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.

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32 practices

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When somebody manages a partner through anger, it is worth asking what the control is guarding. Very often the answer is a fear of being left.

Telling someone that nobody else would have them is that fear turned into a weapon, and it usually arrives when the person feels furthest away.…

Five minutesThe fear underneath angerCoreQur’an 65:3One line of research

There is a difference between stepping out and storming out, and most of it sits in whether the other person knows you are coming back.

Two failures sit either side of this one. The first is staying in the room until something is said that cannot be unsaid. The second is going quiet…

Five minutesChoosing your responseGottmanQur’an 43:89One line of research

If your break turned into disappearing for the night, look at it as fear rather than as a discipline problem. Anger is often a way out of feeling afraid, and so is running.

Shame teaches badly here. Telling yourself you failed at the skill tends to produce more heat, and heat is the thing you were trying to leave behind.…

Five minutesChoosing your responseGottmanQur’an 7:200One line of research

When it heats up today, slow everything down: your voice, your breath, your pace.

Speed is the fuel of a fight. Halve your tempo and the heat drops with it.

Five minutesStaying regulated in conflictEmotionally focusedQur’an 31:19Seen more than once

When you feel flooded today, name it and take a real break before you say a word.

Racing heart, tight chest, that is the signal. Step away, breathe, come back when steady.

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Five minutesStaying regulated in conflictGottmanQur’an 3:134Seen more than once

Take ten quiet minutes to decompress before you walk in the door.

Arriving already softened means the day's stress is not spent on the person you love.

Five minutesStaying regulated in conflictCoreQur’an 3:159Seen more than once

On a break, do not rehearse how wronged you are. Let the grievance go and let your body settle.

Thoughts like I do not have to take this keep you flooded. Turn to something calming instead.

Five minutesStaying regulated in conflictGottmanQur’an 13:28One line of research

For the item that never gets done, make an actual decision: cross it off, or find a way to genuinely want it. Leaving it sitting there is the only option that costs you every single day.

Taking it on often works through a person rather than through the task. You may not care about the paperwork, but you care about whoever is waiting…

Five minutesSystems for daily lifeADHD skillsQur’an 5:2One line of research

You cannot ask for something you cannot feel the want of. Before working out how to say it, spend a minute finding what you actually need.

This is why advice to communicate better so often goes nowhere. The words come out tidy and land as nothing, because there was no felt need inside…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 26:13One line of research

Ask what the feeling is trying to do for you. Anger clears an obstacle, fear gets you out, sadness calls for comfort, shame hides you from being seen.

Once a feeling has a job it stops being a defect you have to apologise for. That matters, because the ones we treat as shameful are precisely the…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 12:86One line of research

Nobody ever came for help because they were too happy. What arrives as irritation or flatness on the surface is usually fear, grief or shame underneath.

So when someone snaps at you, or when you go cold and clipped yourself, treat that as the top layer rather than the whole story. The useful question…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 40:19One line of research

Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.

Most people have to genuinely search for the answer, and the searching is where the work happens rather than in whatever they eventually say.…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 75:2One line of research

Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.

This hurts but I do not know why usually means the event, the feeling in the body and the meaning are being held separately. So join them up out…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 28:10One line of research

If the size of the feeling does not match the size of what just happened, it is probably carrying something older into the room.

Feeling has no real sense of when. An old injury arrives in the present body with all its original force, which is why a small remark can flatten…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 12:84One line of research

If all you can say is that you want to get away, that is already information. Nobody moves away from nothing, so somewhere in there is something that felt hard.

You do not need to know what it is yet. Hold the smaller version for a while: something here is difficult, and the pulling back is how I have been…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 91:8One line of research

You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.

A lot of the distress is not the feelings themselves but the argument over which one is the real one. Try saying both plainly, out loud: I am…

Five minutesFeelings and focusCBTQur’an 94:5One line of research

Often the feeling fits the situation perfectly and the size of it does not. You were right to be annoyed. The ten out of ten is the part that caused the trouble.

This is a useful thing to say to yourself afterwards, because it stops you throwing out your own read of what happened. Your sense that it was unfair…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 17:83One line of research

The intensity that makes you exhausting on a bad day is the same intensity that makes you good company. Enthusiasm and impulsiveness run off one engine.

Worth saying, because a conversation about emotional control can easily become a list of everything wrong with you. The aim is not a flatter version…

Five minutesFeelings and focusADHD skillsQur’an 91:8One line of research

Name their three current worries to yourself, then gently check whether you were right.

Knowing what weighs on them today is how care becomes specific instead of general.

Five minutesKnowing your partnerCoreQur’an 4:19Seen more than once

When someone says they feel nothing, find out where the nothing reaches. All the time, or only towards good things, or only here, in this conversation, when criticism is in the air?

The three answers point in quite different directions. Numb everywhere, day and night, is worth taking to a doctor. Numb to good things while the bad…

Five minutesWhen you go numbEmotionally focusedQur’an 50:37One line of research