Evaluating Good Advice – The Highly Sensitive Person Christian Journey

Did you know you don’t have to take advice from everybody who sets themselves up as an authority for your life? I propose it is the wise receiver of advice, not the wise giver of it, who needs to be the one who determines if the advice given is good or not.

Bad Advice

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of downright bad advice out there. Descriptive words for such bad advice pop to mind:

• idealistic
• “shoulds”
• controlling
• pat answers
• inexperienced enthusiasm
• superficial solutions
• offensive values
• untested theory.

But what I’m most looking at today is good advice.

Principles versus Advice

To clarify what I mean in this post by advice, and to lay a foundation for our response, let me contrast principles and advice.

Good principles are broad truths or realities. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out how to live out these good principles, and that’s where good advice comes in.

Advice is about implementation. Good advice helps us find specific, practical ways of implementing those good principles. Good advice tells us how those principles might look when they are lived out by someone:

• in a particular culture
• with a particular value set
• with a certain preferred cognitive style
• with a distinct personality type
• in a certain season of life

One example of a good principle is the call to love God with all your heart, your soul, your strength and your mind. Advice takes this principle and suggests practical ways to sow into this love and live it out in our daily lives. You might hear a lot of this type of advice from teachers at church.

Another example is exercise. It’s a wise principle that we humans need movement and physical activity in order to thrive. The specific how-to’s of implementing this principle are the domain of advice. “You need to start exercising” is more principle than advice. “You should sign up for that pilates class with me” is what I mean by advice.

The Limitations Of Good Advice

While certain overarching principles can continue relevant throughout various times and cultures, even the best of wise, practical, experienced advice has significant limitations. The reality is that good advice is rarely useful for those who are different from the advice-giver. This means that a lot of good advice isn’t good for you.

In my mind, it’s important to distinguish the difference between the outright bad advice I mentioned earlier, and advice that doesn’t work for you. I call this kind of advice that’s truly quality advice for someone else “ill-fitting advice”.

Generally, I believe people of one design are unqualified to give nitty-gritty, how-to-live advice to people of another design.

To make that statement more specific to my readers, I encourage highly emotional people to only take advice about how to handle their emotional lives from someone who is also highly emotional and who has made peace with their created design.

The same thing goes for highly sensitive people. Highly sensitive people who take advice about how to manage life from people with lesser sensitivities are setting themselves up for failure and pain.

The reality is that really excellent advice that hugely helps one type of person can utterly devastate another type of person if they persist in trying to make it work.

Good Advice For You

For advice to be good for you, it has to fit you and make sense in your heart.

While there may be global truths in the world of greater principle, advice is never globally applicable. What is good advice for one is ill-fitting for the next. For example:

• the specific foods to eat to be healthy
• the particular exercise form to feel good
• the desirable modality for inner healing
• the style of worship to express love for God
• the prescribed devotional style
• the ideal way to feed on scripture
• the way to express love to another person
• the specific practices that make a marriage work.

Advice cannot be distinguished as good by it’s claim that it promises results. Advice cannot be deemed good just because it seems to work for everybody else. And advice is not made good by some authority’s insistence that it’s the “right way” to do a particular thing or the “right way” to be on this earth.

The reason I’m writing this post is because it seems so many of us highly sensitive people are suckers for people who tell us what we’re supposed to be doing and how we’re supposed to be doing it. We so easily believe people when they claim to know the best way for us be in the world.

My agenda is not to point any finger at those often well-meaning people in our lives who are burying us in ill-fitting advice and instruction. On the contrary. I’m sending this to myself and to you to alert us to the power we give to other people to be “right” on our behalf, and point out the danger of acquiescence.

People are without a doubt going to be giving us advice for our entire lives. We need to learn to deal with that reality.

So How Can You Recognize Good (For You) Advice?

Recognizing good advice for you sometimes works similarly to what I’ve written about the Holy Spirit’s voice – how His voice makes something come alive in us. Good advice can do the same thing.

But good advice doesn’t always feel good. People don’t usually share the Holy Spirit’s skill at making even a correction feel safe and palatable. Sometimes I get good advice that goes strongly against what I want to do, but even then, there’s a deep knowing inside that I’m hearing wisdom for me. My response to such can be something akin to a disgusted, “You’re right. Bummer. That’s not what I wanted to hear.” But I know I’m hearing something that will fit me in a positive way.

Alternatively, a big red flag that I’m hearing ill-fitting advice is if the advice misses the “knowing” spot and hits the guilt/shame/”Oh no! I’m doing it all wrong!” trigger that many highly sensitive people have inside them.

Applying This at Church

So what do you do when you hear specific, detailed advice taught from the pulpit as if it were God’s own mandate? Unless you’re fortunate enough to sit under a highly sensitive teacher who is comfortable with their sensitivity, it’s unlikely that such specific how-to’s will be at all helpful for you. (And in that case the specifics would be a confusing burden for the non-sensitive crowd.)

While prescriptive ministerial advice can be helpful to some, such teachings are likely to derail the lives of those for whom the advice is ill-fitting.

In their defense, ministers who prescribe one-size-fits-all specific courses of action have no understanding of the ramifications of their prescriptions in our highly sensitive hearts. And many will grieve deeply when they do ultimately come to understand. Scripture states that teachers will endure a harsher judgment than other people (James 3:1).

I personally have known a number of highly sensitive persons who spent decades earnestly implementing a prescribed spiritual plan of action that was a good fit only for a far different type of person. Having been given no good alternatives, and wanting to love God deeply, they worked hard to try to please God and measure up to His alleged expectations.

They expected their obedience would somehow lead to abundant life, peace with God, and a flowing, passion-driven purpose. It never did. Instead, what commonly resulted was an inauthentic life of neurosis and distress, often with unresolving physical symptoms, and a subconscious (or conscious) view of God as some demanding, harsh, unfeeling Master.

I’ve had the privilege of sharing in many a slow healing journey as one by one these sensitive hearts have begun to heal and grow into the joy and freedom of a relaxed love relationship with God through Jesus.

The Fly In My Ointment

And so I sit here giving you advice about receiving advice. But many of you are not going to find my advice practically useful.

This post may help you differentiate principle from advice. But it gets sticky when it’s time to start sifting through the advice you get and attempting to evaluate or disentangle yourself from it. The fact is, dealing with advice is actually more of a heart matter than an easily-implementable behavior.

For one thing, it’s hard to stand your ground in the face of someone else’s certainty on your behalf.

More importantly, though, if you view God as harsh, demanding, and judgmental, or if you regularly trash talk yourself, being a harsh, demanding, judgmental god to yourself, you won’t be able to recognize what I call “life”. It won’t be able to get near you. The driving need to measure up and become acceptable will drown out any gentle voice that speaks to you of life and grace.

Unfortunately, the harsh voice speaks with greater authority and sounds more “real” to our senses than does the beauty and kindness of the Creator.

Recommendations and Blessings

I wish I had some good, clear advice to give you. But I don’t. I only have a few general principles.

• Keep asking for, seeking for, and knocking loudly for a personal experiential encounter with the true God of the Bible who loves you, and then walk in relationship with Him.
• Learn to be led by the Holy Spirit.
• Honor the human teacher who is giving you ill-fitting practical advice, and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit for you.
• Accept that the offending advice-givers are fellow fallible human beings.
• Forgive.
• And, whatever it takes, eradicate bitterness and judgment from every part of your heart.

May your heart come alive with the love God has for you, and may you discern His still small voice in Your heart. And so may you learn to weigh the fittingness of every drop of advice you receive.

I bless you on your highly sensitive person Christian journey. May the advice given to you by people not drown out the voice of the Holy Spirit in your heart.

Blessings!
Gail Ruth