What can we do? Someone around you is in distress, needs help, you ask what you can do and then do your best. Most of us want to be helpful. But occasionally others in distress don’t want to be helped. Or they want help but not the help we are offering. I often have people come to me in frustration, they hear friends, family or co-workers living through challenges and want to help. So the person I know asks the other in distress if they can help. The answer is yes. But then the person I know begins to give advice, to make change, or to swiftly address the challenge. The person in trouble is not interested in “that” offering and turns it down. They want help but not “that” help. So the person I am talking to is frustrated, “S/he said she wanted help and I gave it to him/her and then they didn’t want my help, what gives?”
This scenario is more common that you might imagine. On the positive side we are a society of helpers, people go online and absorb all kinds of helpful information and remember lessons learned from their own lives. There is a kind of high that comes with offering good advice or a helping hand to someone in distress. The trouble is that the person in distress participates in the same social media you do and has her/his own ideas of what help they want. If the advice or helping hand falls outside this expectation it will be quickly turned down, maybe even dismissed.
And for some reason a person trying to be helpful who has had their help declined is one very unhappy camper. If the one in distress gets more upset the one whose advice or help has been declined will have a tendency to say, “There you go, you didn’t take my suggestion or offer and look where that got you.” None of this is a recipe for a healthy community spirit.
One observation I make to those whose advice has been declined is to try and think like the person who is struggling. Try to imagine their world-view and the kind of help they are accustomed to, the solutions that work for him/her. Then let you offering of advice or helping hand be informed by this insight and the chances of successful assisting this other person will go up dramatically.
One of the reasons such advice comes easily to me is that I actually have limited first-hand information or skills to help the other. Having nothing first-hand to share takes away the arrogance of thinking I know best. All I know is who knows, so I can ask the other what kind of help has been supportive in the past and assess from that what kind of resources will be helpful now. I then think about all the people I know who think like the person in distress and try to link them. I find people are much more likely to move forward with my connections because they can tell I have a sense of their worldview and am not confusing it with my own.
There is an expression that not every problem is a nail and not every solution is a hammer. There is a need to assess not only what the challenge is the other is facing but also how the other is thinking about the problem and offering solutions that are consistent with this insight.