Practices

When someone has gone flat, the question is not what they ought to be doing. It is what still has any life in it for them, however small or unimpressive, and then how to get more of that.

Activities handed out from the outside do not lift much. Someone who brightens talking about their car, or a cousin, or a game has just given you the…

ADHD rarely turns up on its own. If anxiety or low mood is in the room as well, it needs treating in its own right, and that includes when it is the other partner who is struggling.

This is the part that gets missed in couples. One person becomes the identified patient and everybody works on them, while the other one's untreated…

Explain the calming corner on a quiet Tuesday, not in the middle of a meltdown. New instructions do not go in once a child is already rising.

Walk them through it when nothing is happening. This is where it is, this is what you can do there, this is how you come back. Let the whole class…

Whatever the correction is, teach it before you need it. A routine the child already knows can be started with two words instead of a negotiation in front of everybody.

Show them the table, the worksheets, what happens when they finish, and let them try it once while nothing is wrong. After that the instruction is…

If you run a group for people with ADHD, keep it to about five or six, or bring in a second facilitator. Past that you spend the session keeping order instead of doing the work.

The limit is not really about behaviour. It is about how many people one person can genuinely track while also holding the thread of the session.…

Sitting in a room with other people who lose their keys, cry at nothing and hate themselves for both does something no explanation can. You find out you were never the only one.

Groups also do encouragement better than a therapist can. When someone with the same trouble asks whether you managed the homework, it does not land…

Connection does not have to be human. A dog will not judge how your week went, and it will get you out of the door twice a day whether you feel like it or not.

If people currently feel exhausting or risky, an animal is often the easiest place to begin. Part of the good is the company and part of it is the…

You can be connected to a thing as well as to a person. A cause, a project, something you are making. On the days people feel like too much, it is still there.

This works best when it asks something of you regularly: a rehearsal, a shift, a chapter a week. The obligation is the useful part, more than the…

If you tell people that company is part of their treatment, it is worth noticing whether it is part of yours. Sitting in a training room with colleagues is the same medicine, taken by you.

There is a quiet loss of credibility in prescribing connection from a life that has none in it. It also flattens something that ought to be flat. You…

There is a difference between being calm because your partner manages you and being able to steady yourself. The first works right up until the person is not there.

Plenty of adults with ADHD have got by on outside regulation without ever noticing it: a spouse who makes the difficult phone calls, a deadline that…

Sleep, food and moving your body will not cure ADHD, and they do change how much of yourself you have available. Aim for good enough here rather than excellent.

The gain shows up in the margin more than in the symptoms. Rested, you have a bit of room before you snap. Short of sleep, you arrive at the evening…

You cannot ask anyone to work harder on your difficulty than you are working on it yourself. That is the condition attached to every adjustment you ask for.

It is what keeps help from curdling into supervision. If your partner is holding the calendar, softening the tone and steering round your worst…