Sam Peters, LPC

Sam Peters, LPC Therapist (LPC), speaker & author of Built Different. Affirming, practical plays for neurodivergent brains and the people who love them.

Every school I've walked into has a sign somewhere that says Bully-Free Zone. I've never walked into one that could back...
09/08/2026

Every school I've walked into has a sign somewhere that says Bully-Free Zone. I've never walked into one that could back it up.

That's not a knock on schools. Bullies emerge from any large group of people. They always have. The sign is a wish. What the kid needs is a play.

Here's the play. There's a kid who pulls up to another kid's drive-thru every single day and orders a cheeseburger. The poke. The noise. The one comment they know lands. They're not hungry. They're ordering the reaction. A fight is a cheeseburger.

And the kid who hands it over, the one who blows up, is the one who ends up in the hallway. Every time. The window keeps handing out cheeseburgers, so the orders keep coming.

So I teach the kid at the window to hand them a chicken sandwich. Flat voice. "Okay." A shrug. A look back at the worksheet.

Something that isn't what they ordered.
Nobody keeps coming back to a window that never gives them what they ordered. It takes a while. It works.

It's not the whole answer. The adults in the building still owe that kid the rest of it. But the sandwich is the one part the kid controls, and a kid with one thing they control walks into the building differently.

This play deals in reality. Bully-free deals in utopia.

Teachers, don't name anybody! Just tell me how they order cheeseburgers in your room, the thing that always gets a reaction. One word.

(Free playbook, link in the comments.)

Out of sight, out of mind is not a saying in this brain. It’s closer to literal. If I’m not looking at it, it does not e...
09/06/2026

Out of sight, out of mind is not a saying in this brain. It’s closer to literal. If I’m not looking at it, it does not exist in my mind. Not “I’ll get to it.” Gone.

That includes people. It isn’t that I don’t care. It’s that they stopped being rendered.

And then the guilt about the silence makes reaching out harder than the silence was. So the gap gets longer, and the reaching gets scarier, and you build a whole story about how they must feel about you by now. A year in, the story’s a novel.

Here’s the play, and it’s dumber than it should have to be. Set a recurring reminder with the person’s actual name on it. Not “call people.” Their name.

And this part matters. The reminder’s job is not to make you text them. Its job is to bring them to mind so you get to make a decision. Most of the time the decision takes four seconds and the text takes ten. The year was never about the ten seconds. It was about the rendering.

It has nothing to do with your love. It has everything to do with your neurochemistry.

One more thing, and I mean it. Don’t underestimate how glad people are to hear from you. In your head they’re angry. Usually they’re just glad.

It’s a long weekend. Who came to mind just now? Go ahead and text them. That’s the whole assignment.

(The free playbook has more of this. Link in the comments.)

Today is opening day, and I have been an Arkansas Razorbacks fan since before I could walk, so let me tell you what seve...
09/05/2026

Today is opening day, and I have been an Arkansas Razorbacks fan since before I could walk, so let me tell you what seventy-some thousand people are about to do at 3:15.

They’re going to stand up, put both arms in the air, wiggle their fingers, and yell a pig call at the top of their lungs.

“Woooooooooooooooo! Pig Soiee!!”
Three times. Grown adults. Surgeons. Grandmothers. Me.

Nobody’s going to look weird doing it. Nobody’s getting a note home.

Now picture one kid doing the exact same thing in fourth period. Arms up, fingers going, a noise that helps their body settle. That kid gets a behavior plan.

Same arms. Same noise. Same reason, if we’re honest, because a stadium is a nervous system regulating itself out loud and everybody in it knows that’s what’s happening. The only difference is the room, and how many other people are doing it with you.

I’m not saying fourth period should be a stadium. I’m saying that when we call a kid’s regulating behavior a problem, a lot of the time the actual problem is that they’re the only one in the room doing it. That’s a loneliness problem, not a behavior problem, and it has a completely different fix.

Find them their stadium. A room, a group, a team, a Saturday. Anywhere the thing their body needs to do is the thing everybody’s doing. Then watch what happens to the “behavior.”

What’s yours? The ritual you’d never do alone and can’t wait to do with your people. One word.

(Free playbook, link in the comments. Go Hogs!)

Tell me a process with twelve steps in it and I'm gone by step three.Not gone like I stopped caring. Gone like the shelf...
09/04/2026

Tell me a process with twelve steps in it and I'm gone by step three.

Not gone like I stopped caring. Gone like the shelf is full. Working memory has a shelf, and mine holds about three things.

So by step four I'm nodding and holding nothing. By step twelve I'm going to ask you to say it again, and you're going to think I wasn't listening.

I was listening. There was nowhere to put it.

The fix is cheap. Write it down. Chunk it. Clear, direct language, no figurative stuff, no "you know what I mean." Three steps, then the next three.

Teachers, this is the kid in your room too. The one who asks "wait, what?" right after you explained it perfectly. They heard you. The shelf was full.

Where do you lose people, step three or step seven? One number.

09/03/2026

The question I’m going to get from yesterday’s issue, so let me just answer it here.

“Okay, but the bus comes in four minutes. There’s no time for choices.”

Fair. Here’s the thing though. The choices aren’t the play. The choices are one way to do the play. The play is: keep the requirement, hand over the how.

At 7:52 with the bus coming, “the how” is tiny. Shoes at the door or shoes in the car. Teeth now or teeth with the door open while you find the backpack. Not a menu. One fork.

And most of the real work doesn’t happen at 7:52. It happens the night before, when nothing’s required yet. “Tomorrow’s a bus day. What’s the order?” Let them say it. A kid who named the order at 8pm is a kid whose nervous system already agreed to it. In the morning you’re not delivering a demand. You’re reminding them of their own plan.

That’s the difference. Same shoes, same bus, same standard. The ambush is what locks the system, not the task. Take the ambush out.

What’s the 7:52 in your house? The one that turns into a standoff every single time. Name it.

(The full play’s in yesterday’s issue. Link in the comments.)

09/02/2026

A grown-up has a plan. They wrote the plan. They want the plan. Shower, then the email, then the errand.

Then somebody says, "Hey, don't forget the email."

And the email is gone. Not put off. Gone. The wanting drained out of it the second it became a requirement, and now they're standing in their own kitchen, furious at an email they were about to write anyway.

Meanwhile a kid is standing in another kitchen, rigid, over two minutes of teeth. You say it again, calmer. Tighter. You add a consequence. Tighter still.

Same lock. One of them is loud enough to see. One of them looks like a person quietly not doing a thing they said they'd do.

It isn't about the task. It isn't about ability. It's about what this nervous system does with the word "required." For most nervous systems a demand lands as a demand. For this one it lands as a threat, and the body says no before the thinking brain shows up to weigh it.

Today's issue of the playbook is the whole mechanism, the four-step play that changes the conditions instead of lowering the bar, and the version for when the locked-up person is you. Plus the honest part about the name people use for this and where it breaks.

Link's in the first comment. 😊

Most people have a volume k**b for anger and sadness. Some of us got a light switch.Zero to twelve. I'm fine, I'm fine, ...
09/01/2026

Most people have a volume k**b for anger and sadness. Some of us got a light switch.

Zero to twelve. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm all the way angry. There's no five. There was never a five.

If that kid is sad, they're all the way sad. That isn't drama and it isn't manipulation. There just isn't a midrange to land in.

Which changes what you're allowed to ask for. "Dial it down" is asking for a setting the hardware doesn't have. It's like asking a cow to give orange juice.

So stop grading the volume and start watching the reset. How fast does it come back down? That's the number that means something, and it's the one that actually improves.

The play is to build the switch a landing spot ahead of time. A spot in the room, a walk to the office with a note, a song, whatever's already been agreed on so nobody has to negotiate it at twelve.

You know the kid. K**b or switch? And what's the landing spot that works in your room?

Free playbook, link in the comments.

For some nervous systems, a request doesn't land like a request. It lands like somebody grabbing your steering wheel at ...
08/31/2026

For some nervous systems, a request doesn't land like a request. It lands like somebody grabbing your steering wheel at sixty miles an hour.

And if somebody grabs your wheel, you don't evaluate it. You react. You'd swing on them.

In retrospect, sure, maybe they were reaching for the windshield wipers. Doesn't matter. In the moment it registered as somebody taking control away from you.

That's what a demand can feel like from the inside for a demand-sensitive kid. It isn't defiance. It's a hand on the wheel.

Which is why pressure doesn't produce compliance with these kids. It produces a standoff, because now the whole thing is about who wins.

The play is to give up winning, visibly. Say it once, plainly. "I understand it's upsetting. I'm not going to argue. It needs to get done. I'll check back in a few minutes." Then leave the room.

And when you come back and it's done, they don't get a parade and you don't get a victory lap. Because for a lot of these kids, praise reads as "I told you so."

Theoretically it could have been fairies. Let it have been fairies.

Does pressure make your kid dig in, or shut down?

(More on this one in the free playbook this week. Link in the comments.)

Last week I wrote about the boring thing. The daily work nobody claps for, and how I finally got it done by moving the d...
08/30/2026

Last week I wrote about the boring thing. The daily work nobody claps for, and how I finally got it done by moving the decision out of my head and into a structure: a fixed time, a reminder, a list already written by a version of me who wasn’t having a bad day.
That works when the problem is deciding. It doesn’t work when the problem is doing.
Here’s the doing problem. When most people finish a task they don’t like, the brain pays out a little dopamine. That’s the “hey, do that again” chemical. It’s how habits get built. When this brain finishes the exact same task, it can hand back cortisol instead. The stress chemical. The don’t-do-that-again chemical.
So it’s the same chore, and one person gets a treat and the other gets swatted on the hand. Then we call the second person lazy.
It isn’t laziness. It’s a bill. And once I understood it was a bill, I stopped waiting for the payout and started building one.
My creative brain is very good at this, it turns out. Dishwashing dance party. Every shirt folded gets three M&M’s. Each word of the email response gets sung to the tune of Row Row Row Your Boat as it’s typed out. These sound ridiculous. They hold up, because the chemistry doesn’t check whether the reward was dignified.
Put the two weeks together and you’ve got the whole play. If the problem is deciding, change the structure. If the problem is doing, change the fuel. Neither one is caring harder. Caring harder was never on the menu.
If this is your kid: the meltdown over the chore isn’t about the chore. It’s about the bill. Help them build the payout. Let it be dumb. Let it be M&M’s.
What chore does your brain charge the most for?
(The free playbook has more of this. Link on my profile!)

“Sometimes I get away with it” isn’t a rule your kid learned. It’s a slot machine.If the consequence lands sometimes and...
08/29/2026

“Sometimes I get away with it” isn’t a rule your kid learned. It’s a slot machine.

If the consequence lands sometimes and not others, they aren’t learning the rule. They’re learning the odds. And a machine that pays out sometimes is the most addictive machine humans have ever built. You keep pulling. That’s the entire design.

So inconsistency isn’t just “not working.” It’s actively teaching them to try again.

Saturdays are where this one lives, by the way. The screen limitations that hold on a Tuesday and fold on a Saturday because you’re tired and it’s the weekend? Your kid isn’t learning that weekends are different. They’re learning the limit is negotiable and today might be the day.

The fix is boring. Anticipated, communicated, consistent. Say the consequence before it’s needed, say it the same way every time, and let it land every time.

One more thing, because this part gets missed. It can feel like yelling even when it isn’t. Sharpness counts. Your tone is part of the consequence, and they’re reading that too. Consistent doesn’t mean harsh. It means predictable.

Which rule in your house pays out sometimes? One word.

(More like this in the free playbook. Link in the comments.)

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