Practices

The person you love and the person who frightened you are one person, and you are not obliged to decide which of them is the real one. Both were in the room.

People tend to collapse this in one direction or the other. Either the frightening one is the truth and every kind thing was an act, or the kind one…

Hurting yourself is not always about coping. Sometimes it is aimed at somebody else, and until you know which it is you cannot know what would help.

This is uncomfortable to ask about and it is not an accusation. An act can be a way through an unbearable hour, or a message to someone who has…

Before anything else, take seriously what self-injury is doing for a person. Pain in the body can be easier to hold than pain in the mind, and a hurt you chose yourself can feel like control coming back.

There are other honest reasons too. It can switch the world off for a while, or hold up a kind of armour: nobody can hurt me worse than I already do,…

See what you made me do to myself. When self-harm is carrying a message like that, naming the message is not dismissing it, it is looking for the thing that could be said instead.

The question can be asked kindly and straight. Do you ever get angry enough with them to want to hurt yourself so that they feel it. People often say…

Anger sends people back to the thing they had stopped, and the thing they had stopped makes the anger worse. Any plan that treats these as two separate projects tends to come apart.

Write anger into the relapse plan by name, alongside the parties, the old friends and the difficult anniversary. Then when you look at the anger, ask…

Let yourself be frightened. People who cannot stand the feeling tend to do something reckless to make it stop, and it is the recklessness that gets them hurt.

Old soldiers say the same thing about who survived: not the ones who felt nothing, but the ones who could admit they were terrified and stay careful…

Anger itself is standard issue. Handling it well is not, and nobody is born knowing how.

Which means the thing you have been calling a character flaw is closer to a skill nobody taught you. That changes the job: not becoming a person who…

Holding yourself in is effortful for everybody, every time. When it slips you have not uncovered a permanent fault in yourself.

The story people tell after a lapse usually does more damage than the lapse. One bad evening becomes proof, proof becomes despair, and despair makes…

Never decide you are safe because the other person is scared. Frightened people are often the ones who go furthest.

Anger as fear is a useful way of understanding somebody and a useless safety assessment. If the voice is rising, if the space between you is closing,…

Anger rescues you from an unbearable in between by handing you something to do. The relief is real, and that is exactly why it keeps coming back.

Fear asks you to sit in a situation that has not resolved yet, which is a horrible ask. Anger says no to that and converts it into action, and the…

Anger makes a convincing costume for insecurity, and the person most often taken in by it is the one wearing it.

It reads as courage from outside because the frightened person is supposed to be the one running away. From inside it feels like conviction, which is…

Think of the anger as a creature with a parent, and the parent is fear. Nearly everybody is keeping one, and because nobody mentions theirs, each person quietly assumes they are the only one.

Two useful things follow. If you want to do something about the creature, go upstream and deal with its parent, because fighting the thing itself is…

Treat a flare-up as a reading rather than a failure. It is telling you where something is sore.

Instead of the usual round of apology and self-disgust, get curious. What exactly set it off, what did it seem to put at risk, why that today and not…

Two weeks away is the point to stop waiting and ask for help. A year away is beyond what one appointment a week can carry.

Short absences often sort themselves out. Once a fortnight has gone, the pattern has usually begun to set, and the amount of practice needed to undo…

Somewhere between five and ten children in every hundred struggle to get to school at some point, and one or two of those need real help with it. Your family is not a strange case.

It feels rare because nobody mentions it at the school gate. In a school of a thousand that is a dozen or more children needing active support at any…

Avoiding something makes today easier and tomorrow harder. Say that plainly, to yourself and to whoever is in it with you.

Without that sentence, asking someone to face a frightening thing looks like cruelty, and every conversation about it goes badly. With it, the choice…

Anxiety is the most common mental health difficulty of childhood, with something like a third of young people meeting the threshold at some point and a smaller group badly held back by it. Both halves of that are worth saying.

The first half is for the shame: this is ordinary, and keeping it secret is its own kind of avoiding. The second half is so that nobody hears…

Offer school again at ten, and at eleven, and after lunch. One refusal at half past seven should not be allowed to decide the whole day.

Morning dread usually peaks around the time they would be leaving and then drains away over a couple of hours. A child who could not face it at half…

Nobody is asking you to go cold. Comfort your child properly, and watch where it lands: alongside them as they go, rather than waiting for them if they stay.

A hug at the door and a hand on the back on the way to the car sit on the side of going. A whole afternoon of being looked after because they did not…

Some people are not scared of the day, they are flattened by it. Staying home lifts the weight for an hour, then removes the few good things the day still held.

Low mood makes school heavy rather than dangerous: no energy, no interest, everything asking too much. Staying away helps at first and then takes…