It’s no use, the other side is hopeless

I saw a post from Nick Carmody giving advice to those who are “desolate” that Trump was found guilty. His advice was:

“Be careful about becoming emotionally invested in politicians/celebrities/athletes. Be careful about putting people on pedestals.....especially people we've never met....people who don't even know we exist,…”

And that’s true. But I wanted to talk about how you can talk to those who are desolate.

This might be an opening, they might be open to changing their mind. Here are some suggestions for how to phrase questions from Steven Hassan, an expert in deprogramming. This only works if they are ready, you can’t force it.

Family and friends can help by asking respectful questions in a warm and loving way and waiting a long time for an answer and then following up. This part is hard because we want to refute what we believe is false and we hate to sit in silence. But remember this isn’t a discussion. It doesn’t matter what you think, —not for this process. You aren’t deprogramming the person. They need to deprogram themselves; they need to start thinking for themselves instead of outsourcing it, even to you. Another expert I found gave this as an example of a non-judgmental question: “I really want to understand your thinking. Can you explain it to me?” Another series of questions you can ask are, “When did you start believing in this? What did you believe before this? What changed?” Dr. Hassan says that if you can get them to go back to the beginning, they may awaken themselves.