MIND MOVES:Most people need more than our help – they need to feel our respect, writes TONY BATES
PEOPLE OFTEN ask me how best to help someone they are concerned about who is going through a tough time. Perhaps a friend or relative who has become withdrawn and difficult to reach; or maybe someone dealing with conflict in their workplace that they do not know how best to address.
The desire to help is instinctive to humans. It is something we do quite spontaneously without any real thought. Our willingness to care is as natural a reflex as any other that is hard-wired into our bodies.
Someone slips, our arm goes out to catch them; we pass a stranded couple in the middle of nowhere, we offer them a lift; a work colleague looks upset, we give him or her some space and at an appropriate moment inquire if everything is okay.
When we react in a natural way to others like this, everyone feels the better for it. A person in need is touched by the thoughtfulness of another.
In that moment their world becomes a kinder place. And we walk away feeling curiously nourished by having been of some small assistance to them. Helping, as Shakespeare said of mercy, is “twice blessed – it blesseth him that gives, and him that takes”.
It seems to be the case that we are never as whole as when we help another. We feel more grounded and connected with life. We experience our lives as having some meaning and purpose.
And yet the whole business of helping others can become very complicated and fraught. It can be hard to know when to help and when it might be better to leave someone be.
Sometimes our impulse to help another in distress has more to do with the fact that we don’t like how their distress makes us feel.
We say we want them to feel better, but the truth is that we want them to change, so that we can feel better. We cannot accept that they may be in a place of pain that is very real and even important for them. Something that they need to work out in their own time and in their own way.
We can become addicted to playing the role of “helper” because it is the only way we know to feel good about ourselves.
As children we may have learned that making our parents happy was the best way to experience acceptance and love.
We carry this narrow sense of identity into our adult lives and we become compulsive helpers. Our “selfless love” carries within it the unconscious expectation that we will be loved in return. And if this doesn’t happen, we feel short-changed.
I suspect that much of the burnout among professional helpers comes from a shortfall in the appreciation they experience for their constant giving.
This compulsion to give also has negative repercussions for the person at the receiving end of our apparent generosity. The more we define ourselves narrowly as “helper”, the more the people we target will feel they need to passively allow themselves to be helped.
When we see these people only in terms of their limits and disabilities, we risk locking them into the very identities from which they are trying to break free.
Most people need more than our help – they need to feel our respect. And they need to experience from us that they have within themselves the strength to work things out.
When it comes to wanting to help, it can be a good idea to pause and look at what’s happening in your relationship with the person who may well need some help.
This is not to say that we should constantly second-guess our natural tendency to reach out to others.
But when your desire to give feels like something you “must” do, and when you notice this pattern repeating itself over and over in your life, some degree of self-reflection is called for.
Healthy helping occurs when we are less concerned with what separates us from someone in need – their poverty versus my financial comfort; their sickness versus my health – and more aware of what we share.
When we reach out to another from an awareness of our common humanity, we are not so much helping because it is “me” helping “you”. We are helping out because whatever is happening is about “us”.
Tony Bates is founder director of Headstrong – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health (www.headstrong.ie)