Practices

The alarm listens to your body as well as to the world, so once you are stirred up the stirring becomes its own evidence. Replaying the scene keeps feeding it.

This is why anger stays up half the night long after the other person has gone to bed. The rehearsal feels like processing, but mostly it keeps the…

To react is to act again. Some of what fires in you belongs to an older scene, and the person in front of you has simply walked into it.

This is not a way of excusing what you do, it is a way of aiming the work. When a reaction is far bigger than the moment deserves, ask what it…

In a bad moment your attention, your seeing and your remembering all narrow onto the threat. So your memory of the row is a partial recording, and so is theirs.

Worth holding on to before you go back over who said what. Neither of you is necessarily lying when the two accounts differ. Starting with here is…

Most of us rehearse the crushing line we wish we had said. Try spending that same time writing what you would actually like to say next time, and keep it short enough to remember.

Take one real episode from the past week and write two things: what happened, and one sentence you would rather have used. Something like I am…

Anger tells you to say the thing. Fear tells you to leave. You can feel all of it and still not do what it asks, and that gap is the whole skill.

Try naming the urge in your head as it arrives: this is the urge to send the message. Named, it stops being the only available next step and becomes…

Let your hands fall open, palms up, on your lap or at your sides, and breathe there for a minute. It is oddly hard to stay in full fight with open hands.

Anger lives in the grip as much as anywhere. Opening the hands removes one part of what the body is preparing to do, and the rest of the system tends…

A calming skill handed over at the wrong moment reads as your anger is not welcome here. For someone taught as a child that their anger was unacceptable, that is the old prohibition arriving again in kinder clothes.

Let the anger be seen first. Say that it makes sense, that there is a reason for it, and only then offer anything that settles the body. The order…

Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.

Pressing against something solid gives the mobilisation an outlet with nothing broken and nobody hurt. Keep going until the charge drops a little,…

Listen for the sentence that says the child could manage all of this perfectly well if they only decided to. However kindly it is meant, that is the belief to take apart.

It sounds like encouragement and it works like a verdict, because it says the ability was always there and only the willingness was missing. In a…

Medication does not make somebody care more. It narrows the distance between meaning to do the thing and doing it, and that distance is exactly what the other person has been feeling as being let down.

It helps a couple enormously to have the right name for what has been happening. The intention was real every single time. What went missing was the…

A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.

Plenty of couples decide that any argument means something is broken, and then start managing each other into blandness, which nobody enjoys. The…

Before you fix or argue, validate: that makes sense, I can see why you feel that. It cools the heat.

People calm down when they feel understood, not corrected. Understanding first, solutions later.

A sharp sense of unfairness is common with ADHD, and it often ends in walking out rather than in raising the matter. The instinct is usually sound. It is the timing that costs you.

Try a rule of your own making: when something at work feels unjust, write down what happened the same day and do nothing else for twenty four hours.…

The teenager with ADHD is often the one who admits it while everyone else produces a story. That is not worse judgement about right and wrong, it is less thinking ahead about how it will land.

Parents can read a caution or a suspension as proof of a moral problem, when the honesty in the room points the other way. Instead of a lecture,…

Anger takes speech in one of two directions. Some of us go silent and let the face carry it, others turn suddenly fluent and very precise.

Being articulate under provocation feels like being in control, and the two are easy to confuse. A cleanly aimed sentence often does more damage than…

Most outbursts are a last try at getting something across. Underneath the noise there is usually a need that has gone unmet for a long time.

It rarely arrives as a message, though. It arrives as volume, and the other person hears the volume and misses the content entirely. Treating it as a…