Practices

Harm that comes out of feeling threatened and harm that is done coldly, to get something, are not one problem wearing two faces. Before deciding what would help, work out which one you are looking at.

The first kind runs hot. A person feels cornered, the body goes off, and the damage is done inside a few seconds. The second is quiet and aimed, with…

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…

Some true things cannot be said early. A reframe that would land well in the tenth conversation will end the second one.

Ideas about what really drives harm, or about a person being more than the worst thing they have done, are easily heard as excusing it or as blaming…

Ask it plainly. Do you think you are a threat to anyone you love? A vague anger problem turns into something workable the moment it has a name attached to it.

Then keep going, because the follow up questions carry most of the weight. Has there been any thought of killing someone, or of dying. What is in the…

Imagining revenge is ordinary and on its own tells you very little. What matters is whether it has started collecting details: a particular person, a method, a time, something bought or moved.

Almost everybody who is furious has run some version of a scene in their head, and treating that as alarming only teaches people not to mention it.…

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…

An act meant to be heard rather than to end a life can still end one. Whatever you believe about the intent, lethality is a separate question and it always gets asked.

The ways this happens are ordinary and awful. A method more dangerous than the person realised. The friend who was meant to arrive, arriving late. A…

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…

You are right that the first drink takes the edge off. That is exactly what makes it hard, and pretending otherwise would only be untrue.

The calm is real at a small amount and it turns on you as the amount climbs, which is why the argument at eleven at night bears no resemblance to the…

Alcohol does not add anger. It takes off the brake. Stimulants do the opposite job and press harder on the accelerator, and having both in you at once is the worst arrangement of the two.

What drink takes first is the part that holds you back, which is why nothing feels different from the inside. You are not angrier, there is simply…

The strongest pull is not the anger by itself. It is anger plus being right, the lift in the body and the certainty of the moral high ground arriving together.

That pairing is genuinely hard to put down, because giving it up means giving up more than a mood. It means not being the wronged one for a while.…

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 drinking is anywhere in the picture, stopping will probably do more for your anger than any technique you could learn. That is not the interesting answer, it is just the one that moves the most.

Skills work at the edges of a hard moment. Alcohol removes the very part of you those skills run on, so you can practise beautifully on a Tuesday…