Practices

When someone keeps doing the risky thing after every explanation, the missing piece is usually not information. The pull is simply louder than the knowledge.

Which means another lecture is mostly wasted breath, while changing what is within reach is not. Fewer bottles in the house, a route home that avoids…

If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.

Families often hold off because raising it feels like an accusation. You can raise it without one: say what you have noticed, say you are not going…

Sometimes the drinking or the smoking is not the first problem at all. It is somebody's own treatment for an attention difficulty or an anxiety nobody has looked at yet.

You can usually tell from what it is used for: to speak in a group, to sit still long enough to work, to sleep. Where that is the shape of it, work…

Draw your own chart of the moment you usually give in, with the questions you actually ask yourself, and put it where you will see it.

One woman smoking around ten bowls a day made hers as a set of branches: is it a working day, have I been to work, are the errands done, are the…

Set small rewards for staying off it and let them grow the longer you go, so the next one is always near and a slip costs something you can feel.

A vague future benefit competes badly with something available right now. A jar you add to daily, a treat at day three and a bigger one at day ten, a…

If cutting down has failed over and over, that is information rather than a verdict on you. For some people the workable goal turns out to be none rather than less.

Starting young makes this more likely, and the earlier the heavy use began the harder the road back to casual use tends to be. Nobody enjoys hearing…

If the language of a recovery group puts you off, that is a reason to look for a different group, not a reason to decide that help is not for you.

Programmes vary a lot in how they talk. Some lean on surrender to a higher power, others are built around self-management and practical tools, and…

The useful part is not the chart on the wall. It is that the person could think of things to do instead, and that took months of quiet work to arrive at.

Someone else's list of alternatives will not hold, because they thought of theirs and you did not. Build yours slowly, adding what has genuinely…

Every feeling comes with something it wants you to do. Catching the move before you make it is most of the skill.

Anger wants to push, fear wants to get out of the room, sadness wants to curl up, shame wants to disappear. None of that is wrong, and the trouble is…

You do not need a long list of feeling words. Half a dozen you can actually reach for under pressure will do more than forty you have to look up.

Angry, sad, afraid, ashamed, surprised, glad is enough to start with, and most hard moments are some mixture of the first four. The aim is not to…

Point at the body. 'Your hands went up just then', or 'you put your head in your hands', gives a feeling something solid to stand on.

Feelings argued about in the abstract go round and round. A gesture you both just watched is much harder to dispute, and it opens a door: what was…

You cannot ask for something you cannot feel the want of. Before working out how to say it, spend a minute finding what you actually need.

This is why advice to communicate better so often goes nowhere. The words come out tidy and land as nothing, because there was no felt need inside…

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…

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…

Nobody ever came for help because they were too happy. What arrives as irritation or flatness on the surface is usually fear, grief or shame underneath.

So when someone snaps at you, or when you go cold and clipped yourself, treat that as the top layer rather than the whole story. The useful question…

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…

Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.

Most people have to genuinely search for the answer, and the searching is where the work happens rather than in whatever they eventually say.…

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…