Should We Considder Bridging The Gap?

[chibam]

@AppleblossomIME, people-pleasing can be the most satisfying way to live your life if you are dealt a winnable hand. Too many times, I've been stuck in situations where, as far as I can tell, you can't make those around you truly happy. The best you can hope for is a reprieve from them spraying bitterness and/or negativity out into the environment.

I've come to see living in such a community as very much like living in an abusive family: your definition of  "a good day" is one where you don't get beaten.

As I say, a lot of people are just determined to be miserable and to inflict that misery upon others, it becomes impossible to make them happy. So what's a people-pleaser to do?

On the flip side, we can't allow people-pleasing to die because if it does, who will ever make us happy? If anything I believe the overwhelming amount of emptiness and unhappiness in the world comes down to the shortage of a willingness amongst society to make an effort to please those around them.

Mind you, I think a lot of my difficulties come down to the fact that I just don't get what other people want. I was trapped in a disastrous therpay situation for 7 years because I just couldn't figure out what my therapist wanted. In retrospect, the clues had been there from very early on, but I missed them all, because I just couldn't wrap my head around her skewed priorities. To this day, although I can recognize it as a fact that she did place her materialistic obsessions as her primary priority, it still mystifies me how a person ever could prioritize such trivial things over more important matters.

How can you please a person - or a family, or a community, or a society - that you can't understand? The old saying goes: "treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself", but how do you work that in a world that wants to be treated signficantly differantly to the way you want to be treated?

That rift robs you of the capacity to be a force for good, or to ever reap any good from your environment. You are toxic to your neighbors and they are toxic to you.

[Appleblossom]

@chibam

I really liked the way you discussed pros and cons of people pleasing.  Dont think I can give it up completely, nor should I.

In this strange new world of counselling and medicalising of life stages and psychosocial needs, not all therapists are equal.

I am glad you have detached from the materialistic one.  Some do not have sufficient self awareness of how their unconsious bias may effect their most vulnerable clients. 

I would not want to be young again. There are advantages in getting older.

[chibam]

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@Appleblossom wrote:

I am glad you have detached from the materialistic one.  Some do not have sufficient self awareness of how their unconsious bias may effect their most vulnerable clients. 

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You couldn't be more right.

I read a thing a few months back from a therapist who is also a prolific writer and something of an activist, too. Her brand of politics is no mystery and, in broad terms, they are politics I agree with.

But then I read this piece she wrote a few months back in which she basically blamed her unhapppily single clients with differant politics on their own political views - saying something like: "If they were unwilling to change their unreasonable political views, it was no wonder they couldn't find a partner." This really hit home for me, because it was quite similar to devestating commentary I got about myself from my own therapist.

It was very disappointing to hear this from a person who I believed (politically speaking) had their head screwed on right.

But I think that this incident, along with my experiance with my own therapist (from the opposite side of politics) points to a deeper corruption withing the therapy industry as a whole. I think it's a case of therapists being loathe to think of people they considder "wrong" (e.g. opposite politics) supporting one another, strengthening one another and worst of all - procreating and spreading wrong-view spawn across the world.

They don't want the people they see as "wrong" to find love, community and support; they want those people to be as isolated and broken-spirited as can be, so they can "turn" them to their own viewpoints.

I hold my own political stances dearly, but I can't endorse this sort of conduct. Even the wrong deserve to find love, IMO. Even the wrong deserve to have a community. Even the wrong deserve to have a place where they are supported and cherished for who they truly are. I might disagree with a lot of what they say, but I could never deny them those basic rights. To do otherwise would be unthinkable.

Yet that is exactly what so many therapists - from all manners of ideology - use their profession to do everyday; deliberately deny their patients all hope of love and community until those patients convert to the therapists' ideology. What's that old saying? "Absolute power corrupts, absolutely"

Even writing about this is making me feel physically sick right now.