The next time

Somewhere in the next few days, something will get spilled. It might be milk. It might be a colleague's error landing on your desk, or your own mistake turning up in an email, or a remark from your father on the phone. You'll feel the heat in your face, and the old sentence will present itself, ready to go.

Three small preparations will make the other sentence more likely.

Pick your replacement. If you wrote a "when X happens, I'll do Y" sentence at the end of chapter 10, you've done this already, so say it aloud once more. If you skipped it, do it now. Work out which label you use most, on others or on yourself, and write the sentence you'll say in its place, in the form of what happened and what's needed. "The figures on page four are wrong. Can you fix them by three?" That's the whole of it.

Tell one person what you're doing. It could be your partner, a friend, or an older child. "I'm trying to stop calling people names when I'm angry, including myself. If you hear me do it, you can tell me." This gives you an ally. It's also a small act of not hiding, which is practice for chapter 12.

Decide what you'll do after the first slip, before it happens. "When I hear myself say it, I'll go back within the hour, say what I said, and take it back."

That's all the preparation there is. You were handed some sentences a long time ago, by people who'd been handed them too, and for years they've passed for the truth about you. They were only ever things that were said, mostly on someone's bad day. What you do with them now is up to you. The people around you, especially the small ones, will get whichever sentences you choose to give them.

The milk is on the table. Say what happened, and hand over the cloth.