Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
Closeness arrives much faster in a small group that keeps meeting than in a wide circle you see now and then. If you want to feel less alone, pick the small thing that repeats.
Six people who show up every Tuesday and say something real will know each other within a couple of months. Sixty acquaintances will not. It does not have to be therapy: a class, a study circle, a team, anything with the same faces and a reason to be there. What does the work is the repeating rather than the subject.
Qur’an and Sunnah
and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion (Quran 90:17). Compassion is described as something a group grows in its members, which is what the repeating is for.
ثُمَّ كَانَ مِنَ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ وَتَوَاصَوۡاْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَتَوَاصَوۡاْ بِٱلۡمَرۡحَمَةِ
and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion
Qur’an 90:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised pilot with patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, brief loving-kindness and compassion training increased acceptance more than continuing with mindfulness practice did. It was a pilot with a small sample, so hold it lightly. What it points at is that a short shared practice can shift how people hold themselves and each other.
Feliu-Soler A, Pascual JC, Elices M, Martín-Blanco A, Carmona C, Cebolla A, Simón V, Soler J. (2017). Fostering Self-Compassion and Loving-Kindness in Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder: A Randomized Pilot Study.. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Seeing the same few people often gives everybody enough turns to be known.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If you can do a cutting impression of someone, you already own the machinery for empathy. It is the same copying, pointed somewhere else.
Years of putting up with things build a thicker skin, and that same skin is what stops you being reached by the person in front of you. It can thin again.
The real feeling usually crosses someone's face for less than a second before the polite version arrives. If your attention is elsewhere, the polite version is all you will ever meet.