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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Feelings and focus
There is a quiet loss of credibility in prescribing connection from a life that has none in it. It also flattens something that ought to be flat. You are not recommending a technique from outside the human condition, you are describing something you need as well. That is worth saying to a client occasionally, in one sentence, without turning the session into your own.
The servants of the Lord of Mercy are those who 'walk humbly on the earth' (Quran 25:63). Walking on the same ground as the people you are helping is part of the job.
الفرقان
وَعِبَادُ ٱلرَّحۡمَٰنِ ٱلَّذِينَ يَمۡشُونَ عَلَى ٱلۡأَرۡضِ هَوۡنࣰ ا وَإِذَا خَاطَبَهُمُ ٱلۡجَٰهِلُونَ قَالُواْ سَلَٰمࣰ ا
The servants of the Lord of Mercy are those who walk humbly on the earth, and who, when the foolish address them, reply, ‘Peace’
Qur’an 25:63read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review of experimental studies of social exclusion in psychiatric populations found that being left out feeds both into disorder starting and into it lasting. Most of that experimental work has used healthy volunteers, so the clinical picture is less certain than the underlying effect. It is enough to treat isolation as clinically relevant rather than as background detail.
Reinhard MA, Dewald-Kaufmann J, Wüstenberg T, Musil R, Barton BB, Jobst A, Padberg F. (2020). The vicious circle of social exclusion and psychopathology: a systematic review of experimental ostracism research in psychiatric disorders.. European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Advice you visibly live by lands differently from advice handed down.
Any self-disclosure is for the client's benefit, so keep it brief and keep the hour theirs.
You are allowed more than one feeling about the same thing. Relief and grief when someone dies. Love for a job you would walk out of today. Neither one cancels the other.
Time with people is not the nice extra you get to once the real work is done. Put it alongside sleep, medication and exercise rather than underneath them.
Some people are done with an argument in ten minutes. If the person you live with needs three hours, your quick recovery can look to them like proof that you never cared.