One of the things I do in life is to try and help people have better lives. Not change them in a way they don’t want to change but to help them change to be the person they tell me they want to be.

The trouble with this is … I am wondering if it is actually possible to change everyone who asks me for help? I invest a lot of emotion and energy into helping but, quite often, that investment doesn’t pay off. The person slips back into the way they used to be and are no more happy than they were when they first came to me for help.

Am I, in effect, just not up to the job? Do I need to accept that for every success story, and there are many, that there will be significant failures?

With many that I help, the pattern is as follows … they approach me almost from nowhere, I help them and, with their issues sorted and on the right path, they disappear again. I just have to be happy that I have managed to make a difference. I don’t get anything more from the experience. This has been the case from simply giving someone a lift to saving lives, my count for the latter is at least 2 so far, possibly more. Sometimes though, my successes hang around, just not very often. The worst aspect is when my failures also hang around. It hurts every day to have them screw up over and over again rather than to take the simpler approach of taking the right path. It is for those people that I started this posting. Is there a point to which we get with a person after which nothing we do or say shall make a difference? They are so stuck on their destructive path that there is no going back? I need to hear that it is possible to save someone in such a mess. Right now, I don’t have the answer.