“The Super-Helper Syndrome” by Jess Baker

• Super-Helper Syndrome – where people feel compelled to help even to the detriment of their own wellbeing
• Help is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English as making it ‘easier or possible for (someone) to do something by offering them one’s services or material aid’
• The definition above describes making it easier for someone to do something; but you can help someone to just be.
• Personally, I would like the definition to go further and explicitly state that it only qualifies as help when it is wanted.
• Make something easier or possible for someone by offering them resources, information, expertise and, or, support, when they both want and need this.
• When I analysed the data, the interviewees and questionnaire respondents were providing seven categories of resources: labour, status, space, tools, materials, data and finances.
• Information help is where you provide someone else with useful knowledge.
• People who are prone to Super-Helper Syndrome are drawn to jobs where they provide expert help.
• The defining feature of this form of help is that an expert does something that the helpee doesn’t know how to do, unlike resources help when they know how to do something but simply don’t have the time or the wherewithal.
• Usually, expert help works better when it is blended with the other forms. In their urgency, professional experts sometimes overlook the need for information or support.
• Empathising, encouraging, reassuring, consoling and soothing are a different kind of help from the other three forms we’ve explored. Supportive help is the odd one out because it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem; it makes the problem easier to cope with.
• When it’s the principal form of help, supportive help works by facilitating someone to solve their own problem. It’s about showing the helpee that they already have the resources, information or expertise to help themselves
• For some of us, supportive help is the most rewarding form of help to give.
• Supportive help comes in many guises. It can be purely non-verbal, such as smiling and nodding to show understanding, or murmuring your concern. It can also be physical, hugging someone or stroking their arm. It can actually be passive – just sitting by the bedside.
• Occasionally support can even be helping by inaction. For example, if a child wants to reorganise their bedroom with their own collection of knick-knacks and posters, their parent might be tempted to get involved. Depending on the situation, it can be more helpful to do nothing. If the parent holds back, the child has more opportunity to express themselves and take ownership of the end result.
• An important element of effective supportive help is to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust so both of you feel safe.
• The first distinction is between whether the helpee is equipped to solve their own problems in the future versus having to repeatedly come back for assistance.
• Expert help is essentially dependency oriented. Offering resources also invites dependency, as in the famous fishing example referenced in this section’s heading. One of the advantages of information help is that it is more likely to promote independence.
• Supportive help is a subtle game. On the face of it, it’s autonomy oriented because it’s about enabling someone to solve their own problems, but it can morph into a dependent relationship, as in the therapy-go-round, or be subject to the helper’s motives: do they genuinely want to create autonomy?
• Assumptive help wasn’t asked for; responsive help was.
• That doesn’t make assumptive help sound too appealing, so let’s rebalance things. Sometimes it is the right sort of help. There are times when people can’t ask for help
• Assumptive help like that requires a delicate and timely approach.
• One of the challenges of supporting people suffering from Super-Helper Syndrome is that they seldom ask for help for themselves. So, if you want to help them, assumptive help may be your only choice.
• Even when responding to a specific request, in all but the simplest circumstances, it’s crucial to ask questions.
• In more open-ended helping relationships it is essential to thoroughly explore the request for help before responding.
• Recent theory has suggested that prosocial behaviour evolves where strong reciprocators emerge to enforce more selfish types to toe the line.
• Members of a group who are seen to help are more likely to be accepted and protected by that group. It’s the same in human society.
• I agree that empathy is vital, but when it comes to what motivates altruism, I believe the answer is compassion.
• Cognitive empathy’ is the comprehension of what someone else is feeling.
• Cognitive empathy can come without compassion.
• Emotional empathy is the sense of experiencing someone else’s feelings.
• The researchers concluded that empathy can lead us to make decisions that go against our own moral values. This is called the ‘identifiable victim effect’. It is the reason charities don’t just send you fundraising leaflets telling you how thousands are starving.
• many medical procedures depend on putting aside short-term empathy for long-term benefits
• Bloom does provide a convincing argument that empathy as he has defined it (emotional empathy) is a poor basis for policy making.
• Compassion is a painful emotion occasioned by awareness of another person’s undeserved misfortune
• To feel compassion for someone we have to believe that something bad has happened to them, that it is not their fault and that we care about it.
• 1. Serious bad event. How strongly do you react when someone says they are suffering? Have you felt compassion for someone but later realised they weren’t really suffering? Conversely, have you ever underestimated the degree to which someone was suffering?
• 2. Fault. What is your threshold for believing that someone still deserves compassion even if they are at fault? Do you feel compassion for people when their suffering is clearly their own fault? Conversely, do you blame people too readily?
• 3. Eudaimonistic judgement. How easily are you affected by others’ suffering? Do you almost always feel a personal responsibility to take action? Conversely, are you relatively unaffected by others’ suffering?
• when helping becomes compulsive, the suffering that Tillich talked about can be the suffering of the helper too.
• helpers have an undeniable positive impact on the people around them. But when their desire to help becomes addictive, it can actually harm the helper themselves.
• Compulsive helpers seek out opportunities to help, either directly, like offering to load a stranger’s car outside the supermarket, or indirectly, like one of the nurses I spoke to who was growing her hair long to donate it to a charity that makes wigs for children undergoing cancer treatment.
• Such people are so intent on meeting the needs of others they say they don’t have enough time for themselves. Or they see meeting their own needs as selfish.
• The main point about this formula is that it doesn’t imply that compulsive helping is bad per se. If you are meeting your own needs too, then that’s something to celebrate
• Nurses should pay as much attention to taking care of themselves as they do their patients
• Exhaustion is the most obvious way that the Super-Helper Syndrome harms people.
• A strategist in heavy manufacturing told me something similar: ‘The busier I get, the more difficult it is to say no.’
• Helpers can also become exhausted when they don’t have the resources to do their job properly, or because they face impossible demands.
• Compassion fatigue drags people away from effective caring in one of two directions. Some become toughened. They withdraw from the pain they witness. They become numb. They lose their empathy. Others head in the opposite direction. They take on the burden of suffering. They become unable to differentiate their own pain from that of their clients or patients. They lose themselves.
• Helping too much can and does end up in resentment.’ The helper doesn’t want to stop. To do so would be to admit defeat. And when they feel resentful, they don’t want to admit that either, not even to themselves
• Resentment is a self-defeating emotion. It gnaws away at people.
• Exploiters have specially evolved antennae for detecting compulsive helpers. They typically start by asking for some small piece of help or counsel. One tactic is to take on the role of victim, knowing the helper will automatically assume the role of rescuer. As the relationship develops the exploiter is thankful for the help they receive and continues to expect more.
• Helpers fall into exploitative relationships because they are compassionate people. They remain trapped in exploitative relationships not just because they are accommodating, but because they would feel guilty abandoning someone who claims to depend on them
• The A stands for the ‘activating event’, in this case the phone ringing. The C is the emotional and physiological ‘consequence’ – your stomach tightening with dread.
• What we are unaware of is that there is an intervening B, the ‘belief’ about the event. In the case of the phone call, the belief might be, ‘I’ve done something wrong!’ The important thing to understand is, it is the belief that causes your reaction, not the event itself.
• People leapfrog from A to C all the time. It happens whenever we use expressions like: ‘you’re embarrassing me’; ‘you’re upsetting me’; ‘you’re annoying me’. In all of these, it is our beliefs that cause the emotional reaction, not the other person’s behaviour. Nobody can directly cause someone else’s emotions.
• Blaming someone else for our emotions is an everyday occurrence of what psychologists call ‘irrational thinking’
• Aaron Beck originally put it, ‘when the rules are discordant with reality or are applied excessively or arbitrarily, they are likely to produce psychological or interpersonal problems’. We end up blaming ourselves when we fail to carry out these instructions.
• For compulsive helpers, self-criticism operates on two levels. At the everyday level, they undervalue the adequacy of their efforts to help. They should always be doing more. Or on the rare occasion when they don’t help, they find themselves ruminating on how they should have. It’s the G word again. Guilt is the penal system of the inner critic.
• they criticise themselves for feeling exhausted or resentful or being exploited
• Self-criticism is the fourth adverse impact of the Super-Helper Syndrome.
• Suppose you are crossing a busy road when a motorbike speeds around the corner. Your body jumps back on to the pavement out of danger. That’s the amygdala in
• action; the brain’s early warning system.
• It automatically activated a cascade of neurological systems. Signals raced to your hypothalamus and the brain stem, leading to changes in your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing patterns. Blood was pumped to power your muscles that leapt backwards off the road.
• The problem is the amygdala can be trigger-happy.
• I recommended that you start to journal it because seeing your critical thoughts written down allows you to assess them objectively
• Once you realise that your thoughts cause your negative emotions you can correct your thinking and thereby change the way you feel
• Decentering is a simple technique where you remove yourself from the centre of the thought. You just add the words ‘I am having the thought that …’ before the self-critical thought
• Decentering can diminish the emotional impact
• When you have your next self-critical thought, catch it and hold on to it; notice how it is affecting you, then add the phrase, ‘I am having the thought that …’
• I ask participants to visualise their inner critic. It’s a fun way to get to know and befriend it. When you imagine the voice is no longer in your head but belongs to a persona you’ve created, it’s easier to question what it’s saying. You can visualise it as coming from something small or comical. That way, you start to disempower the inner critic.
• If you want to look up more of them, there’s a collection in the Handbook of Wise Interventions edited by Gregory Walton and Alia Crum
• The natural response is to resist or deny uncomfortable realities. This has been called the avoidance mindset
• When people experience anger, anxiety or similar emotions, the avoidance system activates in the right prefrontal cortex
• When people experience curiosity, enthusiasm or the like, the left prefrontal cortex activates – the approach system
• Remember that by activating curiosity you can dampen any anxiety.
• For change to work out well it requires three stages: endings, a transition phase and new beginnings. It’s easy to overlook the endings stage, or to rush through it. But this can sabotage the positive results we hope to gain.
• When letting go of irrational beliefs it may be necessary to forgive yourself – for having held the belief for so long, or for the impact it’s had on your life
• For some of the beliefs, to be truly free of them, you may need to forgive other people too
• Forgiveness allows you to release any anger or resentment you may still be holding on to.
• Hartman suggests that you need to go through four stages to develop your Self: 1. Know yourself – really spend time and effort to understand what kind of person you are quintessentially. 2. Choose yourself – accept who you are and make the best of the resources within you. Hartman stresses that those resources are limitless. 3. Create yourself – become the very best version of you. Move constantly in the direction of authenticity. 4. Give yourself – forget all limitations and be generous in giving to your fellow humans.
• While for some, helping others might not be uppermost in their personal definition, we would all agree helping is a good thing to do. This idea becomes problematic when it turns judgemental – you’re only a good person if you help
• other people. This is one of the traps helpers fall into. They apply the judgemental instruction to themselves: ‘I must help others to prove I’m a good person.’ I call this the Good Person Belief.
• Our little girl sees herself as a good person when she helps; she criticises herself when she doesn’t. She feeds off the praise and rewards. She lives in fear of these being taken away. She’s on her way to becoming a compulsive helper. Over time, the Good Person Belief becomes part of her operating system. Helping becomes habitual
• Once the irrational belief takes hold, no amount of helping or ‘good behaviour’ can dislodge it. It’s the same for the grade A student who believes she isn’t clever enough. Her string of academic accolades doesn’t satisfy her
• But compulsive helpers are inconsistent in their application of this. They don’t hold other people to the same rule they live by. They don’t expect anyone else to help other people to prove they are good
• Another reason the belief is illogical is because it implies that if you stop helping you stop being good
• you hold the Good Person Belief, sooner or later you have to recognise that your compulsive helping is motivated by attempts to win approval. You are trying to convince others, and ultimately yourself, that you’re a good person. Fundamentally, you are trying to earn love. But it’s a game you’ll never win. No amount of external approval will ever satisfy the belief.
• And as we all know, love can’t be earned, even if that’s what we were taught as children. The tragedy is, when your self-worth is conditional, you are in an abusive relationship with yourself.
• You might need to forgive yourself for any of those feelings before letting go of the belief. You might also need to forgive your parents or anyone else who taught you to believe that you’re only good when you help others.
• My self-worth is not dependent on helping others.
• The meaning of any word is open to infinite interpretations. Words like unkind are what Korzybski called ‘high order abstractions’. He argued that there are structural semantic problems when we say something is something. It’s especially problematic when we use ‘is’ about a person.
• Alfred Korzybski, who founded the field of general semantics, argued it’s an incorrect use of language to use a label like ‘Jess is unkind’.
• The organism known as ‘Jess’ cannot be fully known; the word means different things to different people at different times. Even I cannot claim to know everything about the person I call ‘Jess’. Few of the cells in my body are the same as when I was a child. The me I know today is not the me I knew then
• Say you were to label yourself ‘selfish’. When you try to define what you mean by ‘selfish’, you will see that this word too is open to unlimited interpretations.
• According to REBT, any form of conditional self-worth is harmful.
• If his self-worth is conditional on his successes, his elation won’t last. It’s the same if you rely on helping others to feel good about yourself. You feel temporarily pumped up, but conditional self-worth goes down faster than a faulty air bed.
• The idea is to separate your sense of self-worth from your behaviour. REBT suggests that we should simply accept ourselves regardless of our abilities, personality traits, life experiences, successes and failures. It suggests we should refuse to rate ourselves at all.
• A less onerous solution, and one that I do recommend, is to claim unconditional self-worth. By that I mean you choose to value yourself highly, with no small-print conditions. You take a positive view of yourself for no other reason than that’s what you’ve decided to do. You rate yourself highly, regardless of your behaviours, abilities and personality traits.
• Self-compassion offers them a different mode: it’s gentler, more forgiving and allowing. It has three lenses: self-kindness; seeing your own suffering as human; and mindfulness.
• What is called for here is to look through the second lens of mindful self-compassion: to see the humanity of our own suffering. To build a sense of unconditional self-worth means to be charitable to ourselves. Sometimes you can’t bring an end to your own suffering any more than you could for anyone else.
• Use it when you start blaming yourself or reverting to negative self-evaluation. Identify the specific thought and insert it into the following phrase: Even though ______, I deeply and completely love and approve of myself. Here’s an example: Even though I feel highly anxious today, I deeply and completely love and approve of myself.
• There are two parallel paths to a more mindful life. The first is by learning to pay attention to what’s going on moment by moment every day. You deliberately notice your thoughts and feelings. You bring yourself back to awareness whenever you find you have been tangled up in your internal
• world. You use your breath, your body or the physical environment to ground you. You allow yourself to be with your current state, whatever that may be, rather than trying to change it. Over time you become an astute observer, catching irrational thoughts as they arise. Over time they lose their power. This doesn’t just happen; it develops from a conscious choice to commit to a life of mindfulness.
• The second path is to adopt a formal practice to support you on your daily path. This involves various types of meditation.
• Everyone else’s problem becomes your problem. The thinking becomes irrational when we believe ‘I should help everyone’.
• If you believe you should help everyone, you’ve probably experienced at least one of the adverse impacts of the Super-Helper Syndrome: exhaustion, resentment, exploitation and self-criticism.
• However, when empathy goes into overdrive it could be that people are no longer helping out of compassion, but to relieve their own distress. And that’s never going to work because there’s always more suffering to be found.
• 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
• Some people do need help but aren’t ready to be helped yet, for psychological reasons.
• The quality of the relationship also dictates who you can or cannot help. People more readily accept help from those they like, are familiar with and, especially, trust. Despite all that, it may simply be that, lovely as you are, some of those you want to help don’t feel you are the right person.
• Another reason your help may not be wanted is because accepting help often requires the disclosure of personal information.
• Because it often leads to assumptive helping, others might perceive you as interfering. One unpleasant knock-on effect is that people can start to avoid you. This can also happen when people experience an imbalance in the principle of reciprocity. If you spend all your time helping others but will never accept help in return, it can leave them feeling uncomfortable around you
• Or it can go the other way. If you are indiscriminate in who you try to help, you can end up with an entourage of exploiters.
• Yet another harmful effect of trying to help everyone is that it can distract you from your own needs, and even from acknowledging your own pain.
• I’ve used the word ‘dependant’ to indicate the one or more people being helped. I’ve referred to CS relationship (i.e., Couldn’t Survive relationship) to indicate helping relationships where one party is dependent. I chose CS relationship intending it to be a neutral term. It’s not for me to prejudge or generalise about whether these relationships are healthy or not.
• When someone is in an unhealthy CS relationship, it’s hard for them to accept that the underlying belief is irrational. People start objecting, ‘But they couldn’t survive without me!’ Hence the red flag warning
• There are three defining criteria that make up the They-Couldn’t-Survive-Without-Me Belief:
• The helper must believe there’s nobody else with the capability and the availability to provide the care their dependant needs. Or they must feel indispensable because the dependant won’t accept help from anyone else.
• The helper must believe that the dependant is unable to care for themselves. They must believe that if the dependant didn’t receive their help, there would be extreme consequences: the dependant would collapse or die.
• The helper has no choice. Whether they are willing or unwilling to be in the relationship, the helper has to believe they can’t leave it.
• If one feels that the yearning to be cared for by someone else is shameful or dangerous, one can vicariously satisfy one’s own dependency needs by taking care of another person.’
• The need to be needed makes people vulnerable to the They-Couldn’t-Survive-Without-Me Belief
• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V) is the go-to reference for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists
• Dependent Personality Disorder is defined as an excessive need to rely on others for support, guidance, nurturance and protection. DPD is characterised by high anxiety, which is triggered by making everyday decisions, even the simplest ones like what to eat or what to wear. People with DPD feel helpless on their own and vulnerable to rejection.
• Compulsive helpers can be a magnet for people with dependent tendencies, and vice versa. For that reason, you need to make a conscious decision about whether to get involved. If you do start helping, you need to keep a close eye on the amount of help you give
• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is sometimes also referred to as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder
• those with BPD find it difficult to maintain stable relationships. They experience impulsive behaviours such as binge eating and drug or alcohol abuse. They’re also prone to self-harm and suicidal feelings.
• From the point of view of someone trying to care for them, they can be highly dependent but can also turn against the helper, expressing extreme anger or claiming that they aren’t really loved. Because of their clinging behaviour and threats to take their own life they can reinforce the helper’s belief that They Couldn’t Survive Without Me.
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)
• People with NPD have a grandiose sense of self-importance. They have fantasies of success and power or ideal love. Whatever their position in life, they believe that they are special and should associate with people of high status. They believe that others are envious of them. They typically see themselves as fascinating and beautiful and pay a lot of attention to what they wear, setting out to impress
• This can make them initially attractive or interesting to strangers. They can be flirtatious and seductive, drawing people into their orbit. But their relationships are marred by a sense of entitlement. They exploit their family and friends, picking up and dropping people.
• Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
• People with this disorder have no scruples about acting unlawfully. Lying comes easily to them and they readily con people for profit or pleasure. Their dishonesty and unreliability are exhibited in a failure to sustain work commitments or to honour financial obligations. They can also be violent. They display a reckless disregard for themselves and for others, and act without responsibility. In the face of all these antisocial acts they lack remorse or a sense of guilt.
• As a financial adviser on commission, he sold my mother a policy that she paid into for more than thirty years. It was supposed to provide her with a benefit of £6,000 at the time of his death. When I stopped the payments, she had put in more than £17,000.
• When it comes to a life partner, someone with ASPD wants a servant or a slave. Sometimes they withhold money from those who care for them in order to retain all the power
• Acknowledge You HOLD the Belief
• To expose the belief as irrational you have to refute at least one of the defining criteria: that you are indispensable, that there is total dependency and that you have no choice.
• For helpers in some types of CS relationships, it can be useful to remember that there are other people out there just like your dependant. You aren’t looking after those people. They survive without you.
• Sometimes the helpee is not totally dependent. If they didn’t receive their current level of help, there wouldn’t be extreme consequences: they wouldn’t collapse or die
• You do have a choice. There are always other options, even if you are currently unable to see them. Everyone thinks they are the exception – in my unique circumstances I have no option. But if you let go of the They-Couldn’t-Survive-Without-Me Belief it doesn’t imply that you are going to abandon your dependant altogether. That’s another irrational thought. Letting go of the belief doesn’t mean you love them any less. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, total self-sacrifice or total abandonment.
• If you are still having trouble imagining that you have any choice, you might want to look at Choice Theory by William Glasser. He was a leading psychiatrist who called attention to how we choose all our behaviour
• You can only control your own life
• You might continue to support your dependant but in a reduced role rather than them being totally dependent on you. If so, you will need a plan and support mechanisms, both for you and for your dependant
• My self-worth is not dependent on helping others.’ ‘I know and respect the limits of my capacity to help.’ ‘I know and respect the limits of my responsibility to help.’ ‘I deserve to have my own needs met.’
• In fact, 90 per cent of the volunteers said they experienced pleasant sensations such as physical warmth and increased energy. Some even felt euphoric. Luks refers to this as the ‘Helper’s High’
• After the initial high, more than half of the volunteers then felt calm and more optimistic about their own lives and, even, happier
• Older people who suffered a bereavement and then took up volunteering lived longer than they might otherwise have expected. In his review of this type of research, public health expert Doug Oman reported that ‘volunteering is associated on average with longer life, better self-rated health, and better physical functioning’.
• We all know the daily recommendation is to take 10,000 steps. But did you know that walking fewer than 5,649 steps increases the risk of anxiety and depression?
• Hardy people still experience the stress but handle it better. In the literature on hardiness they are defined by three characteristics. They have a strong sense of purpose in life. They respond to challenges as opportunities to grow. They believe they have control over their own destinies; that they can have an impact on the world
• How you are affected by stress is determined to a large extent by how you think about it – mindset.
• Those who were trained to believe that stress is enhancing had reduced muscle tension and insomnia, fewer headaches
• and less hypertension. Their work performance also improved in comparison with the other two groups.
• The students with a stress-is-enhancing mindset actually did better in their second-year exams without any further interventions
• I mentioned that compassion fatigue drags people away from effective caring in one of two directions. Some become toughened and lose their empathy. Others take on the burden of suffering and lose themselves. The answer lies in finding a middle way, a balance where the helper is able to act with compassion and also protect themselves.
• Imagine yourself safe and comfortable inside your zorb. You can still interact with the world as normal, but it slows your reactions down. It gives you the opportunity to observe others from within your zorb when they are throwing their emotions at you like wet paper tissues. It prevents you from immediately taking on other people’s drama or instinctively giving in to your urge to help. You can use the Zorb of Zen to shield you from toxic situations that others want to draw you into. It gives you the time to choose how to respond. You don’t have to absorb their emotions. You watch them slide down the outside of your zorb like wet paper tissues.
• The therapist taught me that my mother’s problems weren’t mine to solve. She taught me to discover my own values, to figure out what I liked to do.
• Don’t try to take everything on at once. Try teeny-tiny steps