IT’S ODD, BUT WHEN WELL-MEANING FRIENDS TELL ME, “YOU SHOULD JUST …,” the solutions they offer all too often miss the mark. The effect of the offer can be the opposite of what was intended: the advice can feel like a judgment amplifying a sense of failure.
Carl Jung says, “People think you have only to ‘tell’ a person that he ‘ought’ to do something in order to put him on the right track. But … nothing is achieved by telling, persuading, admonishing, giving good advice” (The Undiscovered Self, p. 43, [CW 10:555]).
What’s typically lacking in these misguided attempts to be helpful is understanding. Before you can truly be helpful to someone, you first must find an authentic way to hear and be with that person. Unfortunately, you cannot reach a place of real empathy and understanding quickly or easily. Understanding requires patient listening.
If you jump right away to your “solution,” after a person shares their problem, it’s likely that you’re actually trying to defend yourself against an authentic encounter rather than engaging in an honest attempt to be helpful. More often than not, what a person sharing a problem hopes to get from their interlocutors is not a quick fix. What they want instead is to be heard, to have their suffering or struggle acknowledged, to find some sympathetic company in the midst of their misery — because feeling miserable can be so isolating.
Sadly, “giving good advice” and offering the “obvious solution” tends to increase rather than decrease the isolation a suffering person feels. When that happens, the advice ends up providing no solution at all.
The problem with “good advice” lies in the fact that it can be and often is a form of what I call the “success fallacy.” The logic of the fallacy goes something like this: “I once had a problem, which I successfully solved by doing X. Therefore, if you simply do X, you’ll solve your problem, too.” This logic is faulty, because it assumes that we are all the same: that your problem and mine are the same, that your capabilities and mine are the same. My problem and capabilities may be different than yours in some potentially crucial ways, however — and if I manage to do something like what you did, I very probably will not enjoy the same successful outcome that you did.
Because you are different in meaningful ways from the other person, and your life situations are different as well, the authentic response to someone sharing their problems with you would be to listen patiently to them, rather than to cut the encounter short by giving them the “good advice” that you’re sure will “solve” what you assume (rightly or wrongly) to be their problem.
Instead of advice, you could offer compassion, empathy, and an ear able to hear. When you feel you’re really ready to help someone, you’ll find yourself walking with them, feeling with them, supporting them, encouraging them, and even suffering with them as they continue on their quest to discover their own solution.
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