Counsel To A Student

I recent­ly respond­ed to a stu­dent who was try­ing to mud­dle through an awk­ward rela­tion­ship with­out becom­ing bit­ter. She asked for some coun­sel, and here is an anonymized ver­sion of what I told her. The pain she is expe­ri­enc­ing is com­mon enough, and so I post it here in the hopes that it will prove help­ful to some­one else as well.

You have already said that you are pray­ing and so I will move on to oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions. There are sev­er­al prac­ti­cal things you can do.

The first is to real­ize that you can­not avoid being hurt. You have no more choice in that than you have when falling off a cliff. Phys­i­cal­ly, if you get in a fight then your jaw will prob­a­bly be sore regard­less of who wins. Emo­tion­al­ly, it is unlike­ly that you’ll come out of a rela­tion­al melt­down with­out at least the equiv­a­lent of a sore jaw. Just as in box­ing, how­ev­er, you can choose whether you’ll get hit in the face or the stom­ach. Where you are struck is based upon your guard, so block the blows that mat­ter and absorb the ones you must.

Prac­ti­cal­ly, this is a mat­ter of where you pin your hopes. If you pin your hopes upon roman­tic recom­mit­ment, then that is where you are most vul­ner­a­ble to being hurt. If you pin your hopes to renor­mal­iza­tion of friend­ship, then that is where you are most vul­ner­a­ble to being hurt. The pain of dashed romance is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be far more intense than the pain of an awk­ward friend­ship, but you must choose your own course in this.

As an aside, I’m not so sure that “guard­ing your heart” in the Bible is about pre­vent­ing painful emo­tions (which seems to be the way that it is most often preached–if you can just guard your heart suf­fi­cient­ly then you can avoid being hurt). Jesus and Paul both expe­ri­enced much pain caused by oth­er peo­ple. Jesus was betrayed by Judas and wept when Mary and Martha blamed him for the death of Lazarus, Paul was aban­doned by vir­tu­al­ly all of his friends when in prison and wept when he left the Eph­esian elders to head towards his fate in Jerusalem. Guard­ing their heart did­n’t pre­vent them from expe­ri­enc­ing pain. I think we can fair­ly say that it reduced the amount of the pain that they felt, and it cer­tain­ly helped them to sur­mount pain. But it did not pre­vent pain. That’s a very Bud­dhist notion which just does­n’t fit into the Chris­t­ian faith. Bud­dhists detach, Chris­tians love. And love always seems to involve a cer­tain mea­sure of pain.

The sec­ond is to lis­ten to your mind more than your heart. Pre­tend this was hap­pen­ing to one of your friends and then pre­tend to give them some advice. I’m sure you would have wise coun­sel for them–so be sure to take your own med­i­cine. Your emo­tions are going to be very poor guides up this par­tic­u­lar moun­tain. At the same time you can­not afford to ignore them completely–your emo­tions are the source of your pain. Ignor­ing them com­plete­ly is as fool­ish as a doc­tor ignor­ing your symp­toms when diag­nos­ing you.

The third is to believe that your friend is not inten­tion­al­ly try­ing to hurt you. This is a cru­cial defense against bit­ter­ness. He is mak­ing a lot of choic­es that are caus­ing you pain, but he is not mak­ing them because they cause you pain. He wants you to be hap­py and is just as con­fused as you are about how to achieve that goal.

And so if that’s help­ful to you, take it and be blessed.ghost dog the way of the samu­rai divx