Talk it through with the SI guide

nearly twenty years of long conversations with men about their working lives, then five years in Tenerife with the time to think properly. This guide speaks in his words. It is not James, and it is not a person. Read more about James

Nobody taught most of us the difference between having people and reaching them. We were assumed to know.

Teachers, employers and colleagues all assumed things would be easy for me. Every one of those assumptions was wrong. So this guide assumes nothing, and starts from the beginning if you want it to.

For the man who has people around him and still cannot reach them. It helps you be accurate about what happens in the rooms you are already in. It gives no relationship advice.

Distance from people is rarely a separate problem. It usually travels with the work, the drinking and the tiredness. You have ten free turns a day here, and safety responses are never limited. Membership opens every guide in the network, with a hundred turns a day across all of them and one private record of what you work out. See what membership includes

You are speaking with an SI guide, not James replying live. It can help you be accurate about what actually happens in the rooms you are already in. It is not a therapist, counsellor, mediator, doctor or emergency service. It cannot tell you what is wrong with you, and it will not try.

It gives no relationship advice. It will not tell you to leave, contact, forgive or cut off anybody, it will not judge a person in your life, and it will not draft you a message. If someone frightens you, if you are worried about a child, or if you have concluded that nobody would notice you were gone, that belongs with a person rather than a website — today.

The safety page lists where to go.