CaringandReal
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Joined: 2/15/2008
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quote:
ORIGINAL: SimplyMichael
There is a perfect thread on another site that amply illustrates the problem.
A "mentor" is advising this idiot who he calls a "profound" submissive. He is telling her she has found her soulmate and she is blissfully happy
We are telling her that she is about to ride a train off a cliff into a volcano just before the meteorite plumets down on top of her splitting the world open and spiraling the entire planet into the sun.
She is listening to him.
Now the people advising her that doom is around the corner are people like the owner of the largest and oldest dungeon in San Francisco and myself but WE are ignored because we are telling her what she doesn't want to hear.
She has been in therapy all her life, has tried to leave her marriage twice before, is leaving behind two kids, getting a divorce, leaving the US to go to ireland...after meeting the guy online two weeks ago...
The people who most need the advice don't want it...
I've seen train wrecks like that ever since I started talking to other bdsm types. To put a positive spin on your conclusion, maybe the people who most need to learn (the hard way) from experience are busy doing so? When you jump into a real volcano, whether it has an active core or not, you usually die. But when you jump into an emotional volcano, you do not die (you just feel like dying later) and sometimes you do learn. I die a lot in computer games because it takes time to figure out how to win them, what works best. But I learn from it and I do better, usually, with the next game I play. I think that emotional situations are the equivelent of that in real life. Someone who has never cut loose and done something wild maybe needs to have the experience of plummeting to the depths and losing a great deal that is precious to her, in order for her to learn what is important and what is not in life.
In terms of drama, people who haven't spent long years dealing with the harsh consequences of drama often indulge in it, until it starts to bite them back a little too much (or, for hard cases, a lot). Then they learn, from the best teacher there is (one's own experiences) that drama totally sucks. Have you noticed how mature some people who had to overcome something hard in childhood often are? They got early the priceless (and also painful) experience that most of us don't get until much later in life.
It's really hard to learn from the things other people tell you because you haven't had any experiences (yet) that you can connect to what they are saying, experiences that give their words relevance, meaning, or wisdom. You know they're saying something wise and useful, but hell if you can see how any of it relates to you--or ever will. Or that's how I typically experience it, when dealing with something entirely outside my sphere of understanding.
Additionally, most people confuse an intellectual grasp of the meaning of something with an in-depth understanding of that thing that is informed by experience. The two types of understanding are actually worlds apart. And when you're newly adult you're also fairly new to grasping things intellectually (that mental growth spurt starts in the teens and continues into the mid-late 20s) and it is easy to place entirely too much emphasis on understanding the words describing something (as opposed to grasping its substance through experience). I believe the derrogatory term for that is sophmoricism. But people of any age who grasp something only intellectually usually do not recognize that this is only one way of understanding that thing, and a rather superficial one at that. Intellectual comprehension, no matter how broad, only begins to scratch the surface of most subjects. To really understand something, particularly something with emotional significance, you have to immerse yourself in it, have experiences, maybe even get hurt (and hurt...and hurt again).
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"A friend who bleeds is better" --placebo
"How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." --thomas harris
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RE: Generational differences. - 
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