Andrew Bailey

About

I will be honest about the difficulty of starting: for a lot of people the fear is that talking will make it worse, and that fear is not irrational. Badly handled, it can. That is exactly why the sequencing of this work matters as much as it does. We do not begin with the hardest material. Flashbacks and intrusive memories become more manageable once you have reliable ways to interrupt them, so we build those first and only then look at anything difficult. Nothing is approached until the means to handle it are already in place. That order is not optional and I will not depart from it to save time. I put in a long stretch in nonprofit and social-work adjacent posts, where I saw the damage done by people meaning well and moving too fast. It made me careful. If your fear is that talking will make it worse, that fear deserves a proper answer.