Dr Tony Bates: Kindness is love dressed in plain clothing

Dr Tony Bates believes that being kind is the most effective way to help people who are experiencing mental and emotional pain

Tony Bates: "Kindness is the power that energises our therapeutic programmes, treatment regimens, and recovery models."

I was born on this day a long time ago. I mention this because I’m more aware than ever today that what I write comes from a lifetime of highs and lows. Anything of value I have to give, I’ve probably learned the hard way.

We each have our truth, acquired through our joys and sorrows, failures and successes, finding and losing love. We are indebted to others whose wisdom has given us handrails to guide us through tough times.

Our truth comes from the depths of our hearts. It is woven over time from what we see, feel and learn from living our lives. It has come from being honest with ourselves and discovering what matters.

When we speak our truth we offer it to another, not as a judgment or a condemnation but as a gift to help them live their lives more freely.

Human beings are amazing in terms of their creativity, ingenuity, and ability to survive and adapt. Reading about the passionate restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral in a weekend newspaper was inspirational. It made me proud to belong to this species.

But human beings are also fragile. They experience moments when their world falls apart, and they can feel incredibly vulnerable. Most of us have been there. And when we experience these ‘mini breakdowns,’ we look for a lifeline to keep us connected and afloat.

I’ve been privileged to work with people when everything went dark for them; their hearts were broken, and their confidence shattered. Although I may never have heard the word ‘heart’ in my clinical training as a psychologist, I believe it holds the secret to what it takes to heal.

Kindness is an energy that comes straight from the heart. It is love dressed in plain clothing. It is the most powerful and underrated intervention we have to reach people in mental and emotional pain.

Kindness is the power that energises our therapeutic programmes, treatment regimens, and recovery models. Without this quality, these interventions can feel little more than something else being done to the person in pain. The efficacy of mental health ‘treatments’ lies in how we ‘treat’ people.

A review of more than 5,000 people receiving psychotherapy in various National Health Service settings in Britain found that the most significant factor in whether they found therapy helpful was the quality of their relationship with the therapist. People got better when they felt cared for, listened to, and taken seriously. Of course, they also needed practical help for real-world problems they were facing, but it’s unlikely a person will get better by being told what to do by someone who clearly doesn’t care about them.

In my work across different mental health services, I encountered people who presented with a wide variety of personal problems. Their hurt reflected different ways in which life had touched them — the price they paid for being open and letting others in.

Common to each person I met was a very poor sense of self. They struggled to know who and what kind of a person they were. They often loathed their apparent inability to manage their lives. This loss of self-belief may have been a temporary reaction to some upheaval or something that had haunted them most of their lives.

Kindness can transform a person’s sense of themselves. It can cut through the fog of their presenting ‘symptoms’ and touch their hearts. It awakens in them a sense of hope. When they are treated with dignity, it changes how they see themselves. Hope, dignity, and appropriate support enable a person to trust themselves and face their difficulties.

Kindness is also an antidote to toxic self-criticism. We gradually learn to greet familiar negative thoughts that come tumbling into our minds with a smile, and see them for what they are: bullies to whom we have given too much power. A painful waste of time.

In her poem ‘Kindness’, Naomi Shihab Ney writes: “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.”

Being aware of our own fragility enables us to be kind. Our vulnerability is a superpower that enables us to befriend someone in distress. Each of us, whether professionals or ordinary people, has the ability to be kind, gentle, forgiving, and make people laugh. This is true no matter what is going on in our lives, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ a person we may think we are.

To be there for someone we care about who is in pain, we need to start by connecting with our hearts and remembering what life has taught us. When we speak our truth from the depths of our own heart, with kindness, that is our greatest gift.