Practices

When you assess a young person, take a reading of the adults as well: what they understand about the world their child lives in, and how comfortable they are in it.

A good deal of what arrives as the presenting problem is really a mismatch. A parent reads something ordinary as alarming, or something serious as…

Whatever approach the anxious person is learning, teach it to the people they live with. A skill that only one person in the house knows gets overridden by everyone else's habits.

Families have a settled way of responding to distress, usually built out of love, and it will win against anything learned in an hour once a week. So…

With a child, make it a job rather than a lesson. They are the detective, the worried thought is the claim, and the task is to collect what supports it and what does not before deciding anything.

Two columns on a page, in their handwriting, not yours. Ask what a friend would notice, what happened the last three times, what would have to be…

Do not tell a child their thinking is wrong, and do not hand them the better thought. Ask the questions and let them arrive at it themselves.

A conclusion someone reaches on their own stays with them. One that was given to them falls apart the moment they are frightened, because it was…