Josephine Aligwekwe

There's a kind of person who never really gets angry. Reasonable under pressure. Slow to take offence. The one who can see everyone's point of view, which is usually true and occasionally a way of avoiding having one of their own. If that's a description of you, it's worth asking a question that tends to be uncomfortable: where does yours go? Because the anger is generally not absent. It's being managed, and the management has costs that arrive somewhere else, in a form that doesn't look like...

There's a moment a lot of parents describe and very few say out loud. Your child does something ordinary, refuses to move, whines at the wrong pitch, ignores you for the fourth time, and the reaction that comes out of you is enormous. Not proportionate. Not the parent you intended to be. And afterwards, in the quiet, the recognition that lands hardest: that was my mother's voice. Then the guilt, which is often worse than the incident. What's Actually Happening When your reaction to your child...

A friend describes a mistake they made at work and you're immediately generous. Of course it wasn't a disaster. Anyone would have done the same. You genuinely mean it. Then you make a comparable mistake, and the voice that arrives is nothing like the one you just used. It's precise, it has receipts, and it's still available at three in the morning six weeks later. Most people notice this discrepancy and conclude something is wrong with them. What's actually happening is more interesting than...