Worried about someone else
You are not the one struggling, and you are still in it.
Most of what is written for families is written about the person who is unwell. This is written for you: what actually helps, what to avoid saying, and where your part ends.
Who are you worried about
Narrow it, if you want
Nothing here tells you what is wrong with them. There is no checklist to match somebody against, because deciding what a person has when they have not asked you to is its own harm. And none of it is a guarantee. They have their own say in this, and if things do not improve that is not a verdict on how well you did any of it.
1,570 practices
Showing 30 of 1,570. Every one carries a verse or a sound report and a named piece of research, and every one is a draft.
Whatever is driving it, behaviour that frightens someone is frightening. The reason behind it does not soften what it was like to stand on the other side of it.
Two people can do something that looks identical from outside and mean quite different things by it. That difference matters for what will help the…
Working out what someone meant by hurting another person is a conversation for the person who did it. Said to the one who was harmed, they were not really trying to hurt you lands as being talked out of your own experience.
Anyone who has been on the receiving end of violence has usually spent a long time being told it was not what it was. Even a kindly meant explanation…
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…
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…
Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.
This is the cheapest work available and it is nearly always skipped, because it feels too obvious to count. Notice when your worst moments land: late…
Try swapping the word. Instead of I got aggressive, try I was defending myself, because that is much closer to what your body thought it was doing at the time.
The word you reach for decides what happens next. Aggressive is a verdict on your character, and verdicts send people into hiding. Defending yourself…
Anger and fear are not two separate weathers. They run through much of the same equipment in the body, which is why the two can feel almost identical from the inside.
Heat rising, breath going short, focus narrowing to one person: that is the same list you would give for the ten minutes before a hospital…
Anger is often a bluff, a show of size put on by something that feels small. Knowing that is not an insult to you, it is probably the most useful thing you can know about it.
The bluff works on other people, and it works on you too, which is why the voice gets biggest right at the moment you feel most exposed. You do not…
Keep one word ready for when the heat arrives: danger. Asking what feels dangerous here gives you something to answer instead of somebody to beat.
Answers are allowed to be small and unimpressive. Being seen as useless. Being talked over again. The value is in having a question short enough to…
When a conversation is getting hot, change the geometry. A step back, sitting down instead of standing, ending up side by side rather than face on, all of it lowers how much threat your body is taking in.
Somebody coming too close reads as a threat before a word has been said, and it runs both ways, so you are also the person standing too close to…
The angry face is standard human equipment. It looks the same in every country, and people born blind make it too, so nobody had to teach you either to pull it or to read it.
That cuts two ways for you. Yours is showing when you are sure you are hiding it, and people answer what they see rather than what you meant. And…
Your eyes flag a threatening shape before you have properly looked at it. By the time you are weighing up what is going on, the alarm has already gone off.
So the spike itself is not a decision, and there is no point arguing with it or feeling ashamed of it. What you can do is give the slower part of you…
A colleague's frown is being read by very old equipment that is watching for something pointed coming towards you. The reaction it produces is not a judgement on you, and quite often the frown is not about you at all.
Before you answer the face, get one piece of actual information. Ask what is going on, or simply wait for their first sentence and listen to it. Most…
The gap between your car and the one in front belongs to nobody at all, and still, somebody moving into it lands like a break-in.
Old territorial machinery is running on a stretch of road you do not own and will never see again. Seeing that clearly on the motorway makes it…
If it is more urgent than this
If you are frightened for their safety, or for yours, a page is not the right speed.
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