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on helping
the *poing* pointed me at this LJ entry about helping people, and i think more people might benefit from reading it.
i've always been a person who needed help in a very different way from everyone i grew up with, so part of this dawned on me very early. like the original poster, i need to be left alone to process, and anyone trying to "help" in other ways ends up adding to my stress. i decided back then that the much-vaunted "golden rule" was completely useless, and for a while i operated under the "reverse golden rule" -- don't do to others what you'd hate having done to yourself. that worked a lot better. but some years later i realized that it, too, didn't actually work well enough -- fortunately i am big on consent, and that meant i'd better ask somebody what kind of help they wanted instead of just leaving them alone when they didn't explicitly ask for help. so yeah, no rule whatsoever; individual consideration instead. it still doesn't work for people who require mind-reading to feel good about offered help, since i don't always succeed at that, but it's made a huge difference.
the original poster's last line is short and pithy, and for once pithy doesn't stand in the way, since it can be applied to either side: don't help me, help me.
i've always been a person who needed help in a very different way from everyone i grew up with, so part of this dawned on me very early. like the original poster, i need to be left alone to process, and anyone trying to "help" in other ways ends up adding to my stress. i decided back then that the much-vaunted "golden rule" was completely useless, and for a while i operated under the "reverse golden rule" -- don't do to others what you'd hate having done to yourself. that worked a lot better. but some years later i realized that it, too, didn't actually work well enough -- fortunately i am big on consent, and that meant i'd better ask somebody what kind of help they wanted instead of just leaving them alone when they didn't explicitly ask for help. so yeah, no rule whatsoever; individual consideration instead. it still doesn't work for people who require mind-reading to feel good about offered help, since i don't always succeed at that, but it's made a huge difference.
the original poster's last line is short and pithy, and for once pithy doesn't stand in the way, since it can be applied to either side: don't help me, help me.
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Oh, Godyeah. That's SO FRUSTRATING.
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