The Hyggelig Journey

There is much a doctor can never say. Keeping silent hurts, but it is a necessary exercise when a patient arrives at the clinic seeking more than just a prescription for her illness. It is the part of the vocation that neither university teaches nor the church canonises. This silence is a miracle when one knows how to listen to it. The sacred religiosity of the profession ends here, faced with the sharp wit of a client probing for an answer. If, for every patient who complains about their spouse, I allowed the slightest hint of concession and my expression betrayed even the faintest amen during the consultation, rest assured, I would be sealing the marital grave myself. That’s right—when someone starts complaining, they already have their bags packed, merely awaiting a formal excuse, and nothing serves that purpose better than something straight from the doctor’s mouth to decree the end. But being a companion to silence does not prevent me from muttering a few words of caution here ...

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 ...