BPDRecovery.com: Forums

I just realized that what I learned as a teacher is my undoing here! As a teacher, if a student fails to learn, it is the responsibility of the teacher to find a way to get through to the student so that the student can demonstrate competence in a subject area. This is especially true in special education where failing a student is not an option. Teachers are required to keep working on a skill with a student until mastery is reached before moving on. No wonder I have such a hard time allowing someone to fail. I take my role as a teacher far too seriously! It is hard for me to be a learner when I view myself as a teacher and that is why I get trapped into investing more into others than I do in myself.

I need to stop feeling responsible for others and instead allow them to take responsibility for themselves. When they fail, it has nothing to do with me and I should be able to view their failure as an essential learning experience rather than to take on the responsibility of teaching them be successful. If a person never gets it, that is not my problem. I just need to keep my sights on my own goals and not worry about anyone else. I am going to have to try out that "good luck with that" line!

Sounds like a good realization.

I can imagine for a teacher, it would be very easy to have the "teacher role" triggered by someone asking for help/advice. One way to look at this, though, is that in a traditional teacher/student relationship, there is a power imbalance. The teacher is in the power position, same as a doctor would be, or a therapist. The teacher is not the student's peer or friend. If a teacher attempts to be a friend or peer of the student, it is a boundary violation. In the same way, for "equals" who are peers or friends, taking on the role of teacher becomes a boundary violation because it eliminates the equality. I have no idea if I'm articulating this well.

I get my inner "armchair analyst" triggered pretty easily, and that too is a boundary violation with a peer.

Ann, it is because your example of a "boundary violation" made so much sense to me in the first place that I can see where the problem lies - I am too invested in the outcome when I should not be so concerned about other people's choices. I could not figure out why I feel such a sense of failure when others fail and now I recognize that it is because I was trained to consider my students' failures my own and take the blame for their lack of progress. Rather than being a "peer support" as I should be, I am assuming a position that I should not have outside of a classroom of students. Just because this is a learning environment and I believe that I have knowledge to offer does not mean that I have the right to project my teacher role onto others. It is more appropriate to allow people to find the answers for themselves than to share unwelcome wisdom.

I had not heard the "say it once" slogan in AA (possibly because I was not "invested" in AA other than to meet my legal requirements) and it was these words that started me thinking about how I was trained to teach to various learning styles and to keep trying different methods in order to reach students in a way they would be able to grasp. My "lightbulb moment" was the realization that my teacher role has carried over into situations where it is not appropriate and that is what is causing me to take the wrong approach here. It is not my responsibility to invest in teaching others when I should be acting as a peer support instead. Other people's lack of learning is not my problem to solve so I don't need to be so invested in the solution.

P.S. I am here because I prefer this type of "armchair analysis" over therapy.