Partners, managers, friends who go quiet, strangers and when it's more than a habit

The rule holds everywhere. A few situations need their own paragraph.

Partners. This is where the reading runs most and where the check is easiest and least used. The person at the dinner table is the person most likely to tell you the truth when asked once, kindly. "Rough day?" at the door, before the reading has had time to settle in, saves most evenings. And the sample argument in chapter 14 applies most strongly here. You are the safe one, and the safe one gets the weather.

Managers. The two-line email is the modern form of the reading, and it's read by everyone who gets one. Managers send short emails because they send a lot of emails. If Thursday matters, the check is one line in the reply, about the meeting and not about your standing. And if a manager really is unhappy with your work, they'll tell you, because that's their job, and the reading can't bring Thursday forward.

Friends who go quiet. People's lives fill up. A friend who's slow to reply for a month is usually a friend with a month in it, and the other account is "something's happening for them" rather than "something's happened between us". The check here is a message about them. "Haven't heard from you in a bit, everything all right?" If it's about you, they'll say. Mostly it's a month.

Strangers. Leave it. Always. There's no day behind a stranger's face that you'll ever learn, and there's no check available, and nothing you did could have reached them. The neighbour who didn't wave was looking at their phone.

Children and teenagers. A teenager's mood is not about you in the ordinary run of things, and reading it as though it is teaches them that their weather is a problem for the household. Notice, offer, and leave it. If they want to tell you, they'll tell you when the noticing has been quiet enough to feel safe.

When it's more than a habit. If the sense of being watched and judged is with you in every social situation, if you dread meetings and parties for days in advance and go over them for days after, if you avoid things because of it, that's the pattern the NHS describes as social anxiety, and the NHS says it's common and treatable and doesn't tend to go away on its own. See a GP, or refer yourself to NHS talking therapies. The method here may help alongside, but it isn't the treatment. Likewise if the reading has been with you your whole life, in every relationship, and the fear of rejection shapes who you get close to, Downey and Feldman's work suggests it's a pattern worth taking to a therapist rather than a book.

When it is aimed at you. If the moods in your house are aimed, with contempt in them, and you find yourself frightened of the person you live with, this book has nothing to say to that except that it isn't a reading. Trust it. The National Domestic Abuse Helpline is on 0808 2000 247.