Exhausted from Helping everyone but yourself? Of being the agony aunt, family fixer, mediator?

Are you the one everyone else turns to: the dependable, competent fixer of other people’s problems? Do you help others in all aspects of your life – playing counsellor to your friends, mentor to your colleagues, mediating family arguments, rescuing neighbours in distress? Perhaps you are one of the million ‘sandwich carers’ in the UK, looking after ageing parents as well as raising a family, helping everyone but yourself?

The next, and most important question is, are you struggling to give yourself the same level of care that you freely give to others? And, as a result, are you close to exhaustion? 

If so, you would relate to the people we interviewed when we were investigating the Super-Helper Syndrome, where people help others even to the detriment of their own wellbeing. And we have to admit that while there were some men included in that category, most of them were Women.

Human givers

80% of all jobs in adult social care are done by women. In her book, Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez points out that the majority of unpaid care work is also done by women. According to her, this isn’t simply a matter of choice. ‘Women’s unpaid work is work that society depends on, and is work from which society as a whole benefits,’ she writes. The philosopher Kate Manne has exposed how our society obligates women to offer care, affection, emotional support and more. In her book, Down Girl, she exposes the expectation that women be ‘human givers’ rather than human beings. She defines ‘feminine coded work’ as goods and services, such as care, concern, soothing and nurturing, that women are expected to provide.

The women we spoke to, frequently talked about their upbringing to explain how they ended up as a helper.

Helping everyone but yourself: Brought up to be a helper

Some children (especially girls) are taught that they must help other people in order to be a good person. If this socialisation is strong enough it can lead them to adopt what we call the Good Person Belief, one of the irrational beliefs that drive compulsive helping. 

Picture a little girl who finds one of her classmates crying in the playground with a grazed knee. She takes her to the school nurse who tells her she’s a really good girl. After dinner, as she dashes off to play with her brothers, her mother calls her back, ‘Be a good girl and help me clear the plates.’ Later, she’s praised for reading her younger sister a story at bedtime. Next morning, she is told off because she hasn’t made a birthday card for grandma. You get the picture!

It’s hardly surprising when children begin to internalise their parents’ and teachers’ messages. They see themselves as good when they help; they criticise themselves when they don’t. They feed off the praise and rewards. They live in fear of these being taken away. They are on the way to becoming a compulsive helper. Over time, the Good Person Belief becomes part of their operating system. Helping becomes habitual.

Seeing the suffering

Other children are socialised by childhood messages that highlight the suffering around them or they grow up with role-models who attempt to alleviate that suffering. When this is taken to extremes it can lead them to adopt another of the irrational beliefs, a sense of personal responsibility to help everyone you meet. This is a second irrational belief, the Help Everyone Belief. 

One woman had an alcoholic father. He had stopped drinking as soon as she was born. He became heavily involved in setting up an alcoholics’ support group. He would take her on missions to ‘go and see the poorly man’. Her deep connection with her father and these formative memories were still with her more than forty years later.

Not meeting your own needs

However you became the agony aunt, family fixer, mediator, the important thing now is to acknowledge that your compulsive helping coupled with not meeting your own needs is benefitting others but ultimately harming you. When you’re in a state of exhaustion you cannot give the high quality care that you pride yourself on. It’s only by countering the beliefs that are keeping you trapped in compulsive helping that you can start to look after yourself too. That means setting boundaries: learning to say no to requests for help, learning to push back assertively without apology and without feeling guilty. It means resetting the limits of your responsibility. You don’t have to fix everybody else’s problems. Simply listening to someone’s grievances might be the best way to help. 

You have a duty to care for yourself. If you are helping everyone but yourself, and do not look after your own needs, who else will? 

Jess Baker and Rod Vincent are Chartered Psychologists and the authors of The Super-Helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People (Flint Books, available in hardback £18.99 and ebook)  

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