Practices

Let yourself weep. Tears over someone you love are not a failure of faith or of strength.

Crying is not the opposite of patience. It is the body grieving honestly, and it passes more cleanly when it is not shamed.

Notice where the fear sits in your body, the chest, the throat, the gut, and breathe gently toward it.

The body remembers what words forget. Meeting the sensation with breath, not judgement, begins to loosen it.

Reflect your partner's feeling back to them in simple, slow, soft words, using their own words where you can.

Empathic reflection, gently naming and mirroring back what your partner is feeling, tells them they are not alone in it. Keep it slow, simple, and…

Once a day, take your partner's emotional temperature. Ask how are you doing, and mean it.

Not out of politeness, but because you truly want to know. Small check-ins build trust over time.

When your partner talks, shift the focus off yourself. It is not about being interesting, it is about being interested.

Postpone your own agenda for a while. Tune into their world before you bring yours.

Try to see the situation from your partner's side, not your own. Assume there is a good reason they feel as they do.

Their reality has its own validity. Start by looking for why it makes sense, not why it is wrong.

Ask open questions that cannot be answered yes or no, then really listen to the answer.

Tell me the story of that opens the heart. Follow up on what you hear instead of waiting to talk.

Hold your advice until you fully understand, or until it is asked for. Understanding always comes before solutions.

Words of understanding must precede any words of advice. Always. Fix later, if at all.

Say back what you heard, then validate: I hear you saying this, and it makes sense you would feel that way.

Validation is not agreement. It is showing you understand even part of their experience.

Take your love needs to your partner, not outside the relationship. Going outside almost always makes it worse.

When something is missing, ask for it at home. Seeking it elsewhere deepens the wound.

You can say what an SSRI does in one sentence. It blocks the doorway that carries serotonin back out of the gap between two nerve cells, so more of it stays there for longer and is likelier to be picked up.

Worth being able to say plainly, because most people are carrying something vaguer and more frightening than that. It also sets a fair expectation.…

The blockade is partial. Serotonin is not trapped in there forever: enzymes still break it down and the transporters that are not blocked carry on working.

That matters for accuracy and it matters for reassurance, because people do picture something flooding and stuck. It also explains why serotonin…

Serotonin syndrome comes from stacking, and the second agent is usually something nobody thought to mention: a migraine tablet, a cough medicine, a herbal remedy for low mood.

Triptans, tramadol, dextromethorphan, linezolid and St John's wort all count, as do other antidepressants. Someone who mentions in passing that they…

When someone says they react badly to normal doses of almost everything, take it as information about their body rather than as a personality trait.

Bodies differ in how fast they break a medicine down. Give two people the same dose and one of them may be holding far more of it for far longer,…

Whether a medicine works can turn on something as ordinary as taking it with food or moving it to bedtime.

Vilazodone is the clear case. On an empty stomach a good deal less of it is absorbed, and the nausea it can cause is easier to sit with overnight…