Practices

The relative who was shut in a cupboard, tied to a chair or expelled was being managed for the same thing you are assessing now. There was simply no name for it then and no help attached to it.

Told carefully, this changes the story a family tells about itself. Not a line of difficult people, but a trait that has been present for generations…

Before you decide a strategy has failed, check whether the medication underneath it is doing its job. If someone is sitting in front of you still struggling, the honest first answer is usually that it is not, quite.

Ask about the shape of the day rather than the dose alone. When does it come on, when does it wear off, which hours are the hard ones, is there any…

Time management is only the fit between tasks and the hours you have: planning them against time, then doing them against time. It is a skill with parts, not a verdict on what kind of person you are.

Most people arrive having already decided they are lazy, and that decision is doing them no good at all. Describing it mechanically gives you both…

Parents with one affected child often ask what they might do differently before the next one. Answer honestly: there are lists of suggestions in circulation, the evidence behind most of them is thin, and the question underneath is usually about blame.

Take the question seriously and take the guilt seriously alongside it. Give what is genuinely known, say plainly where recommendations run ahead of…

Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.

Do it slowly and write it in their words rather than yours. Most people arrive believing anxiety is one solid block that either has hold of them or…

When a child truly does not mind losing the privilege, taking more away will not get you anywhere. That is the moment to change approach rather than raise the stakes, usually to a structured parent programme that works on the pattern between parent and child.

Star charts fail with these children because the reward was never the point of the behaviour. What helps is a proper course of parent management…

Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.

It fits inside an argument, a shopping queue, the second before you send a message you will regret. The value is not the breath itself, it is the…

Cold water on your face, especially around the eyes and cheeks, slows things down fast. Splash it, or hold a cold flannel there for half a minute.

This is one of the few things that works when you are too far gone to concentrate on anything. It asks for no skill and no privacy beyond a tap. Lean…

Cross your arms over your chest, hook your thumbs together, and tap your shoulders slowly, left then right. You set the pressure and the speed.

Twenty or thirty seconds is enough to feel something shift, and most people find the breath falls into step with the tapping on its own. Warmth in…

When you are helping someone settle, put the technique in their hands rather than your own. They tap themselves, they set the pressure, they stop when they want to.

Being touched by someone else, even kindly and with permission, asks a lot of a person whose body has been handled badly before. Self-administered…

Trace a square in the air with your finger while you breathe: in for four along the first side, hold for four, out for four, hold for four.

The counting slows the breath to roughly the rate that suits the heart best, and the tracing gives your eyes and hand something to do, which is…

In the thick of it, keep your eyes open and give them something outside you to rest on. A fingertip, a doorframe, the line where the wall meets the ceiling.

Closing your eyes takes away the evidence that you are here and safe, and for some people it lets images in that they were holding off. Most…

Breathe in, hold it a moment, then let it out as a sigh you can actually hear. Not a polite one.

The sound is the point. A silent out breath does some of the work, and letting the voice into it adds a bit more, which is probably why sighing turns…

Tap the fleshy side of one hand with the other and say it plainly: even though I am feeling all this in my body right now, I can accept that this is how I am.

You can strip away everything else and this part still stands up. Naming the state and accepting it in the same sentence blocks the second wave, the…

Before you try anything, give your distress a number out of ten. Do the thing. Then give it a number again.

Even a drop from eight to six is worth having, because you were the one who moved it. That is often the more important result: not the two points,…

When you have gone numb rather than frantic, try a long low sound on the out breath. Voo, drawn out until the breath runs out, so your lips and chest buzz with it.

This is for the flat, far away state, not the racing one. The buzz gives you something unmistakable to feel when nothing else is registering, which…

After you have tried something to settle, check: how here do you feel now, compared with before? Do not assume it worked just because it usually does.

This takes ten seconds and does two jobs. It tells you whether that particular thing is worth reaching for again, and it slowly trains you to notice…

Rest one hand on your forehead and the other on your chest. After a few minutes, move the forehead hand down to your belly. Eyes open or closed, whichever you prefer.

Again the instruction is only to notice what goes on between the two hands. That noticing is quietly the training: it is body awareness arriving…

Two senses rarely get named: the one that tells you where your limbs are, and the one that tells you which way is up. Pressing your feet into the floor or slowly turning your head feeds both.

When someone feels unreal, or far away from their own body, these are the channels that have gone quiet. They carry plain information with no feeling…

Keep one strong smell for when you have gone flat, lemon or peppermint, and one soft smell for when you are wound up, something like lavender. Smell asks nothing of you, which is its whole advantage.

Set this up in advance, because the moment you need it is the moment you will not feel like planning. A small bottle in a bag, a sprig in a pocket, a…