I've got a friend who likes to vent to me. She's not exactly practicing right speech, but I give her the benefit of the doubt. She has a turmoil of emotions that spill out as anger, but she has few skills to examine her emotions or the causes and conditions. I don't encourage her, but I listen. Will she change? Probably not, at our age, and she is well meaning and kind hearted. But her venting has a pattern, and the same events and situations come up repeatedly, because she can't move beyond her reactivity. Examining her own patterns is not something she has experience with, and she looks to others for guidance. I avoid minding her mindstream by paraphasing what she has said, and also by sympathizing with her hurting. I address that hurt, because then she feels seen.
Giving up trying to change people by "helping" is one of my achievements in the last few years. People are pretty much going to be by now what they were all along, and I accept that the speech between us is not going to become transparent. My gift of love is listening without judgment or fixing. I either love them as they are, or I'm no good to be around them. We're all human, all on our own individual paths, and all deserve love and respect. That doesn't mean I don't try to be as transparent and genuine myself as I am able, but I no longer have "requirements" of my friends. Now a situation could come up in which I'd say something, but only in relation to our friendship, not the rest of the other person's life. I'd say how what the person said made me feel, and try to clarify my understanding of what they said, but no further. I want to feel free to enjoy my friends, not analyze them. And so far it's working pretty well.
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