“You should....”

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I have been reviewing my past and thinking about my tendency to be easily led and wondered if anyone here experienced the same growing up?

I was and still am a very passive person socially. I often don’t see the point in conversation with others and will rarely initiate it, and only when there is an actual need for information exchange, however I have often craved attention and wanted to have friends who cared about me, so I haven’t avoided people all together. Unfortunately I have not attracted the healthiest people into my life and have not had the ability to recognition their untrustworthiness. This has sometimes been inconsequential and at other times has led to abusive or detrimental consequences for me. In particular there seems to be something around the phrase “you should....” that has had the effect of almost switching me on like a robot. It has led me to break laws, be abused, give up my chances at a decent career, act cruelly to others.... in hindsight my so called “friends” who gave me this terrible advice never followed it themselves and I’m wondering actually if they kind of enjoyed seeing what I was willing to do if they told me I should, rather than telling me to do things which they felt would actually be good or right for me (which is what I stupidly believed at the time). Did anyone else do things like this themselves or did you have a better sense of judgment than I had? Or perhaps didn’t have those kind of people in your life at all?

Fortunately as I’ve grown older I’ve been luckier about the people I’ve ended up close to, but I still feel my only defence against being manipulated is to stay away from other humans.

I would say the problem that you are describing lies in readily accepting the advice of others. I am the opposite. In Junior High I was subjected to a lot of bullying. It affected me to a degree that I developed the opposite condition. I reject all criticism, all suggestions from others. That creates a different set of problems.

There are two types of criticism. These are destructive criticism and constructive criticism. Destructive criticism is fairly easy to spot. When someone calls you stupid, an idiot, ret*d, crazy. When they tell you that you will never amount to anything. That you are probably better off dead. That is destructive criticism. It is the language of bullies. But many people exist who try to help people. They feel your hurt and pain and try and lend a helping hand. They make suggestions that can help you improve your life. They are gold.

So the quality that needs to be learned is WISDOM. It is the ability to distinguish between the two. Who has your interest at heart and who in not your friend and only pretends to be.

I think you are right.

I was already aware of some of the bad decisions I made, but today I realised a new one and I am feeling bitter about it. The one thing I really had going for me as a young person was my intellectual ability, and though I struggled badly in my mid teens at school, I still managed to get decent grades at my GCSEs, however in the summer holiday before going back to do my A Levels (Maths, Physics & Psychology) I helped my “friend” decorate her front room. My internalised story about this was that I decided I loved painting and gave up on school to take a youth training scheme in painting and decorating. However on remembering about it today I recalled that that wasn’t quite what happened. My friend said to me “you should be a decorator, you’re really good at painting” I denied this, and she said “no you shouldn’t go back to school, you should be a painter and decorator”....

It’s that should thing again.

I’d (perhaps unfairly) been annoyed with my parents later for not having talked me out of it (indeed my mother took me to the careers office to get me enlisted on the scheme when I told her what I wanted to do). I’d thought that I’d made a faulty decision and was not given good guidance about what would’ve been more appropriate for me, but in fact it wasn’t what I really wanted to do anyway. I’d just gone along with what my friend suggested. I didn’t even make my own bad decision.

A part of me is angry that there was no one to try and sensibly guide the vulnerable and naive me from back then, but a bigger part is just ashamed and embarrassed that I could be so weak. I just seemed to have this kind of devoted Labrador mentality about certain key figures through my life. Perhaps my behaviour even incited some manipulative streaks in these people. I don’t know. My loyalty and devotion were genuine. I’d always thought that everyone felt the same way as me and even now I find it hard to believe anyone would have ill intentions, because it just doesn’t make sense to me.

(I don’t mean that my friend had ill intentions about the painting thing. There were other things I won’t mention here)