Remco Tensen

Trigger warnings are antithetical to a fundamental principle of mental health care. When you decide to follow me, I'll assume you posses the cognitive and emotional acuity of an adult in using your brain to navigate the real world. I don't set out to offend, but I don't care if I do, either. Life is your trigger warning.

When Israel makes artificial pork, will muslims eat it?

"Not everything can be resolved through kindness, which is why angels carry swords, not flowers."
(not a C.S. Lewis quote)

In daycare and personal health care we are trained to be kind. Most of the time that is the right impulse. People come to us already carrying enough. When kindness becomes the habit of removing every friction before the client has to meet it, we have a problem. We wash what they can still wash, decide what they can still decide, and cushion the consequence when they refuse. It feels like care.

Over months it becomes the opposite: the person learns that nothing really depends on them anymore. The work is to keep the distinction clear between what someone cannot do and what they will not do. When they cannot, we step in. That is the duty. When they can, or can with a little support, we stop doing it for them. We say what is at stake, we stay in the room, and we let the next move be theirs.

If they take it, we help with what comes after. If they do not, the result is allowed to stand, as long as it stays relatively safe. That is harder than both pure kindness and pure distance. It asks for a continuous judgment about capacity, and for the willingness to sit with the discomfort that follows.

The same applies between colleagues. A team that treats every disagreement as a threat to the atmosphere will eventually stop saying what it sees. The people worth working with are the ones who still have their own standard and are prepared to defend it, even against you. That is not a lack of loyalty. It is what keeps the work honest.

Kindness is necessary. It is not enough.