Helping our patients with empowerment to make choices

When living with others and society, there will inevitably be times when we are being “forced to compromise”. At least, that is our perception.

This may cause ongoing unhealthy resentment, anger, frustration, and negative impacts on our biopsychosocial health.

So how can we reframe that?

“I choose to compromise” is different to “I am being forced to compromise”. It’s a shift in perspective from “things simply happen TO me” to “things happen BY me or THROUGH me”.

Empowering people to make choices even when they feel like they don’t have one, can be an important process to improve their health.

Following our values will always have to reconcile with the values of others/society to some degree in order to have workability unless one is on an island by oneself.

Everyone are ultimately free to make choices, and at the same time, choices are not free of consequences. If we don’t like the consequences, we can make a choice to choose another option, but that is still our choice.