Advice

For those of you who don't have access to my Facebook profile, here is a note I posted last night about frienship and giving out advice:

I gave someone some very good advice last night, and in the process of doing so, shared some very personal experiences with them. My advice was based on a combination of my own experiences (which mirrored an important perspective in this person's situation), common sense, and a desire to prevent this person from being hurt any further in their situation.

There are two important points I want to make:

1) I don't consider myself any kind of infallible advice guru or anything. Not only do I need to be better about taking my own advice sometimes, but I don't know everything (imagine that!)

2) I realize that people make mistakes and that some unhealthy behaviors are really, really hard to break. I accomodated that into my advice-giving.

My advice in this case was about this individual continuing to remain involved in what I would consider a toxic relationship. This isn't your average "bad, crappy relationship." This (and my evaluation is based solely on what this person conveyed to me about the situation) is the type of relationship that could break a person and put them on a path that would require years of recovery.

To be more specific, as far as I was concerned, this person was putting up with a high-level of game playing and emotional abuse from the other party. I had already noticed signs that the toxicity of this relationship was severe enough to be affecting said person's self-esteem, body image, and evaluation of things that I KNEW were once important to them. Classic signs of an abusive relationship, right? Now, I didn't say all that. My advice was more gentle. Advice has to be given in stages sometimes.

I was pleased that I seemed to be getting somewhere. My thought process at the time was that sharing some of my own personal experiences increased the effectiveness of my advice. I was even promised that the person was going to do a lot of thinking on their long drive home. "Good," I thought. That's a first step. Just think. Hard.

So imagine my surprise that all of my good advice and a couple of hours on the topic were disregarded in about...5 minutes after this individual was gone from my presence. Surely that must be a new record! Am I wrong for being annoyed...no, ANGRY... about that?

I have had friends disregard my advice before. And I have disregarded plenty of my friends' advice myself. It happens. But it's usually a "slippage" process. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? You start off feeling strong and then maybe a day or so later, not so strong. Maybe even a couple of HOURS later...not so strong.

This was literally 5 minutes. In one ear, out the other. Am I wrong for being frustrated? My level of frustration is equivalent to where I would be if I had told another friend something similar and was back to square 1 with them for the third time in a week. That is just an excessive level of hardheadedness. If you don't value my opinion, why waste my time? Also, when you feel weak, you are supposed to turn to your friends; what else are they there for other than to lift you up?

Not only was I annoyed, but when I was honest with my friend about my disappointment (and frankly, feeling a little insulted) at how quickly our conversation went out the window, I became the bad guy. How did THAT happen? I'm the bad guy? Really? Not the person who is playing you day in and day out and putting you through all this, but me? Ok. Now on top of feeling frustrated and disappointed, I feel betrayed as well.

For those of you who know me well, the one thing that will cause me to see red faster than anything else is to feel betrayed. Betrayal has exited out people faster from my life than any other cause.

After stewing over this for a few hours last night and parts of today, I realize that this is something I'm powerless to change. The fallout is that I am no longer friends with this individual (not my decision) and my former friend is off in Toxicity Land with no one to watch over them. This initially worried me quite a bit (still trying to be a good friend, can't say I'm not loyal), but I have to let it go. People have to be free to make their own mistakes.

Lesson Learned: Stop trying to be Captain Save 'Em. And, if you can't deal with the fallout from the trainwreck, refrain from observing the collision.