“The more experienced member realizes that we don’t tell anybody what to do. People only accept and use the advice they’re ready for.” (ODAT, 26 November)
Either they resist it, and then you’re the baddie, or they go with it, and it goes wrong, and you’re the baddie. Sometimes they go with it, and it works, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. The individual is no further ahead in learning to handle their own lives.
If you do someone’s homework for them, yes, it’s done, but they have not learned anything.
What’s amazing is how the advice on how not to be depressed, anxious, or generally upset was all provided to me in my first couple of years in the fellowship, but it was years more before I really made the policy decision and effort to assimilate and apply the advice.
Turns out I was happier in my drama than in the anticipated horror of letting go of who I thought I was.
When the person wearing the earplugs takes out the earplugs so they can hear you telling them they have earplugs in their ears, the first thing they say is, ‘I couldn’t hear you. I had earplugs in.’ They put the earplugs there in the first place.
The attraction to depression, anxiety, and upset was there, and I adopted them. I need not have, but I did. This is why others’ problem-solving, fixing, advice, Tellings of Wise Precepts utterly failed. I had to burn out all of the perverse pleasure in my self-centred indulgences before I was really willing to hear The Different Way.
Whatever my protestations, I did not want a solution; I wanted to retain my drama but somehow have it be your fault. People trying to help me and ‘failing’ to do so was the perfect mechanism for this. I won’t be so easily duped on the other side of the tug of war!
To look at the positive side of this, I can indeed share
what has worked for me, but without the slightest pressure or inclination to
force this on others, and without the attempt to make up for others’ unwillingness
or resistance with force, charisma, or excessive help on the application front.
Here are the tools; over to you.