Thursday 27 August, 2009You Know More Than You Think You Do

Sometimes it seems as if one can’t absorb any more information about relationships and then at other times, it’s like there’s a never-ending gap in the brain that just wants to learn more, more, more.

When people find out I am a writer, there is one thought that seems to cross the minds of people almost all the time: and that is to wonder if I am an ‘expert’ and know more ‘secrets’ about relationships than they do. But I always tell people that there is no such thing (in my opinion) as a relationship ‘expert.’ One of the reasons I so firmly believe this is because I know too many social workers, psychologists and educated, clinical people who are just as messed up as the rest of us.

I’ve never forgotten the example told to me one day by a man of great intelligence in the human service field. He had been attending a seminar that was being led by a well-recognized author who made her living writing about anger: and yet during this workshop, she confided to her audience(made up of professionals only) that weeks at a time go by in her house where she and her husband don’t say a civil word to another. That kind of turned me off a bit, to say the least.

Another time, less than a year ago, I sat next to a female social worker, a very compassionate, very smart woman, who was crying her eyes out. She felt locked in a dead-end abusive marriage and no amount of talking and time spent with her dissecting the relationship was able to make her take any different actions that were necessary to change her life. She sniffed at me: “I always tell my patients that they have to change what they’re doing,” she said, “but I can’t do it myself.”

“Why do you tell people to do something that you yourself have trouble doing?” I asked her then, very curiously. Her answer was probably the most honest one I’ve ever heard. “It’s easier to tell someone what to do than to do it,” she said.

I am not knocking people who dedicate their lives to helping others expand, understand and hopefully affect their relationships for the better, because I spent a lot of my earlier years wanting to be one of these people. But neither do I want to be a person to tell someone what to do if I struggle with it myself. Words are easy to speak as advice is easy to give: but as everyone knows, the actually changes are really up to us, as individuals. It’s my belief that most of us know what we have to do to make changes in our lives…yet everyone knows that that’s where the hard part comes in.

Sometimes I think it just comes down to the recognition that we’re all human, we all struggle and mostly, we all try to do our best.