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echoes, you said this---""""I know that for me, what keeps me falling in the pothole is if someone else could or might do something about it""""

the thing about that is, if others keep us out of our potholes, we never learn to walk around them on our own. we become dependent on others to tell us what is right, wrong, and how to live,behave and speak. this just isnt good.

once we learn this pothole is getting old, we may* look around for ways to avoid it. at this point, only, we become open to learning.

this is everyones own time scale.

it is up to the other, as BG put it, to choose what to do. if your sick of pulling someone out of their pothole, then please stop doing it. dont lay it on them...."ok, im pulling you out AGAIN but i sure hate it and its your fault i have to do this". decide, "i will pull you out of my own volition and its my own choice", i wont pull you out again but i wish you would see to climb out", or "i wont look to see if your in a pothole or not"

the first one sounds like my mom and her bs. the guilt trip, the sighs and bitching. let me figure my own way out and i bet i can do it! she wouldnt but she sure bitched enough for a lifetime. a adult would maybe choose two or three.

bottom line is, only we can learn our own way to walk. as babies, we fall a lot. we repeat bad patterns until we get a bit older. your kid would never learn to walk if you didnt let them fall. and if you own their falling, they will learn bad shit real quick about caregivers and themselves. (how is my falling bothering her?)

we all gotta let us all grow up in our own ways and times. we can help, we can care along the way but we cant do it for another or stick our stuff onto them along the way.

ibf, thats why its called work. daily work. sometimes constant work.

as i said in a earlier post, you have 3 or more choices. what you choose is up to you.

when it becomes counter productive is when you jerk the person from the pothole, yell at them why dont they listen to you, how stupid are they anyways, you know best, and then dump them back in their pothole. not saying you do this...just using "you" as a general pronoun, ok?

you have to care to try to show them the pothole, and be ready if they choose to not accept your view. you have to give that view in all unselfishness. and then let it go.

i dont believe its best to try to steer anyone away from any pothole. i believe in offering a hand out in unselfishness. its not our business to drive or steer another. its theirs to learn. they wont want or need to as long as someone rescues them and then wonders why they ended back in it. because rescues dont show anyone the need to change.

Jody, I see that you are posting in this thread and therefore breaking your agreement with me and the leadership team. I have you on "ignore" so I am only responding to the fact that you are violating our agreed on boundary by posting here. I will leave it up to the leadership team to discuss this matter with you as I am unable to trust you to keep agreements and therefore find it unproductive to work this out with you directly.

I had to look up the conversation between us in order to forward it to the Admin team so I figured I would post the link here to refresh your memory: http://board.bpdrecovery.com/bpdrecovery.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=8787.

very sorry, board and all. i did not realize this was denims thread when i posted to echo. i didnt even check to see whose it was, i was addressing another person.

nothing i said was meant to denim.

was not on purpose.

I agree Jody. I think we can offer help once, twice, even three times. But how long can you bang your head against the wall? I have decided not to discuss with my friend the issues she has that she keeps complaining about. She won't take my advice and there's nothing I can do about it. Why spend my time worrying about it? She's an adult, I gave her my opinion, and let her take the consequences of her behavior. She says to me, "I know you're right, but....." and goes along her merry way. So I decided I am finished. I guess there's a little Radical Acceptance there on my part. I dont' take it personally. I realize she isn't ready to hear me. That's her choice.

it is your pals choice, BG. something we all need to respect in another. hell, if everyone lived their lives how we wanted,eh? thing is, which we got to pick? mother teresa? prez george w? stalin? i foresee a fight over whose life to pick!

i think its better to offer help to pull someone up once they fall. but only if it has no strings attached and is given freely. like on here, advice/views given freely, with no expectations back, is key. if not, we are screwed.

when you talk to your friend, you can always change the subject. sometimes obviously. "sooooo, what do you think of the weather?" ya know? if they ask, you can say well, i think we have about run dry on the subject you were on and i thought we could try a new one! without any you statments or accusing statements.

i think without having those guidelines in place, we are set up for a fall. we can not control another. in any form.

make sense? im not sure if i am.

Yes, you're right Jody. I do change the subject now when I speak to her. I know she just wants to vent, but I get tired of hearing it. I think I am more patient with people here on the board doing it than I am with people in RL. For one, I know her for 25 years. I know her very well. I don't know the people here on the board that well, I don't know what's going on for them in RL and what they're up against. Plus you get more information when you talk to the person as opposed to writing on a board like this. With my friend, I have just used Radical Acceptance and accepted that she won't change, at least for now.

yeah, my pal i have known for 24 yrs now has changed so much. i think it is because she is stressed completely out with having to raise 3 of her grandkids. i know i would be!

but she is all about herself now and how sick she is. and it drove me crazy until i had to figure out how to accept it. im never gonna change her. i cant!

she feels safe in her pothole, and i cant keep wishing her out of it.

I had no reason to follow this split, so I just now saw this post. I have no idea what you are referring to or why you are referring to me. If your example is about your experience with your mother, that's your business. If you are referring to me in any way, then you've just landed in quite a pothole. If you want to refer to me please do it directly and not indirectly in threads I'm not involved in.

Ibfuddled, that wasn't posted in a thread you weren't involved in. It was split by one of the moderators from the Informed Choices thread after it was posted. It was a reply to one of your posts in that thread, and originally posted in that thread. See Denim's post in this thread (which also was split from the other thread) for why these posts (the first one and the ones with "Re: Informed Choices") were split from that thread (only the ones starting with Denim's 2nd post having originally been posted in this separate thread.)

Thanks, Ellen. OK, I guess I get that. I had figured out most of what happened with the split, and that I didn't know about the post because I hadn't looked at the thread for hours after I posted and actually for a day or two after the split. I just couldn't figure out the connection between this post and my earlier one. My thinking when I wrote that was so different than what this post seemed to refer to that I couldn't make the connection.

I can see a connection now, and retract my comment about direct communication with my sincere regrets.

b.