This is About Writing Without Helping

A desire to help is not necessarily a bad thing, but for me there are many lurking shadows. The biggest one has been my conviction that if I do not help in some way, and in the process ensure the maximum amount of approval of everyone around me, I don’t have any value or worth. Why would someone be in relationship with me if I am not helping them?

In this way, wanting to help can become, I want you to be dependent on me and the help I provide so that I feel powerful and like I have value, purpose, and meaning in life.

Another shadow to “wanting to help” is wanting to control. Wanting to help can become, I want you to conform to my ideals of what is good or better so that our relationship is predictable and comfortable for me.

Sometimes wanting to help is having an idea of what help looks like, how it should be received, and what should happen after the help has been given. All of these ideas typically are rooted in our personal judgments and biases about what is good or righteous in life.

As a lifelong helper I have been guilty of all of these things many times over. Sometimes I read back what I have written and I hate it because I feel like I was trying to help instead of just trying to honestly say what I truly mean.

The healthy form of help I’ve been trying to tap into is to try and embody what feels like wellness to me. For me right now that means seeking light-heartedness, playfulness, love, connection, and vitality. I am trying to keep my eyes on the goal of guarding and tending to that well and just sharing what feels good to share.

Then a voice comes in and says I feel like this could be a kind of narcissism and absorption, like me just focusing on feeling happy and joyful, that is not helpful enough. To be a responsible human in these times I need to show up, be courageous, be uncomfortable, and take risks. This conflict is some layered shit that I am still trying to process.

How has that process been going for me? Not well. I can’t seem to stop trying to help as control or hold judgments in my help, at the same time I am driven to “be of service” and in some way “help” what feels like crisis after chaos unfolding around me. This of course often comes at the expense of myself, not to mention the people I’m purporting to “help”. My self-worth being tied to whether I am in good service to others is so old and tiring. My self-neglect and self-sacrifice are no longer secret points of pride. They are old baggage that I need to leave on the jetway.

I try not to judge the people I really love, I try so hard. And I sulk imagining that they judge me. But the judgments still exist, and they sound innocent enough–I was thinking this might help... But then I volunteer help I don’t have the capacity to give and then either end up not doing what I said I was going to or doing it resentfully.

When I think about this need to help as a desire to control, which comes from fear, the loneliness creeps in. I think my biggest fear is rejection, and I can not for the life of me believe that people will love me even if I’m not trying to help them. I definitely have major abandonment issues, and need to feel like I am of use to the people around me, otherwise I am not good. At least that has been the story for a long time, I do feel like I’m getting through it, meaning being able to pull apart my core identity from that story, but it’s a slog.

I asked a great and experienced teacher doing sacred work for their advice on what to do when someone needs help, and he told me:

If you feel triggered in any way by someone going through their process,

excuse yourself, you are not the one to help in this situation.

Lead with your heart. Engage the mind when necessary. But keep your heart open.

So if you are triggered by the daily photos and videos of children being executed by bombs in Gaza; you should excuse yourself, and regroup? That doesn’t really sound right to me. The conflict drums up again.

But maybe it is right, in some way. I know I’m not going to be able to help the people who need the most help if I’m triggered by the situation that they are in. If we want to be able to help in a crisis, our hearts and our nervous systems need to be more stable than those we want to help. If they aren’t, it’s our job to find safety in our own bodies first before going into savior mode. The old put your air mask on first idea. And the heart has to be in the lead, and it can slow us down. This means more vulnerability, more fluidity, more opening of the mind to stay in the flow of the heart.

I wanted this to be an essay where I didn’t try to help. I’m not sure if I succeeded. I am a work in progress. I don’t want to help. But I do really want everyone to feel better and more loving and more okay and more relaxed. And when I am not feeling loving and okay and relaxed, putting my energy to achieve that for others feels obscene at this point. All I know to do at this point is try to channel my nurturing, compassionate energy back inwards, to myself, and when I can find a balance again, the energy that “helps” will emanate naturally. This is the dream. I am not there yet but I can aspire and love myself all the way through it.