Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I'm one of those people that others find easy to talk to, a character trait that people in my family call "the gift", something that many people in my family have had.  I get people telling me all manner of things about their lives that I assume they never tell anyone else.  I've had a complete stranger on a bus turn to me and tell me she thought her marriage was ending.  I listened to everything she had to say.  That wasn't the first such experience, there have been many, but through it all I usually just sit or stand and listen to what people have to say, often times all they want is for someone to hear them out.

When it comes to people I know, who know me quite well, I often get to the end of their flow of everything they have to say and I am then met with that questions of all questions "What do you think I should do?" - I've grown tired of that question, not because I don't want to help, I do, it's just that those who ask it rarely want you to actually answer the question.  When you do offer advice and say what you would do in their situation, sometimes they ponder it, but often they dismiss it, with some excuse lined up as to why they can't take that advice, therein lies the reality of the question - they've already drawn their own conclusions about what they can and cannot do, and what they are really asking for is an answer that they could not have possibly thought of before turning to you.  The trouble with that as an honest question is that often the only answers you can give that they would not have thought of, are answers that won't solve their problem, if anything they will probably create more.

I'm not a therapist, I'm a pragmatist, and often my advice comes down to practicality and how to overcome, or get around, issues and the problems they create for us.  My advice doesn't usually tackle the root cause and take it away, not because I don't know how but because I have learned from a very young age with this "gift" that people never tell you the full story.  No matter how open they may seem, no matter how trusting of you they may claim to be, there is always more to every story than they tell you.  It's not always a case of deliberate deception, if anything it's usually a case of them not connecting two things together in their mind that are relevant.  In any case, deception or not, without knowing everything you can never make a fully informed response.

Ultimately therein lies the truth about life - we each live our own and only we alone know our whole story and only we alone can make informed decisions about our lives.  The advice we seek of others is to see how their lives and their experience would shape their response to the same situation, but we often come to realise their advice would only work for them, not for us - the ultimate irony here is that they themselves rarely take their own advice which reduces the whole thing to a completely pointless exercise where everyone is simply asking you to do as they say, not as they do.  The sad conclusion to all of this is that if you want to solve your problems, you really have to do it yourself.  Seek therapy if you find that an overwhelming proposition but know in doing so that whatever they suggest you will always be the one to decide in the end, nobody can decide for you.  I think that is one of the reasons some people are so averse to the idea of seeing a therapist, because they have the misconception that they are going to tell them what to do and they don't want someone to do that.  The reality is a therapist won't do that - unless they're very bad at their job - they will instead explore the reasons why you have not been able to come to a solution yourself, and what is preventing you from doing so, and help you find a way to remove those obstacles.