More On Self Analysis

In a few months the "kids" are moving out. Considering they are both 30, they aren't really kids any more. Our son and his friend are both at the stage where they believe they can live on their own.

We opened our house a few years ago to our son's friend. He needed someplace to stay while he got his finances fixed and went to college for a trade. We agreed to let him live with us under certain conditions. He had to pay rent and he had to help with the chores. Same as our son did.

He came to us with 27 years of , let's call it bad programming. He was a decent enough young man but he had not been raised to consider others very well. In fact his family was taught to be selfish by their mother who thought of herself first, second, and last. So we had some bad habits and attitudes to work on.

There's been improvement but three years can't counter twenty seven that much. I would love to sit down with him and have a heart to heart talk about how I see him but there's two problems with it. First, he'd get too defensive and upset to listen objectively and understand that I was trying to help him. Second, some of what I would like to say would hurt him.

He's a decent young man but he believes he's capable of having things told to him bluntly and he isn't. He gets upset when anyone contradicts his view of himself or tells him something he doesn't agree with.

There are a lot of good points I can make in his favour but there are also some truths he needs to hear and think about before he can build the life he wants. But, like most people, he doesn't do the self-analysis routine. He's never learned to look objectively at anything let alone himself. So he would take anything I said too personally and not learn from it.

Our son was raised knowing the difference between being critiqued, where both positive and negative opinions are express, and being criticized, which is almost always all negative. We taught him to look objectively at everything without losing his passion for anything he was interested in. He also grew up knowing that there were times when we'd slip out of being objective and that he could do so as well and as long as we recognized that it was something we were having trouble being objective with there was no problem with it. Sometimes you just can't be objective.

We've tried to teach our son's friend to be objective but that's one lesson that's hard to get across without something major happening to drive the point home. We don't want to do that. He looks upon us as a second, and often better, set of parents and he's become another one of our "unofficially adopted" children. We know it means he will be in for a painful time when Life teaches him that lesson and all we can do is be here for him when it happens.  Sometimes the best thing a parent can do is step back and let Life teach the lessons their children won't learn from them.

I know how hard it is to be objective about ourselves but it really is something people need to learn. For one thing, you usually come out of it with a better opinion of yourself when you're able to look at all the positives instead of just the negatives. After all, no one is harder on us than ourselves although some people seem to try hard to be even more critical than we are. And part of self analysis is being able to take those critical comments and judge them objectively to see if they really do apply to ourselves or are simply comments by people trying to be nasty.