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Courses, straight answers and practices, all together. Type it the way you would say it.
40 results for we argue about the same thing
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Shame
When someone tells you they have failed, the most useful thing you can do is nothing clever. Let your face stay soft and keep looking at them.
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Feeling from the inside
Let the uncomfortable thing be uncomfortable, without arguing with it. People are often surprised by the relief that follows.
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Making it stick
If a practice looks pointless, you will have dropped it by Thursday. Before you take on anything new, get clear on what it is meant to be building in you.
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Choosing your response
Draw a small circle on three separate scraps of paper without thinking about it. Then look: same size, same spot on the page, same direction of stroke, same starting point, nearly every time.
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Question the thought
A belief about yourself comes with a feeling somewhere in the body, an emotion, and a set of things you then do or avoid. Argue only with the words and the rest of it carries on exactly as before.
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Bringing the future closer
Do not ask whether you feel like it. The answer is no, today and every other day. Ask how you will feel about it later.
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Get started
Sometimes the last minute really does produce your best work. Often it produces your worst, and those nights are much easier to forget.
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Systems for daily life
Support does not have to stop at eighteen. Plan for it to thin out gradually through the twenties, at a level everyone has agreed rather than one that gets argued over every month.
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Your sense of time
A small job due tomorrow feels heavier than a big one due next week. Everyone works this way. It is simply stronger with ADHD, and it quietly wrecks any list ordered by importance.
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What anger actually is
Your anger is usually arguing for something. Underneath it sits a judgement about how things ought to be and, almost always, something you care about.
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Feelings and focus
Worry does two things at once. It makes the problem bigger than it is and it makes you smaller than you are. The second half is the one that usually goes unchallenged.
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Worry that will not switch off
A false alarm, a habit of thinking, and a religious accusation that has no text behind it.
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Feelings and focus
Some of what you believe about yourself is not a distortion. Things really did go wrong, often for years. What can be argued with is the conclusion you drew from them, that this is simply what you are.
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Feelings and focus
Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.
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Your nervous system
The tools that slow things down mostly use your head: naming what is happening, standing back a little, putting the distress at arm's length for now.
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What anger actually is
If you catch yourself saying you were teaching someone a lesson, ask what the lesson cost. Were you paid for the teaching, or are you the one still paying?
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Structure and routine
Rather than arguing that someone ought to get organised, ask one question. Would your life be better if fewer things slipped, fewer people were annoyed with you, and you spent less of the day worrying about what you had forgotten?
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Treatment and medication
Move the family's picture from a child who will not do as they are asked to a child whose capacity for holding themselves in place is genuinely limited. It is a change of category, not a softening.
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Choosing your response
Do not only correct the thought, correct the sentence. Rather than do not shout at me, try can you take those off, I want to talk to you.
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Making it stick
Knowing something calmly and feeling it are two separate achievements, and the second takes longer. If you can say the reasonable thing but it does not touch how you feel, you are partway, not failing.
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Systems for daily life
Instead of guessing what pulls you away, catch it happening. Keep a scrap of paper beside you for a week and note whatever took you off, at the moment it takes you off.
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Food, caffeine and fuel
Working out what you have comes before choosing what to take. The right remedy for the wrong condition is still the wrong remedy, however good the remedy happens to be.
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Get started
When somebody looks like they have stopped caring, it is often that they have stopped expecting it to go well. Giving up on yourself tends to come after a long run of trying and being told it was not enough.
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Get started
The good news is that most of us only run three or four of these. A short list is something you can genuinely keep an eye on.
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Choosing your response
You can tell someone they have hurt you without your voice showing it. The message and the heat come apart, and it is usually the heat that stops the message being heard.
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Cool the body first
When one thing fills your view, everything around it stops registering. You can be staring hard and taking in almost nothing.
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Equanimity and perspective
The useful part of this kind of practice is not the calm. It is noticing that the angry commentary running in your head is commentary, and that you are not obliged to follow it.
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When you go numb
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.
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What worry does
Listen for the words I can't. When anxiety is doing the talking, that phrase turns up long before any evidence does. Let us try and see is the same situation with the door left open.
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Your sense of time
One more episode tonight is obviously worth it, and by eleven the next morning it obviously was not. Nothing changed except where you were standing in time.
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The fear underneath anger
If you genuinely cannot remember what you said, that is often true rather than a dodge. Under a big surge of stress the part of the brain that writes the story goes quiet, while the part that records the feeling gets louder.
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Treatment and medication
The therapy that helps adult ADHD is not really about arguing with your thoughts. It is practical work on how your week is built, and it works because you are the one who can go and rebuild it.
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Shame
A child facing a frightening parent often reaches for the safer story: I am the bad one and they are fine. It costs the child their sense of worth and buys them a world that still makes sense.
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Your sense of time
The inner clock does more than one job. It tells you what time it is now, how long that took, how long things usually take, and it taps you on the shoulder when a particular time arrives.
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Cool the body first
Look along a shelf of anger books and the advice converges: bring the body down first. Mostly what differs is the packaging, so take whichever version you will actually use.
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Emotions as signals
Point at the body. 'Your hands went up just then', or 'you put your head in your hands', gives a feeling something solid to stand on.
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Righteous anger and perfectionism
The alarm system behind your anger cannot be beaten into silence. It settles when it is understood and soothed, which is slower and far more reliable.
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Bringing the future closer
Ask people how it went. How was that meeting, how am I doing, what did you make of it. Nobody enjoys asking, and the information is not available any other way.
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Practising under provocation
Some people move through the day half expecting to be slighted, and the scanning itself wears them out. If most days seem to contain someone who did not give you your due, part of the pattern may be in the looking.
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Being seen and judged
Afterwards, say out loud what actually took place. You spoke without planning it and it went ordinarily. That sentence is the part that changes something.