When you sit with someone who is grieving, or facing a decision they can't undo, the instinct is to fill the silence — to offer frameworks, reasons, next steps. The 9th-century Sufi psychologist Al-Harith al-Muhasibi noticed something uncomfortable: our urge to speak in those moments is rarely about the other person. It's about our own discomfort with witnessing. This connects strikingly to what attachment researcher Peter Fonagy calls 'mentalizing' — the capacity to hold another person's inner state in mind without collapsing it into your own. The leader who can sit in that gap, who can resist the pull to resolve or reframe, is doing something rarer than giving good advice: they are offering their nervous system as a container. Saturday is a good day to notice whether your helpfulness is actually about you.

Who in your life do you rush to advise — and what would you have to feel if you stopped talking and just stayed?

Drawing from Sufi moral psychology combined with contemporary mentalizing theory — Al-Harith al-Muhasibi (Kitab al-Ri'aya, c. 9th century CE) and Peter Fonagy (Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self, 2002)