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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Self-compassion
Say this carefully, because there is a careless version that does real damage. Everyone is a bit ADHD is not what is meant, and it leaves a person feeling unseen. The honest version keeps the diagnosis exactly as it is and sets it back among human things: a hard version of something everybody deals with in some form, and not a verdict on your character.
We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot and We found him lacking in constancy (Quran 20:115). Forgetting and not following through are placed at the very start of the human story rather than at its edge.
طه
وَلَقَدۡ عَهِدۡنَآ إِلَىٰٓ ءَادَمَ مِن قَبۡلُ فَنَسِيَ وَلَمۡ نَجِدۡ لَهُۥ عَزۡمࣰ ا
We also commanded Adam before you, but he forgot and We found him lacking in constancy
Qur’an 20:115read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of the widely used Self-Compassion Scale showed that it mixes positively and negatively worded items, and that the negative ones, self judgement, feeling isolated and being swallowed by your own reaction, carry much of the link with mental health problems. Feeling cut off from other people is doing a lot of the work in that association. This is measurement research rather than a treatment trial, so read it as a pointer to where the harm sits.
Muris P, Petrocchi N. (2017). Protection or Vulnerability? A Meta-Analysis of the Relations Between the Positive and Negative Components of Self-Compassion and Psychopathology.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Shame feeds on the sense of being the only one, so being put back among other people takes some weight off it.
It tends to run the same way each time. You struggle with something, you feel awful about it, so you keep away from it, and anyone who raises it gets a sharp answer, which makes you keep away harder.
It rarely stays a matter of attention. The difficulties shape what you come to believe about yourself, that colours how you are with the people closest to you, and their responses feed straight back into the original trouble.
The aim was never to stop needing the aids. It is to find ways round the parts that do not work well, and then to keep using them.