Lessons Learned

I know I’m probably too young to give you advice but I’ve been told I am actually pretty good at it. Giving advice is sometimes really nerve racking to me, but delivering advice and helping people with their problems makes me happy. It brings me joy to know that I am aiding someone with their issues hoping to make things better. It makes me wonder why I don’t want to be a psychologist? 

Even if I have never had the experience before, I give my advice to the best of my ability based on what my heart and gut tell me. I also draw on the wisdom I have learned from my family. In doing this, I only hope that my brain and the rest of my body follows. This is how I live my life. 

Now that I am done talking about myself, let’s move on to the question for the day: The Issue of Trust

What do you do when you know something you’ve been trusted with by a friend but you feel you can’t keep the secret for whatever reason? Do you tell someone else but risk your friend’s trust or do you keep it to yourself even if it hurts you? Or what do you do if you’ve already broken that trust because you thought it was going to help? Do you tell your friend or do you keep this information to yourself until they find out from another source?

In my honest opinion, do what you think is right. I believe in always telling the truth, I hate being lied to, even worse, I hate when information is kept from me. The question I believe you need to ask yourself is: is this information your friend trusted you with harming them? Are they harming others? Are they harming property? Is someone/something harming them? -this is a lesson I learned from my family growing up. I have no siblings, but I have several cousins. When we’d all tattle on one another, it was ridiculous. So my family always asked these questions, and if the answer to them was no, then the tattle was meaningless and accomplished nothing.

The point is, if you can ask these questions to yourself, and the answers are negative (no) then you truly do not need to tell anyone. Your friend trusted you with this information, don’t break their trust simply because you can’t keep quiet.

On the other hand, if you answer yes then I think the real thing to think about is, what is stopping you from telling someone you trust to make a difference? You could help them with the problem and, even if they had begged you to not tell anyone and you did, you know that in the long run, the friend will look past their anger and realize you did the right thing. You saved them in some way or another.

The question was also asked: I already told someone, now what?

Guilt is a powerful thing. But so is the truth. Even if you know you’ve done wrong, saying sorry and being truthful from the get go reduces the pain in the long run. As my family used to tell me as a little kid, “Better to face the truth than to hide it, because when the truth finally does come out, and you aren’t the one who told it, things will only be worse.”

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