The Problem with Advice

Maybe if it said “Today I Am Pissed” instead…

“If I never again hear advice to “keep a journal” or “take up meditating” in response to my difficult emotions, I will be delighted.’

This was a FB post from last week that I can’t stop thinking about.  I don’t know who I’m speaking for but I know it’s not just me.  Journaling and meditation are great tools and more people should have access to them and encouragement to use them.  But for some of us who have not been encouraged to speak up, who do not feel safe speaking up for whatever reason, advising us to go journal or meditate is another way of telling us to swallow our own thoughts,feelings, and experiences.  I’ve been journaling since I was 8, and practicing mindfulness of one form or another since I was 14.  The result is not a better ability to manage difficult emotions.  It’s mastery of keeping them to myself, of not sharing things that need to be shared, things that need to be spoken aloud.  It’s been a way of keeping things even more to myself.  By now I know really really well what’s going inside me, but I continue to believe there is no place for that inner truth in the outer world.  Because people are still telling me to go journal and meditate on it.  What I hear is, “keep keeping that to yourself.  Don’t let any of that spill over into shared space.  Don’t bother me with all that inner stuff.”  The result is that I don’t trust that inner stuff.  It’s okay for me to contemplate on my own, but not worthy or clean enough for public consumption.  

First, ask if I journal or meditate and then ask what my experience with those practices has been.  Then, take the advice of another recent FB post:  “Instead of telling me to journal, meditate, cut out coffee and sugar, or see it from someone else’s point pf view, try just staying present and honoring where I am right now.  Let me feel what I’m feeling in the presence of another human being. I promise it won’t kill either of us.”