There is a fine line….

There is a fine line between telling your story and giving advice and I feel I have crossed that line in the past week or so.

If you follow the rules of AA, the idea is that you tell your own story and support others for telling their stories as well. What you don’t do in AA is give advice to people who are sharing. They may not want advice. The advice may be the wrong fit for that person. They may not be at a place where that advice is helpful. There are a million and one reasons NOT to provide advice whereas there are virtually no reasons for not being supportive.

I feel in the last week, I fell into an old habit of giving advice rather than giving support, and this is NOT ok. I would like to apologize here for that. Giving advice is / may be a way of compensating for lack of empathy and that too is not OK. It is some sort of distancing mechanism.

I am relatively new in the blogging community (March). What I have observed is that most people comment on posts that resonate with them and generally provide supportive commentary not advice commentary for a particular post.

At this time, I wish to call myself out for getting in the advice-giving mode in my comments instead of getting in the empathy mode. My apologies to all for this behavior.

So with that apology said, what type of blogosphere comments work for you? Should blogs follow the guidelines of AA where the focus is on telling your own story? Are there blogging rules somewhere that I should know about? Particularly about providing support versus advice?