ABOUT

My daughter was about two when she stubbed her toe, huffed, puffed, and said "fucking hell." 

I wasn't cross with her. I was just suddenly very aware of what she'd been watching. She wasn't doing anything wrong — she was doing exactly what she'd seen. And that was the moment I stopped being able to tell myself it wasn't that bad.

I'd been a psychologist for nearly a decade by that point. I understood why people get stuck. I understood patterns, and loops, and why knowing something and being able to do it are two completely different problems. I knew all of it.

What I came to understand — properly, in my own life, not just in a clinical setting — is that shouting is what happens when you've been trying the same thing on repeat and it keeps not working.

You want the noise to stop. You want to get out of the door on time, just once, without it becoming a thing. You want the sibling fighting to stop, the shoes to go on, the 500th question of the day to be the last one. You want a different outcome and you keep not getting it. The frustration builds, and eventually it explodes.

I started paying attention to the loop. Where it started. What I was doing that wasn't working. What I needed instead. I got steadier. Not because I tried harder — trying harder had never been the answer — but because I started using the right tools at the right points in the build-up.

I still lose it sometimes. But where it used to be most days, it's now once every few months. And when it happens, I know exactly what to do next.

That shift is what I built my work around. Because if it took me — someone who had spent years studying this — that long to crack the practical application, then the advice most parents are working with was never going to be enough. You don't need more information. You need the right tool for the moment you're actually in.