While I don't necessarily have faith that the writers will go here, the answer for Dean, IMO, is threefold:
1) To realize that God does not solve His children's problems for them, for all problems His children face are faced by His design, and are intended as instructions to a greater state of being than that in which the child currently resides.
2) To realize that he, Dean, must stop looking to external sources to validate that which he believes to be right, but rather must learn to look to himself for such answers, using those he trusts as points of stability to which he might anchor himself and/or sounding boards he might use to judge the soundness of his own thinking, but that in the end, the answers to all Dean's challenges lie only and solely at the feat of Dean Winchester himself. And in order to overcome those challenges, he must empower himself to change that which is intolerable by accepting the weight of the intolerable as his own; by stopping a continuing behavior of seeking to change the behavior of others to a good end and seek rather the change his own behavior in response to the behavior of others to a more productive end than he has heretofore enjoyed, being the sort who always looks to the external for faith he must have in himself in order to act in his own interests and, by proxy of himself, in the interests of others.
3) To realize that NO human is EVER worthy of the purity of faith and trust Dean consistently seeks to place in them, up to and including his father the invincible (John, not God), his brother the incorruptible (Sam, not Jesus), and himself ... AND THAT IS HOW IT IS INTENDED TO BE. To stop seeing an inability to live up to the purity of faith/trust he bestows upon others as a failure within them so much as it is the inevitability of Human frailty to which all Humans are subject, thus why they require the intervention of a savior in the first place to redeem them from their imperfect natures of never being as perfect as they would seek, in their best moments, to be.
Again, without expecting the writers of SPN to necessarily ever wrap themselves around such themes, those are the themes to which Dean must be answerable in my mind in order to overcome his own fear of failure both in himself and in others. Because as he is now? He looks to either himself or to others (John, Sam, Castiel) to be unfailingly perfect and unfailingly deserving of the faith he wishes to place in them when the only One who can succeed at not failing under the weight of such a burden is God himself.
And until Dean learns to not only understand this, but also accept it as the nature of ALL men, he will continually be looking to the external for a God surrogate when all God surrogates, by their very definition, must inevitably fail for being surrogates rather than God.
no subject
1) To realize that God does not solve His children's problems for them, for all problems His children face are faced by His design, and are intended as instructions to a greater state of being than that in which the child currently resides.
2) To realize that he, Dean, must stop looking to external sources to validate that which he believes to be right, but rather must learn to look to himself for such answers, using those he trusts as points of stability to which he might anchor himself and/or sounding boards he might use to judge the soundness of his own thinking, but that in the end, the answers to all Dean's challenges lie only and solely at the feat of Dean Winchester himself. And in order to overcome those challenges, he must empower himself to change that which is intolerable by accepting the weight of the intolerable as his own; by stopping a continuing behavior of seeking to change the behavior of others to a good end and seek rather the change his own behavior in response to the behavior of others to a more productive end than he has heretofore enjoyed, being the sort who always looks to the external for faith he must have in himself in order to act in his own interests and, by proxy of himself, in the interests of others.
3) To realize that NO human is EVER worthy of the purity of faith and trust Dean consistently seeks to place in them, up to and including his father the invincible (John, not God), his brother the incorruptible (Sam, not Jesus), and himself ... AND THAT IS HOW IT IS INTENDED TO BE. To stop seeing an inability to live up to the purity of faith/trust he bestows upon others as a failure within them so much as it is the inevitability of Human frailty to which all Humans are subject, thus why they require the intervention of a savior in the first place to redeem them from their imperfect natures of never being as perfect as they would seek, in their best moments, to be.
Again, without expecting the writers of SPN to necessarily ever wrap themselves around such themes, those are the themes to which Dean must be answerable in my mind in order to overcome his own fear of failure both in himself and in others. Because as he is now? He looks to either himself or to others (John, Sam, Castiel) to be unfailingly perfect and unfailingly deserving of the faith he wishes to place in them when the only One who can succeed at not failing under the weight of such a burden is God himself.
And until Dean learns to not only understand this, but also accept it as the nature of ALL men, he will continually be looking to the external for a God surrogate when all God surrogates, by their very definition, must inevitably fail for being surrogates rather than God.
(continued)