Practices

Once today, ask about a stress from outside the two of you, then just listen. No fixing.

Twenty minutes on their side. Your only job is to understand and be on their team.

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…

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…

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…

If staying home means an anxious child gets more of you, your comfort is quietly part of what keeps them there. That is not a failure of love.

This one is hard to see precisely because the soothing is kind and the distress is real. The usual shape is a fought over morning, the child stays,…

On a day at home, be the person who supervises rather than the person who keeps them company. The warmth is not cancelled, it moves to the evening.

Hovering, chatting, sitting alongside them with a cup of tea: all of it is lovely, and all of it makes the day at home better than the day at school.…

If a child can go to the school office whenever they like and stay as long as they like, that is an exit rather than a support. Agree a length, and a gap between visits.

Ten minutes, twice a day, with a return to lessons afterwards, is a support. Open ended visits from the first flutter of nerves onwards teach a very…

When someone with attention difficulties loses the structure around them, the difficulty shows in full. Nothing has got worse in them; the scaffolding that carried part of it has gone.

Bells, a timetable, a teacher at the front, other people visibly working: all of that was taking some of the load. At home the load falls on whoever…

When the fear is about being seen, being asked, being judged, you can build the steps out of real moments: the doorway, the corridor, the dining hall, answering once in a lesson.

Fear of a whole building cannot be practised. Fear of walking into the dining hall at half past twelve can. Make each step small enough to be boring…

Physically taking a refusing child should be rare, and only with a young child, two adults at home, two staff waiting at school, and a plan for keeping everybody safe.

It goes wrong easily. Someone gets hurt, a younger sibling watches it happen, and a child learns that the adults will use force, which is not a…

If most of your talking happens somewhere everything gets counted, likes, views, replies, then of course a room full of people feels like a scoreboard too. The habit was learned somewhere real.

Notice when the feeling arrives. It is usually before anyone has said anything: a sense that a number is being kept on you. Then name where you…

Unless you have turned up somewhere in fancy dress, you are not the main thing on anyone's mind. Most of the people around you are working out where to park and what they are going to eat.

This is not a trick for making the feeling vanish. The feeling usually hangs about for a while. It is more that when you walk in and the whole room…

Sometimes the help you need is not insight. It is someone sitting with you while you sort out what actually happened this week and which bit of it mattered.

When anxiety is running at full speed, everything arrives at the same volume and nothing can be ranked. A bad week becomes one undifferentiated bad…

Breath work goes straight into the body, and for some people that is the problem. If your panic has ever been about not getting enough air, putting your attention on your breathing can set it off rather than settle it.

Asthma, a history of choking or smothering, panic that arrives through the chest: any of these makes the breath a loaded place to put your attention.…

For when you are stuck in shutdown there is a faster practice: short sharp exhales driven from the belly, letting each in breath happen by itself, about twenty of them.

It is meant to rouse, so expect to feel more awake and a little buzzy afterwards rather than calm. Twenty is plenty. Sit down before you start so…

Breathe in for about five and out for about ten, and do not hold at the top. Go straight from the in breath into the out breath, five to ten times over.

That pause after the inhale feels natural to add, and it can raise your heart rate rather than lowering it, which undoes what you came for. If ten…

Fighting, running and freezing are the ones everybody can name. There is a fourth: going along with things, smoothing them over, making yourself easy to be around so that nothing bad happens.

It gets read as being agreeable, or as a personality, and it is often neither. If you grew up being criticised, or spent years around someone…

You are not trying to talk yourself into feeling calm. You are trying to move your body from one setting into another, and the breath is the handle you can reach.

Once the alarm system is running, stress hormones are already in the blood and telling yourself to relax does very little about them. Changing the…

Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. The holds are the strong part of this one, and they stay optional every single time.

Some people find the pauses deeply settling. Others meet the edge of what they can tolerate there, especially at the bottom of the exhale. Both are…