“I’ve tried everything and nothing helps.”

A thought by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend from their book, It's Not My Fault. (pg. 39) Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

Maybe this where you are.  Maybe you have said and believed this statement.

John says, “When facing an unreached goal, a relational opportunity, or a life problem that needs to be resolved, a person will often express some form of I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. That is to say, he believes he has tried everything, and there are no solutions. In his mind, he has exhausted all the possibilities for making changes, achieving dreams, and making improvements, and now he must resign himself to the reality that there is no hope for betterment. Nothing helps.

“It is true that there are those times in which nothing does help, at least in the sense that you can’t undo the past. When a person you love dies, he is gone. When you get fired, you are not likely to get the job back. When your husband says critical things to you, they can’t be unsaid. No device has yet been invented that can rewind what has happened and replay it by a different script. Dealing with the inevitability of the past is more a matter of knowing how to grieve and adapt.”

John goes on, “I can’t count how many times a caller on our radio show has said, ‘I’ve tried everything to solve this problem, and nothing helps.’ She may be referring to a troubled marriage, a problem child, or a weight issue. The problems vary widely, but this distorted-thinking response to them is all too common. When I hear this distortion, I generally respond with two questions.

“What is ‘everything’? More often than not, the caller will rattle off a pretty short list that doesn’t even begin to exhaust the possible approaches to a solution.”

He says, “The point is this: if you find yourself saying you have tried everything possible, it’s a good thing to question whether you really have.

“The second question I ask when a caller tells me she has tried everything is, ‘What do you mean by ‘“try’?”’ I attempt to find out what the caller really means by her use of that word. For example, how many times did you tell your husband you wanted him to stop drinking? How direct, forceful, and serious were you with him?

“Often I find that try means, ‘I brought it up once or twice, and I’m not really good at confrontation anyway, and he ignored me, so I decided that it wasn’t working.’ But that interpretation of try doesn’t take into consideration how much work it takes for people to change their behavior. It takes a lot of time and energy, and it often takes many repetitions and efforts to bring into his awareness that you intend to stay on the issue; it isn’t going away.

“Often, there is another factor driving the ‘I’ve tried everything’ thinking. Sometimes an individual is afraid of failure, discouraged, or just plain worn out. Or he may feel that he is a pretty powerless individual in general and thus incapable of being an agent for change. If this describes you, it is worthwhile to dig out whatever is triggering this thinking and confront it in yourself.

Is that you?  Please stop and think about what you really have done.  Ask God to open your mind wider to what else could be done and to give you strength and motivation to keep trying.  Also, will you really be honest about why you really want to stop trying and confront it?  Will you keep at it?

Yes, yes!