What’s up with advice? 👂

People new to the relateful culture often don’t understand how little we give advice. If someone has a problem and we know the answer, isn’t it coldhearted to keep it from them? What’s wrong with advice?

There’s nothing wrong with advice.

The issue isn’t advice, it’s that it often comes bundled with things that cost intimacy. Advice can sidetrack us from self-inquiry: Why do I want to change this person? What’s it bring up in me? Advice can stop us from checking our assumptions—do they want something to be different, or do they just need to be heard and validated? Do we really know better? Do we even understand what they’re going through, or are we just projecting our own past on them in a bad pattern-match? I recently found a cool frame for this in the parenting book “Good Inside” by Dr. Becky Kennedy. “Validation is the process of seeing someone else’s emotional experience as real and true, rather than seeing someone else’s emotional experience as something we want to convince them out of or logic them away from”.

This implies that when we try to convince someone to get out of an experience, it often feels invalidating. Even with the best intentions, logic often sounds like “See, you’ve got no reason to be upset!” The more painful the experience we’re witnessing, the more tempting it is to want to fix it, and yet the more invalidating it feels to be told what to do to get out of it. Relatefulness usually includes validating experiences.

Here’s some advice: if you’re going to give advice, start by seeing the other’s emotional experience as real and true.

With love, Jordan