Silence is golden, clear communication is even better, and situational awareness is important. They do go together though.
People like to be helpful. And being of service is a wonderful thing.
When it becomes a control issue, however, that impulse to help can be detrimental. It can even be spiritual arrogance. Here are some examples as “helpfulness” with a control undercurrent:
We spend a lot of time in this world not feeling heard. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is to listen. It’s possible the person you’re looking to help wants to be heard rather than offered solutions. If you’re not sure if they want advice, you could always ask.
There’s a marvelous webcomic/blog (although she has 2 books now) called Hyperbole And A Half. The author, Allie Brosh, writes about her quirks and struggles in a very relatable way. One of the things she struggles with is Depression. In this story, she talks about what it’s like when people with no experiential understanding of chronic depression try to help someone who has depression.
But people want to help. So they try harder to make you feel hopeful and positive about the situation. You explain it again, hoping they’ll try a less hope-centric approach, but re-explaining your total inability to experience joy inevitably sounds kind of negative; like maybe you WANT to be depressed. The positivity starts coming out in a spray — a giant, desperate happiness sprinkler pointed directly at your face. And it keeps going like that until you’re having this weird argument where you’re trying to convince the person that you are far too hopeless for hope just so they’ll give up on their optimism crusade and let you go back to feeling bored and lonely by yourself.
And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something — it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing. You can’t fill it up. You can’t cover it. It’s just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.
It would be like having a bunch of dead fish, but no one around you will acknowledge that the fish are dead. Instead, they offer to help you look for the fish or try to help you figure out why they disappeared.
The problem might not even have a solution. But you aren’t necessarily looking for solutions. You’re maybe just looking for someone to say “sorry about how dead your fish are” or “wow, those are super dead. I still like you, though.”
The next time you feel the need to comment on something that is not directly your business, pause for a moment and think if your input was requested. If it was not, let it go. Write the information down if you must somehow get it out of your system, but do not share it. Silence is golden.
This post is part of a series called Monday Message, based on that day’s reflection from 365 Days to Enlightenment (authorized versions are currently out of print, working on a new edition). Check back next Monday for another one! You can also sign up for the Daily Message on my mailing list if you’d like to receive a new reflection every day. I also often post them to Instagram and Twitter, if either of those is a medium you enjoy.