Can Someone be helped to change?

One of the things I do in life is to try and help people have better lives. Not change them in a way they don’t want to change but to help them change to be the person they tell me they want to be.

The trouble with this is … I am wondering if it is actually possible to change everyone who asks me for help? I invest a lot of emotion and energy into helping but, quite often, that investment doesn’t pay off. The person slips back into the way they used to be and are no more happy than they were when they first came to me for help.

Am I, in effect, just not up to the job? Do I need to accept that for every success story, and there are many, that there will be significant failures?

With many that I help, the pattern is as follows … they approach me almost from nowhere, I help them and, with their issues sorted and on the right path, they disappear again. I just have to be happy that I have managed to make a difference. I don’t get anything more from the experience. This has been the case from simply giving someone a lift to saving lives, my count for the latter is at least 2 so far, possibly more. Sometimes though, my successes hang around, just not very often. The worst aspect is when my failures also hang around. It hurts every day to have them screw up over and over again rather than to take the simpler approach of taking the right path. It is for those people that I started this posting. Is there a point to which we get with a person after which nothing we do or say shall make a difference? They are so stuck on their destructive path that there is no going back? I need to hear that it is possible to save someone in such a mess. Right now, I don’t have the answer.

Comments

You Bloody Idiot

I had a really enjoyable time in Meltham with Stan and Pete, even that walk against the wind up the pub on Saturday evening in a blizzard was fun. On the way there I thought it’d be fun to take some pictures of the car in the snow. I had not realised just how windy it was, I seriously thought my door was stuck when I tried to open it but it was just being pressurised by the forces outside. I am lucky really the wind had not been behind me else the door would have been ripped off. On the way back on Sunday I paid a visit to Sue in Sheffield. I like Sue and she is a great conversationalist. The journey was not without incident as the satnav kept failing and crashing and just became useless. I eventually tracked the problem down to the loudspeaker connection for the mount and once I’d removed that it was stable and guided me well to Sue’s door. I am really happy to report that the steroid injection I had last week as helped ease my pain. I still have the pain but it is not restricting me ...

2 Weeks in

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Not a good day

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Steve from England

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