Practices
Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.
Narrowed down
466 practicesArea
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Who it is written for
Where you are right now
On your own, or with someone
Theme
Approach
When someone introduces themselves as an abuser, take the word seriously without treating it as the finding. A label names a category of offence, not what is actually going on in them.
Some people arrive with the language of a programme or a court already fitted to them, and it closes down the question of what drives the behaviour…
Some of what a person does to a partner is not defence and not temper. It is a script they watched at home, absorbed as ordinary, and never once held up to the light.
The tell is that it does not feel like a decision. There was no rush of heat and no sense of crossing a line, because at some level this is simply…
Ask whether the anger is really about this person at all, or whether it is contempt for a whole category of people that happens to have someone standing nearby.
It sounds different once you listen for it. The complaints come out in the plural, about how women are or what wives do, and the particular person in…
If the harm has only ever happened when someone had been drinking, the drinking is not the background to an anger problem. It is the anger problem.
Families often know this long before anyone says it aloud: he is fine, except. Go through it honestly, every incident, drunk or sober, and if…
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…
Hormones are part of this for everyone, not only for men and not only in adolescence. If your flares seem to arrive with a rhythm, that rhythm is worth writing down.
Episodes that look random from close up often turn out to have a shape once there is a record of them: a point in a monthly cycle, a change of…
Anger has a chemistry of its own. There is nothing to pour down the sink and nobody to stop selling it to you, which is why letting it go feels like losing something rather than putting something down.
The lift is real. Heat, clarity, energy, a body that suddenly knows exactly what to do. Take that away and leave a gap where it was, and within a…
If anger runs on the fear system, then the things that settle fear are worth trying on anger: staying in the room a bit longer, letting your body come down before you speak, going back over the story you told yourself about what was happening.
Most anger advice is about clamping down, and clamping down on something frightened rarely holds for long. Treating it as fear gives you gentler…
Think of the reaction as a small program sitting quietly, waiting for one particular condition. It is not running all the time, and which condition wakes it is a question with an answer.
Keep a short list for a few weeks. Only what was happening in the ten seconds before: a tone of voice, being interrupted, somebody standing over you…
Triggers come in different kinds. Some are about life and limb, some are things you learned to dread such as criticism or being shown up, and some are abstractions like unfairness. What helps depends on which kind you are dealing with.
Real danger needs a plan and usually other people, not a breathing exercise. A learned dread tends to ease by going near it more often in small doses…
Some of the fights you take up for other people are your own old fight, unfinished, borrowed onto somebody else's ground.
The signs are recognisable: the heat is out of proportion, you cannot let it go afterwards, and the person you were defending never asked you to.…
Ask what has been done to this person, not only what they have done. Old harm decides which ordinary things now register as a threat.
Reactions that look wildly out of proportion usually are not, once you know what the moment resembled. A hand raised near a face, a certain tone,…
Follow the chain. The anger points at a fear, and the fear points at what you believe is at stake. That last thing is what you are actually dealing with.
Once it has passed, ask what you were afraid of in that moment, then ask whether the threat was really there. Being spoken over is not the same as…
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.
Once a day, take turns unloading the day's outside stress while the other just listens and supports, not fixes.
Ten minutes each on stress from beyond the relationship. The listener gives empathy, not solutions.
Getting a child back through the gates is not the same as helping them. Ask what the school day is asking of them that they cannot face yet, and put your effort there.
Attendance is easy to count, which is why plans get built around it. A plan that only presses for attendance leaves the frightening thing exactly…
The first day back is worse than the weeks before it, not better. Plan for that spike rather than letting it take you by surprise.
Anxiety climbs as the return gets close and peaks somewhere near the doorway, then it comes down, but only for someone who stays long enough to find…
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…
Most of these stories begin with one of four things: a change, a person, an assessment, or a loss. Working out which one tells you what the fear is really about.
A new school, a timetable that split them from their friends, someone who made the corridor unsafe, an exam, a long illness, a death at home, a…
Before choosing a method, work out what the avoiding is doing for the person. Two children keeping away from the same building can need opposite things.
A technique that sounds right is not the same as one aimed at whatever is holding the problem in place. Ask what the hours at home actually contain,…
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