Own Good

People really do want to help.   They want to reach out and ease other people’s problems by offering solutions that will reduce distress and increase success.

Their suggestions are most often based on strategies that have worked for them in the past, just ramped up to address the problems.   A good solution, they regularly assume, is good, and if it isn’t working now, then all you need to do is to turn the volume up, to eleven or even more.

It’s a natural human response to try solutions that have worked in the past, just amplifying and extending them to meet the current need.   More power, more kick, lots more wham and a bigger hammer should be able to fix it.

This response is why the seeds of our next failure are usually in our last success.   The instinct to push the tried until it fails, often spectacularly, is just built into human arrogance.

We imagine that more is always better, that the same approach will work.

I just saw a crossdresser who hates having to lie and live in at least part time hiding say that living full time as a woman will erase the curse they live under.  Sure, they will have challenges, but they will be the challenges of a woman, and so will be easy to manage and fulfilling to solve.   Their imagined life is much better than their current real life, but real life always contains challenging surprises we never ever engaged in our dreamy fantasies.

It’s always easier to address other people’s problems than to address our own.  We can see their problems as the simple, structural problems they are, while our problems are redolent with nuance, emotion and details.

All we have to do is pop other people into making the hard choices we know they need to make.    They just need more intensity, more discipline, more denial, more focus, more compartmentalization, more real work and less damn whining.

We are sure that we know what is best for them, if only they will take it on board and do what we tell them to do.   We have a fine solution all sketched out, clean and simple, that they just need to impose on their own mess.

For their own good, we just need to force them into doing what we are sure is the right thing.   Sure, they might resist some, they might feel some discomfort, but we are just helping they do the right thing, even if they don’t see that at first.

We need to hurt them to help them.   They can thank us for it later.   They need to wake up and smell the coffee, dropping their old ideas, pulling on their big girl panties and learning to take it like a man.   Once they toughen up and learn to keep their feelings out of it, just doing what must be done, then they can go out and succeed the way that we did.

Good intentions are behind almost every action humans take.   The few suffer so the majority will benefit.   We eliminate suppressive forces to make the world a better place, moving to achieve the goals we know are blessed and proper.

I know that the reason people have always tried to hurt me is because they believe it is for my own good.   I bring on my own abuse, by this reasoning, just because I resist complying with the conventional wisdom others work so hard to impart to me.    If I would just get what they are so lovingly saying through my thick skull, they wouldn’t have to bang the damn lessons into me so hard.

Smarten up and the hurt ends, they tell me.    The most important thing I can do is to make them not see me suffer, to do what makes them comfortable, and so is must be right thing to force me into doing.

They erase and abuse me out of love, you see.  It’s really hard to get angry over people who are just doing the best that they can, even when they think that means hurting me until I comply with their selected solutions, for my own good, of course.

Parents have always tried to force kids onto the straight and narrow and always for the child’s own good.   Sure the parents don’t want to be seen as indulgent and weak, want to keep their standing by being the kind of good parents who help their children follow good, conventional moral rules, but they feel good because they know they are doing it for their kids, hurting them to help them.   They will be very happy to assure you that they only have the very best intentions, only come from love.

You want to hurt me.   I know.

You want to do it for my own good.   I know.

But your solutions, imposed one that mirror your approaches, don’t really have me present.     And I know that, too.