Whether you realize it or not, when you tell someone to just try and “move on” before they can be healed of whatever hurt they received, all you are in fact doing is devaluing their pain and their perspective.
Whether the hurt is real or imaginary, it still hurts and making it seems like it’s just not that important makes them feel unimportant. When they ask for answers and you give them the politician run around and dance around a topic, the whole while evading the truth, all you are really doing is making them feel stupid.
Sometimes you just have to say “I don’t know” because sometimes you really may just not know. Sometimes you just have to hug someone and love on them without trying to say anything or adding any kind of two cents in. Whether or not you are in a leadership position or not or you just feel the need to “step up” and show them why what they did is wrong and why your point of view is backed by experience and knowledge, all you are making them feel is that their opinions and revelations are worthless.
Even though you may “know better”, sometimes you need to just let things play out until somebody who is obviously under an intense amount of duress calms down. Then you can rectify the situation and pick of the pieces, but if you try to fix things with your own personal brand of “guidance” before that right time all you will end up doing is shattering their peace and self-confidence even more until you have an extremely volatile situation and an even more volatile person who feels completely unjustified and worthless because they’ve been shown their opinions or pain don’t matter when compared to how right your opinions are.
We talk about a culture of honor, right? Sometimes honor is leaving someone alone until they know what to do with themselves.
Beacon Fire Ministries 