Practices

Before going towards a hard feeling, decide what will hold you while you are inside it: a way of breathing, a way of standing, a sentence, a person you can picture or ring.

Going in with nothing is not brave, it is flooding, and it teaches your system that feelings really are dangerous. Pick two or three supports in…

Whoever is going to do the feeling picks what to work with. The tightness in the chest, the closing throat, the anger, the grief, whichever one they are ready for today.

Choosing keeps the person in charge of the dose, and being in charge is a fair part of what makes this different from whatever happened to them. If…

Say it out loud before you start: you decide how much of this you feel, and when. Stopping for a bit is part of the plan, not a failure of it.

Being in charge of the dial is most of what separates useful contact with a hard feeling from being flooded by it again. If you are helping someone,…

Before you go anywhere near the hard memory, you need to be able to stay in your own body while something difficult is happening in it. That capacity is part of the work, not a delay before it starts.

Phase based approaches put this first for a plain reason: people who cannot bear the arousal either drop out or push through and come away worse. If…

Before sending anyone for hands on work, ask what touch has meant in their life. A massage table is a poor place to discover that touch brings something back.

The person delivering it is not there to hold what surfaces, and often has no training for it. So ask directly, ask about what parts of the body are…

When a treatment is described as approved, ask what it is approved for. Magnetic brain stimulation is licensed for depression, and using it for attention problems is off label.

Off label is not the same as forbidden or useless, and it does change three things: how much evidence stands behind it for your situation, what the…

The study most often quoted for magnetic stimulation in attention difficulties had eight people in it, and half of those on the dummy treatment improved too.

That dummy half is the interesting number. It tells you how much improvement can come from attention, hope and being taken seriously, before any…

The same treatment in two different clinics can go two different ways, and the difference is often the people. Kind, unhurried staff who explain things get better results.

So when you refer someone, or choose somewhere yourself, ask about that as well as the equipment. Do they remember your name, do they answer…

Telling someone what a treatment will actually be like improves how they respond to it. What it feels like, how long, what is normal afterwards.

Uncertainty makes everything sharper, so filling it in with plain description takes some of the edge off before anything starts. Do not oversell it…

These medicines work on a timescale of four to six weeks, not days. Say the number out loud at the start, because someone expecting relief this week will have decided by Friday that it failed.

Something does happen on the first day, but it is only the first step of a change that takes weeks to finish. The useful version of this is a date:…

Describe what the first fortnight might feel like before the first tablet, not after the first worried phone call. A warning given in advance turns a bad week into a milestone.

The wording can be plain. Some people feel more wound up for the first week or ten days, it usually passes, and nobody changes anything without…

The first week or so on one of these can feel worse rather than better: jittery, restless, sleeping badly. For most people it settles within a fortnight, and it is a known part of starting rather than a sign of harm.

Untold, a person quite reasonably concludes the medicine is making them ill and stops. Told beforehand, the same week becomes something to sit out,…

If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.

A registered clinician is not allowed to promise you an outcome, because nobody can honestly guarantee one. So a provider who promises makes you a…

Somebody will eventually ask you whether you want what is best for your child. It is a sales line, and knowing that in advance is most of what you need to withstand it.

Parents of a newly diagnosed child are frightened, motivated and often exhausted, which is exactly the state that gets marketed to. The question is…

Three things are worth noticing before you buy any treatment: whether the only research on it is their own, whether they will say plainly what it is meant to change, and whether you have to sign something.

Each one covers a different way of being caught out. Research a company funded and ran itself has never been checked by anyone with nothing to lose.…

Decide at the start what you are actually aiming at. Eight difficulties down to six, then to four, then perhaps to two. Never zero, because zero was never on offer.

Everybody has some of these traits, and ADHD is largely inherited, so a life with none of it was never a realistic target for anyone. Naming a number…

Hear this before you start rather than after: change here is gradual. Habits built over twenty years do not come apart in three weeks.

Waiting is genuinely harder with ADHD, and a treatment whose reward is months away is exactly the sort of thing that gets dropped in week five.…

Treatment is not only about school reports. Lower rates of accidental injury and of other serious harms are reasons in their own right, even for a child whose marks are perfectly fine.

This is the answer to the question about the bright child who is coping academically and whose impulsivity worries you in traffic, on a bike, or…

Said plainly, because it should be: medication is the most effective treatment for ADHD, and by a good margin. Everything else in this area is something you add to that decision, not something that replaces it.

This is not a push to medicate. Families weigh side effects, age, other conditions and their own convictions, and those are proper things to weigh.…

Rather than memorising which treatments to avoid, keep a few questions you can put to any of them. New products arrive faster than anyone can keep a list.

Ask how it was tested and by whom, and whether anyone independent of the company has looked at it. Ask what it costs, whether insurance touches it,…