We shouldn’t just use these ideas about consent with physical touch, but also with emotional consent. When someone is telling me about something that is giving them distress, I’ve learned not to volunteer advice, but to ask if they would like advice, sympathy, or just to be heard. This puts the power in the hands of the person struggling, giving them autonomy even as they’re having a hard time and may not feel empowered.
A little story of how this looks in practice:
I have learned to start every single Facebook post with a request for advice, sympathy, or just to be heard. Too many times I’ve posted a rant about a situation that I’ve already thought about, rolled around in my mind figuring out all the angles and possibilities, only to have a bunch of people give me their (often unexpert) advice. This happens a lot when it comes to things like relationship issues or health troubles, where the general audience doesn’t necessarily have context but wants to offer advice anyway. It’s a situation that’s frustrating for me as the person going through something, but it’s also frustrating for my friends, who want to help and don’t understand why I’m annoyed!
By putting my request up front, I create a space where my boundary is clearly communicated, helping my friends help me in a way that I am prepared and ready to receive. It cuts down on my stress and their labor, so we all feel good about the support given.
I tend to believe that people want to help in the best way they know how. Fair enough—offering unsolicited advice is so common it’s become a social norm, even if that’s not always (or even usually) the best policy. We want to fix the other person’s life so they’re not in pain, which is a sweet thing to want to do.
However, I suspect that people often want to give advice rather than just listen, and that this is not for my sake, but for theirs. They want to feel useful without asking themselves if they are, in fact, being useful. People get defensive and upset when you say “I just want to feel heard, I don’t want to have to discuss in depth the solutions or the issues with those solutions,” which underlines my belief that the giving of advice is often not for the person in pain, but for the person who wants to give the advice.
The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene is a book about how to manipulate people. It classifies rescuers as victim types. People who want to help and who base helping as part of their identity will often ensure they are surrounded by people they perceive as in need of help, whether or not those people actually are. The desire to help can be genuinely kind, but it can also quickly turn into a burnout-causing form of codependency.
Additionally, many people are dealing with frustrating situations that don’t have a solution because they’re institutional problems (for example, not being able to access mental health care because you can’t afford it, and the reason you can’t afford it is because you are struggling with your mental health and that makes getting a decently paying job harder). To an outsider, it may look like someone complaining over and over again about a situation that seems like it can be fixed by a lifestyle change, or a change of attitude, or better communication. For the person in the struggle, hearing the same advice from a dozen different people can invalidate their lived experience. I’m thinking here of how many times people told me my back issues could be solved through eating more kale and doing yoga, when in fact I had a birth defect in my spine that needed medical intervention. They meant well, but I had tried those things to no avail, and really just needed space to rant.
If you’re truly going to be present for someone, you have to be willing to meet people where they’re at, and also take care of yourself and your boundaries.”
Originally published in Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook, © 2023 by Kitty Stryker. Republished with permission from Thornapple Press.
Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook is available from Amazon and Bookshop.