I have two very, very different answers to this question that feel contradictory but are both true.

My first is that yes, I’ve experienced this both as the advisee and the advisor, and the onus is really on educators and advisors to make sure we share our experiences in ways that are helpful. More often than not it seems like it has to do with the person either wanting to shoehorn their personal preferences into their advice, or really just wanting to brag about their experience. I know I sometimes feel like telling a given story that has some relevance to the question at hand will help elucidate the point that I’m making, but once I launch into the telling of the story I forget that there was a point I was making and so I don’t tailor the story to highlight the relevant elements.

By the way, this is not unique to kink - I do public speaking as an aspect of my profession, and after I do the first draft of a talk I have to go back over it and really interrogate whether I told a story in such a way that it drove the point home, or if it got lost in the shuffle. I’d say about 25% of the time it’s the latter and I have to rework. Same goes for stories I incorporate into responses in fora such as this where I can write and edit before posting. But in live conversation you don’t have the luxury of multiple revisions, so it’s safe to assume that 25% of the stories I tell in that setting are not very effective communication.

My second response is that, contrary to what primary school teachers around the world would have us believe, there are in fact such things as bad questions, and people seeking to learn bear some responsibility to ask the questions that will get the answers they’re seeking. Especially in advice-seeking environments, it’s been my experience that a large number of people tend to ask questions that are almost guaranteed not to get them the answers they need. For instance, to draw on a recent conversation I bore witness to, if what you want to know is how best to respond to the fact that your Dom ignored your safe word during a rape scene, don’t approach a group of relative strangers and say “Does anyone here have experience with CNC? What can you tell me about it?.” The chances someone will hear that question and speak specifically to ignored safe words may not be zero, but they’re definitely not very high.

So if you asked a question and you’re on the receiving end of a response that seems to be answering what you asked, but isn’t giving the answer you were searching for, it might be on you to pause the person and try to better articulate what it was you were actually asking.