Learning to hold things with compassion

In counseling work, I often see folks who hold certain past memories or past loss with a lot of shame, anger, helplessness or resentment. This often gives them a lot of grief because those feelings of shame, anger, helplessness and resentment tend to “metastasize” to other unrelated areas of their lives leading to even more grief.

As Family Doctors, I am sure you have seen this pattern many times. It’s hard to stop this cascade isn’t it?

Helping our patients to hold these memories, experiences, thoughts and feelings mindfully or even better still, with compassion will help.

How can we do that?

By cultivating and practicing it ourselves perhaps. On average, Family Doctors as a group can be very self critical aren’t we?