Experience dealing with a close friend/relative with a negative disposition?

[Mops]

@thorny_locust

@Dinsdale

what do you do if someone pretty clearly has informed you that they do not WANT your suggestions - no matter how well you intend them, or how positively and nonjudgmentally you try to phrase them?

Then you stop giving them suggestions.

If somebody insisted on continuing to give me suggestions that I’d clearly told them I didn’t want any more of, I’d probably sound pissed off every time I talked to them too. And I’d limit how much I talked to them, if I did so at all.

There are two problems with that attitude:

1. Sometimes what I say in response to someone bitching and moaning about something is resented as an unwelcome suggestion - only it wasn’t a suggestion but a query to to build my mental image about the problem. For me it is a waste of time taking any further about a person’s problem until that problem is defined. I can empathise with a person’s feelings about a given problem; I can even empathise with a person’s wrong-headed (IMO) feelings about a given problem; I cannot empathise with a person’s free-floating, woolily expressed feelings about an undefinded something.
   So, what you want my sympathy, do answer my “Wh questions”, dammit!

2. If you only want sympathy and affirmation, once these have been forthcoming, shut up. If you do not shut up, obviously that was not what you wanted, so the logical inference is that you want advice.

[thorny_locust]

@Mops

Sometimes what I say in response to someone bitching and moaning about something is resented as an unwelcome suggestion - only it wasn’t a suggestion but a query to to build my mental image about the problem.

If this happens to you repeatedly, then I suspect that the way you phrase your query comes across not as a query, but as a suggestion. And if this happens to you repeatedly, again, I’d stop doing that.

@Mops

If you only want sympathy and affirmation, once these have been forthcoming, shut up. If you do not shut up, obviously that was not what you wanted, so the logical inference is that you want advice

That is not the logical inference. The logical inference is that the person wants to keep complaining.

You don’t have to keep listening, of course. You can say ‘that’s really shitty, but can we talk about something else now?’ You can say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t deal with any more of this right now myself.’ You can determinedly change the subject without saying why. You can walk out of the room/hang up the phone/not answer the texts/emails. You can block the person, with or without telling them why.

But to keep insisting on offering them advice when they’ve made clear that they don’t want that is in no way useful and is IMO rather obnoxious.

If you can’t empathize with them, then you can’t empathize with them. So it goes. It isn’t going to turn them into somebody you can empathize with for you to insist on getting into an argument over whether they ought to find your advice useful. It’s only going to piss them off.