Barking Bad
I read your response to "Confused" (the woman dating a guy so needy he wanted her to ditch all her friends and spend every minute with him). I suggest you tell her it'll never work out and she should date someone else.
--Advice From 60-Something Male
Telling people what to do is necessary in certain situations, like when it's a more successful battle strategy than "You do you!": dispatching the troops to engage in the military version of interpretive dance.
However, in general, direct advice -- "Do this!" or "Do that!" -- tends to backfire big-time, revving up a state psychologist Jack Brehm calls "psychological reactance." "Reactance" describes our fear-driven freakout -- our reaction -- when we perceive a threat to our freedom to do as we choose. We go on the defensive -- rebel against being controlled-- typically by doing whatever we were doing...only longer, stronger, and louder.
Understanding this is why I'm an advice columnist who specializes in NOT giving advice. I use hedgy-wedgy language like "you might" and "you could" that leaves big wide-open spaces for personal choice. Accordingly, instead of telling this woman, "Dump Mr. Needypants pronto!" I offered reasons the two MIGHT be a bad match. I also identified potential stumbling blocks -- like being a "My needs last!" habitual "pleaser" -- and suggested practical steps she could take to kick them out of the way.
My ultimate goal is helping people help themselves: giving them the psychological and behavioral chops they need to render me unnecessary! I typically retell the story they've told me in ways I hope will help them gain perspective -- that is, understand what they're going through and why. I then lay out a set of tools -- ways they might tweak their thinking and behavior -- in hopes of empowering them to dig themselves out.
Basically, my column is the advice version of that well-worn fish saying -- uh, as I like to rewrite it: Give a woman a fish and she'll have dinner. Teach a woman to fish and she'll have dinner for a lifetime...OR -- let's be honest -- because my column and I are big on realism: She'll order her fish dinner in a Paris bistro, poring over photos of a fabulous Chanel fly-casting suit and sketching out her plot to rob the Louvre to pay for it.
For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.
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