After reading Kub933's Journal - #93 by Kub933 's post I was twigged to write this:
I was with a family friend and a few other people and the friend was considering buying a property here. They were asking me and my partner for advice as we have been living here. A particularly big potential wrinkle - a deal-breaker really - came up, and I pointed it out, that if that were the case it would really lower the value of the property and it wouldn’t be the good deal they think it is.
I could tell they were disappointed, but this time it was different. In the past I would naturally empathise with them, and feel that same disappointment… and then I would want to make them feel better. As clearly they wanted the deal to work, I would tell them it’s ok, it’s probably a good deal anyway, don’t give up, so that they would feel better. But I realised this would be doing them quite a disservice! Because if it isn’t a good deal, they shouldn’t do it… and it would actually be rather … maybe not “uncaring” per se, but it wouldn’t be good for them, to paste over the facts of it. Empathising and assuaging isn’t actual caring, not at all.
I also witnessed everyone else around the table doing just that – trying to assuage them – and it was just even clearer that it isn’t the most caring I could be!
And therefore I didn’t feel bad about disappointing them at all! I didn’t do anything ‘wrong’. I didn’t feel ‘good’ about it in terms of being gleeful at their bad feeling… but I couldn’t do anything else. It wasn’t the ‘right’ thing to do, but it was the sensible thing to do.