Jo Bugman
Jedi
Like others have said in this thread I think sharing personal experiences is important. I do consider this forum a group and writing out your thoughts on here help others help you, help you see things more clearly, and gives the opportunity for others that may be going through (or gone through) similar issues to relate and learn.I agree with you here @Ryan. This also reminds me of the story where two people draw the Enneagramm and the one with more knowledge sees that the other person has less knowledge by the way he drew it. What i mean with that is that these kind of rules are probably rarely to be taken as absolute but depending on one's own knowledge they can be applied with more nuance and context.
A few days ago i had a situation where i needed to decide between doing and not-doing and decided to not-do. And it was exactly those "what ifs" that you describe @Jo Bugman that prevented me from doing. My mother and i were visiting my uncle and aunt who live in another country and whom we haven't seen since 5 years. I can also not remember when i have seen them before that. So i don't really know them well. Now my uncle has a sever gambling addiction which caused allot, and i mean ALLOT of trouble for his family. Like gambling away his last penny and his house forcing them to live on the street for a short period of time (this was a backroom gambling with very shady characters). Long story short, the reason we visited them was so my mother could talk to him (they are brother and sister) and try to open his eyes. But she didn't say anything (she had no idea how and what to say) and tried to persuade me into talking to him instead because she says that i'm more of a calm character and can listen to people. I tried searching the forum for hints and advices (i started reading the "Love and Addiction", by S. Peele and A. Brodsky" thread) but this was way too much to be able to make a decision in a day in a topic that i don't understand. To bring this story to an end, i decided to not-do or not-say anything because one of the "what ifs" was that i couldn't estimate how my words would affect him and by extension his family. It could have backfired extremely on them (he at one point had thrown both my aunt and their daughter out of the house when my aunt tried to talk to him). I don't have enough knowledge nor the talking skills to be confident enough for that.
Sorry if my post went a bit overboard but i tried to show an example for why i think that these rules need knowledge and context to be able to apply them properly.
EDIT: In that sense i broke rule 22
On the topic of talking with struggling family members, it’s something I wrestle with also. Laura’s book Amazing Grace touches on this subject with her mother who also had issues with handling money, if you haven’t read it yet perhaps it could relate to your experience as well.