Ordinary Advice Doesn’t Work in Extraordinary Situations
If You Can’t Respect that then You can Just Shut Up
I once had a Southern Baptist Pastor call me in for an appointment. I was a newly single mother, and my life was hell. The first thing he told me was that I needed to stop talking about my “unfortunate circumstances” because it wasn’t a normal situation, and my talking about it was “making good people uncomfortable.” This was when I knew for sure that I would never be Southern Baptist. I’d been wondering about that for a while but this was the clincher.
He went on to say that people tried to give me good advice, but that I kept “making excuses” for why that advice woudln’t work. What they did was stupid shit like telling me to follow the insulting Dave Ramsey’s financial advice, to examine my heart to make sure there wasn’t unconfessed sin in my life, and to make time to be grateful that things weren’t worse. They had also suggested that I needed to stop letting people live rent free in my head, which makes me just want to puke.
They were convinced that this was how things work. It must be in the Southern Baptist Manual that I missed getting becuase I wasn’t there that day. They pretty much all said the same shit and it was shit that I had tried over, and over, and over again for more than a decade. It didn’t fucking work. These were the kinds of people who were middle class, married, both had professional jobs, two kids, and a white picket fence. The worst thing that had ever happened to them, it seemed, was that their cousin’s best friend’s dog died.
In other words, these people had no clue about reality. I am not sure that it’s just the demographics of the particular Southern Baptist church I was in at the time, but I suspect that the demographic of the entire denomination is people living comfortable middle class lives. I’m happy for them, I really am, but they can hardly advise on poverty or much else. They are the kind of people that will never understand me or where I’ve come from and so it was just time to move on.
I should have said “I’m sorry that my living in the real world makes people uncomfortable, perhaps they should try being like Jesus” but I apologized, promised to do better, and submit to the wishes of the pastors. I was crushed, but I kept telling myself that I was scum for making “good people” feel uncomfortable.
Many years later, I met a woman in a different church in a different denomination. She was almost twice my age, and was a mother figure to me, or so I thought. I guess as a woman with deep mother issues, it was impossible for me to know that she was toxic. She assured me that she could turn me into a decent person, and after about a year or so told me that I was getting to where I would be a decent person soon.
She took over my finances completely, and while you could argue that I should have known better, in some ways I’m not sure I did. The truth was that I did need practical help with many things, and she was willing to provide those things if I was willing to pay the price. It cost too much in the end and I needed the help of others to extricate myself from that situation.
She made me follow ideas that would have turned me into a carbon copy of her. I was her project, set up to make herself feel good about helping. The thing is, a lot of the practical help really was helpful, but it cost me a lot. It cost me sanity, it cost me my integrity, it turned me into her bitch. I did some dishonest things for her, and she lied a lot, but she was always mad if I lied to her.
It seemed like she had cared at first, but she only cared as far as she could see someone she could manipulate and turn into her. I look back now and I see how horrific the whole situation was. When I finally emerged from that situation, I lost what I thought had been a close friend of fifteen years, because although he didn’t know her, thought I was the one who had done her dirty, and told me that if I didn’t fix that relationship, then the relationship between he and I would change.
This person told me that all I did was use people until I sucked them dry, then went on to the next person. I spent much time agonizing over that particular accusation because if he was right, I wanted to fix it. My mental health professionals and close friends helped me work through it, and I came to realize that I was not like that. I had been abused and I had to get away and that abusers would say those kinds of things to me to guilt trip me back to them.
Thanks to these people, I did not take the bait, and I accepted the loss of the friend who threatened me also. What was interesting about that was that this happened right after I started my recovery process. I learned the hard way that some people needed me dysfunctional to serve their own desires, and that if I were healthy, I wouldn’t be useful to them. It was a hard lesson to learn.
My personalities had started to emerge at a faster rate, all needing attention and special care. As they came out, I began to work together with them, but they kept on coming, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Again I was told stupid shit by people that were actually well-meaning, especially again the thing about not letting people live rent free in my head. I was told to work on myself first, despite that fact that these personalities are all me.
The three-year-old personality who is here because they tried to drown me, the one beaten as an infant for being a “little sinner” who was manipulative and rebellious, the one raped by daddy’s friends: telling them not to let people live rent free in their heads is not just unproductive, but dangerous. It’s trivializing their stories and not helpful in working through the trauma.
These people get upset when I try to explain why their way won’t work for me, especially because of the multiplicity, and instead of just accepting that I can’t use that advice, they treat me like I am stupid by gaslighting me. They insist that it’s advice that works because it worked for them. In their mind that means it works for everyone.
In the end, I have to just shut up and listen to them go on and on in order to keep the peace and not be rude. But I’m considering going the rude route. The people who have the right to speak into my life know who they are. They are the people I trust completely, people I love, people who are my friends because the love me, because they love us. Anything one of these people says to me is taken very seriously, and their advice is usually excellent.
Quite frankly, I’ve gotten to the point where if a person hasn’t earned that right, if they don’t believe in my multiplicity, if they want to accuse me of lying, if they don’t know me that well, if they can’t respect that sometimes their advice isn’t helpful, or is even harmful, then they can just shut the fuck up.
