Common Humanity, Contributing, and Values: one small step towards their unity

Common Humanity

From the self-compassion literature common humanity is described as "... perceiving one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than seeing them as separating and isolating." (taken from a BING search 2024)

Contributing

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) uses contributing as a distress tolerance strategy.

Values

Over and over again in therapy I refer to values. How we, my clients and myself, want to be with the world. What characteristics and strengths we want to develop. So that we work towards a life that we want to participate in and engage with.

 

One of the strategies I am implementing to participate in this myself is that as of June 2024 I will be donating $1.00 per client seen to a monthly charity organisation. Plus $1.00 for me.

It is a small step.

I sincerely hope that this small action will weave together the elements of common humanity, contributing and values together and help my clinic be part of something bigger than just myself and my clients.

My first charity was Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF: Doctors Without Borders) which is described as "... an independent international medical humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters". https://msf.org.au/. I chose this charity in part due to my former 2nd placement supervisor who donated a lot of his time to MSF. A donation was made at the end of June.

This month the chosen charity is the Animal Welfare League. https://awl.org.au/.. I will write more about the benefits of pets later. But for now, this charity has been chosen for Sammy.