The Super-Helper Syndrome by Jess Baker

Author:Jess Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Reason 3: Your Help Isn’t Needed – It’s Not Your Task

When you are a psychologist interviewing people, for the many reasons we do, there’s something that sometimes happens at the end, after you have finished your questions. People relax out of their I-am-being-interviewed mode into a more informal conversational mode. This can be the moment when they open up or their most colourful examples come to mind. It was as one of those afterthoughts that a nurse told me this story. She was outside the leisure centre chatting to her gym-buddy before getting into her car. Across the car park she caught sight of a lady halfway out of her car seat, struggling with the open door. She was parked in a disabled bay. The nurse raced over and said, ‘Let me help you.’ She hooked her arm under the lady’s and used her body to gently lift her from the car. The lady didn’t say anything until she was almost hauled out. Then she told the nurse she had actually been trying to get in. The nurse said how sorry she was, but the lady didn’t seem to mind. Although this was recounted to me as a funny afterthought, it nicely illustrates how your help sometimes isn’t needed. It also shows how empathy in overdrive can lead to poor judgements.

In the same way that it was obvious that you don’t have the capacity to help everyone, for a variety of reasons, it should also be obvious that sometimes your help is not required. Remember the definition in Chapter 1 – for it to be help, it has to be needed. But again, the instinct to help can kick in before a compulsive helper has even questioned it. Might the person already know where they can find a solution? Might they already be getting help from elsewhere?

A useful concept here is the ‘separation of life tasks’ as identified by Alfred Adler in his theory of Individual Psychology. Adler stressed the importance of identifying what is, and what is not, your responsibility. A classic example is when ‘helping’ a child to do their homework. According to Adler’s idea, it’s the child’s task not the parent’s. Forcing them to study can just lead to frustration and resentment in both the parent and the child. Establishing the separation of tasks would be to make it clear that it’s the child’s responsibility, and why. Then, not to offer more help than the child wants. Adler pointed out that we are constantly trying to take responsibility for how other people behave. When you start to notice this, you are likely to find yourself doing it all the time. When I first moved in with Rod and his son, I found myself picking up wet towels from the bathroom floor. After a while I felt resentful that I was doing this. Then I thought, they must have eventually picked up the towels before I moved in, and nobody had asked me to pick them up. It wasn’t my task, so I stopped.

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