and improvise. Ten minutes beforehand, work out what is likely to happen, what you will do about it, and how you get out if you need to.

If someone is coming with you, make it a shared plan. What the signal is when one of you needs air, who says what to whom, when you leave. The point…

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.…

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…