Humanised Listening

Some people are so accustomed to themselves as they are that abandoning what harms them requires a certain amount of time and effort—something that is not for the therapist to judge.

I recall a patient whose chronic pain made the periodic use of medication essential for clinical management. Yet, she was reluctant to rely on it.

Her refusal to take any medication stemmed from a fear of becoming dependent on it. She associated it with a previous experience, where it took her far too long to wean herself off an antidepressant she had used daily.

However, this was now a reheated emotion. What could have been resolved in a few follow-up appointments—if not the worst of the crisis at least—stretched into a long journey of many interventions. But, given her self-imposed limitations, perhaps that was the time she needed and was capable of allowing herself.

The most painful part of humanised listening is knowing that much of what is advised and prescribed will be ignored by the patient. Help is not always accepted. It does not always fit in the budget or in the mind.

This excessive attachment to what is at hand, to emotional experiences, creates problems because the healing process fundamentally requires detachment.

A patient may leave the consultation armed with doses of courage, tablets of patience, bottles of hope, and injections of faith. But that is not enough. It is essential to be a friend of change.

It takes time to understand the process. To break free from limiting beliefs, emotional blocks, recurring thoughts, and ambiguous feelings. To change, even if slowly, but to change nonetheless—to rediscover, transformed and renewed, the old self.

Comments

Anxiety

Anxiety is a very generous word, so generous that it makes a lot more sense in the plural, anxieties. This is because, like a large umbrella, a load of elements can fit under it. However, despite its multitude of disturbances and manifestations, anxiety can be traced back to quite simple and predictable stress triggers. In its origins, it is much more visceral and organic than people imagine. A common trigger, for example, is hunger. You can lose hunger, overeat, stick to a crash diet, all as a neurovegetative expression of stress. Irritability is another trivial trigger. You are more easily irritated, frustrated, and angry over nothing, cultivating an inner anger, sometimes silent, sometimes explosive. Loneliness is also an important trigger. It is a complex feeling that includes inadequacy, weakened belonging, nostalgia for everything that has already happened and for everything that cannot happen. It is a mood that can be thoughtful, rueful, self-defeating, filled with needi...

Delusions

I've attempted to discover a quick way to deal with confrontational scenarios by interpolating empathy with courteous demeanour. While it didn’t interrupt confrontations, nor made them avoidable, it seems that begging to disagree can work, so long as you’ve have first learnt to mirror what is being talked in a different point of view. I like to call those exercises tools for mutual understanding. It took me a while to understand that it is natural for some people to showcase colourful disagreement only to capture a topic by exhaustion. Funnily enough, no words can interpret with precision what a subject matter can bring to a vulnerable person. I say vulnerable not to explicate people who eventually become vulnerable, oh no. We are all vulnerable to small stressors, too many of them, too many times. Triggers, say, of how much sentiment you will drill in a matter of seconds. More than that, it is a delusion to ignore them. That’s righteous okay, I need to add. Subjectivity is always ...

Remaining Attitudes

Sometimes one cannot just let it go. While I can understand why a patient would like to give up, if he is willing to put himself walking inside the hospital, I must comprehend he wants to keep fighting. Tons of medicines, exhaustive hours later and nothing has changed but a frightened soul. Walking in, walking out of his room, the pace seems unfair and unreliable; but then again, the patient remains fighting. Never truly could understand how it happens, whether that is due to faith, love, or some sort of primal instinct, but people fight for their survival more frequently than we can bare to imagine in their shoes. It is too easier and human to surrender, I guess, but it is so surprisingly godly to battle one cell’s battle. Maybe that is what makes us more human: our will, I am not sure. I watch this all, so erratic and alone in my own thoughts, slightly resilient than the day before on my attempts at understanding this effort. I wish I could say for sure to all of them “it will be alr...

The Hyggelig Journey

Search This Blog