Sometimes The Best Help Is To Stop Helping

Help is often overrated. We believe that it means kindness, solidarity and hospitality, but the problem is that it is not always a collaboration between human beings that share a common goal. Instead, people usually do it to take care of a task they think the other person cannot do, or would do very slowly or poorly.

This attitude can be called a form of “toxic help” because it involves solving other people’s problems without giving them the chance to tackle their own challenges. In addition to preventing them from developing their own abilities, it sends a clear message that you think they can do nothing.

In this way, we end up dismissing them as persons and having their abilities, opinions, attitudes and knowledge fade away, even though we had the best of intentions.

In the eyes of society, help is something positive, but if you look a little closer you can find many examples of people whose abilities are underdeveloped due to “good Samaritans” who solved too many of their problems for them when they really did not need help.

Today , people whose parents were too overprotective fall into the category of the “soft generation”. This includes people whose parents did their chores for them, solved all the social problems they had and completely eliminated all forms of contact with frustration.

Doing things for other people is positive as long as it comes in the form of cooperation. For example, if two people share the goal of starting a business together, they must work together; one can furnish the building while the other spends every morning generating publicity.

This can be an example of a collaboration that enriches both parties because both benefit from the common goal, and thanks to that, the company has a greater chance of being successful.

But if the help goes only in one direction, it can be harmful because it reduces the other person’s abilities and breeds destructive thoughts. The person may think that:

• This one really needs help
• The other person is obliged to help
• It is important for the other person to help

Therefore, no one benefits from this type of help. First, because the person being helped gets the message that he is not doing well without the other person, and it is a fatal blow to his self-esteem. And secondly because it plants a seed of anxiety in the helper. It makes the person believe that he can not say no when the other asks for something, or makes him believe that the other can not make progress without help.

It is easy to see how the personal relationship between the two can deteriorate. The helper will always be inclined to look after the other person while their own needs are not prioritized, which can end in rejection.

Helicopter parents are toxic and overprotective. They can not stand that their children are suffering, but their view of suffering is completely distorted.

They are usually parents who suffered some form of trauma during childhood and do not want their children to experience the same thing, so they are raising their children in an extremely overprotective way. They solve all their problems for them, even those that the children can actually solve on their own, until they reach an age when they have to develop self-reliance.

This means that the children do not learn. Because parents live their lives for them, they have never made a mistake, and as a consequence, they have never felt frustrated and not fixed or learned from their mistakes, which is the only way to really learn.

The children’s development stops in this situation, even though they have enormous potential to use. When they reach adulthood, they become indecisive. They also tend to have problems with self-esteem; they tell themselves that they can not cope with their problems without getting help.

They begin to demand help in all areas of life. Therefore, they tend to choose partners who treat them in the same way as their parents did, and their abilities thus remain undeveloped.

If you really want to help, or rather collaborate , you should be guided by a desire for the people in question to develop and become confident. You can approach their self-esteem by emphasizing what they have done well, close to their determination by suggesting opportunities, and close to their abilities by highlighting appropriate issues.

It is important to be patient and accept that life comes with many frustrations, but that no one has died from them.

If you give the person a way to eliminate the obstacle, you will not let him find a solution himself. The person will not have to take action, fight, try or find alternatives, because you have already done everything.

For example, if your son can not find a job, but you give him money every month so that he can survive, why should he continue to look? He does not need to! But this is also negative for him, because what should he do when there are no longer any parents who can give him money?

To collaborate in this case would be to help him write a CV, choose a profession and look for a job so that he can feel that he has control over his own life. Do not you agree?