The Super-Helper Syndrome E-Book

Jess Baker

• Herausgeber: Flint
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 388

Beschreibung

'A fascinating insight into how and why we are compelled to help others even when we've got nothing left to give.' Amy Beecham, Stylist 'This book is a powerful catalyst in showing helpers how to help themselves.' Suzy Reading, author of The Self-Care Revolution 'It goes well beyond reminding us of the importance of self-care and digs deep into unconscious beliefs and thinking patterns. I'm very sure that everyone could relate to The Super-Helper Syndrome.'Carers UK 'I wish this book had been available for me to read years ago. Besides explaining why super-helpers behave as they do, it's given me a healthier mindset and allowed me to reassess what boundaries around selflessness can look like.' Martine Croxall, BBC Television journalist There's a type of person out there who is better at helping others than they are at looking after themselves. Maybe you're one of them. Maybe you know someone who is. They are the backbone of the caring professions, giving strength to our schools, clinics, care homes and hospitals. But you will also find them in offices, gyms, community groups and charities – everywhere you look. There's usually one in every family. But these people, who do so much to help others, are struggling. Some face traumatic and distressing situations. Those in long-term caring relationships have no time to care for themselves. Those who are professional carers work prolonged hours with inadequate resources. Deeper down, beneath all of this, there is something else that causes helpers to suffer. It dwells in their psychology and the belief system that motivates them. The Super-Helper Syndrome offers a new perspective on the psychology of helping. It offers support for people who want to adopt a Healthy Helper Mindset, including meeting their own needs, countering the inner critic, building assertiveness and setting helping boundaries. It's only by doing these things that compassionate people can be most effective at helping others. This book is for anyone who helps to the detriment of their own wellbeing. It's for anyone who wants to support the helpers in their life. And it's for anyone who wants to understand how helping works and to be better at it.

Leseprobe

Praise forThe Super-Helper Syndrome

‘The themes of this book gives insights and a fresh perspective into why we help others. It also pinpoints the potential impact of being a helper. The reader is taken on a journey that encourages them to be as compassionate with themselves as they are with the people they support.’

Gina Day, Citizens Advice

‘Putting children first starts with a workforce who are well equipped to protect their own needs. The themes of this book are pertinent to our volunteers, and to our staff. It helps to explore personal boundaries and why it’s essential to protect them – not just to protect your own needs, but to enable you to give more to others too.’

Liane Smith, NSPCC

‘If you are one of those lovely people who always place others before self you can’t afford not to read this remarkable book. It is a lifeline.’

Theresa Cheung, Sunday Times bestselling spiritual author

‘I wish this book had been available for me to read years ago. Besides explaining why super-helpers behave as they do, it’s given me a healthier mindset and allowed me to reassess what boundaries around selflessness can look like.’

Martine Croxall, BBC Television journalist

‘A brilliant book for all carers. Full of invaluable insights. The tool kit through which to build a balanced compassionate life.’

Essie Fox, Sunday Times bestselling authorof The Fascination

‘I was impressed with the care and insight of this book. It’s not typical self-help. This is an eye-opening account of who Super-Helpers really are - not weak people to be exploited. I will be recommending this book to my fellow foster carers who live in fear of criticism for not functioning like robots. I now realise it’s about connecting to why we do our work.’

Louise Allen, Sunday Times bestselling author of Thrown Away Children

‘The themes in this book are very relevant to unpaid carers, and to many of our staff who are working carers themselves. It goes well beyond reminding us of the importance of self-care and digs deep into unconscious beliefs and thinking patterns. I’m very sure that everyone could relate to the Super-Helper Syndrome either directly for themselves or thinking about a friend or family member.’

Carers UK

‘A fascinating insight into how and why we are compelled to help others, even when we’ve got nothing left to give. The Super-Helper Syndrome will help so many understand themselves better and protect their boundaries more. The writing and reflective prompts will change the way you think, feel and act – all for the better.’

Amy Beecham, Stylist

‘At last, an intelligent guide to the art of saving yourself! A powerful and personal narrative that evokes empathy for those who lose themselves in helping others. Jargon free and compelling. I feared it would stop me helping, instead it showed me how to help myself.’

Vanessa Marr, principal lecturer, University of Brighton

‘A thought-provoking read. This book explains just how important it is to know your limits to helping others and the absolute necessity to learn how to keep the situation safe for all concerned. Thank you for such a brilliant resource.’

Torie Campbell, television and radio presenter

‘The title of this book rang some powerful bells with me. So many of the midlife women I work with in my nutrition clinic are super-helpers and they often don’t even realise it. This book unlocks the door to understanding the art of helping and how to become a healthy helper. The authors give compassionate and expert advice, practical guidance and activities to support the reader in changing their mindset. The Super-Helper Syndrome is a must-read for anyone who’s so busy helping others that they don’t spare a thought for themselves.’

Jackie Lynch, nutritionist and authorof The Happy Menopause

‘I immediately recognised myself as a super-helper, so this book was a great way to take a step back, reflect and understand my “why?” It is a heartfelt and brilliantly written book, easy to read, with practical advice and solutions on how to invoke change. I have recommended the book to many women through the Made for Life Foundation who are living with cancer and who ‘super help’ everyone else before themselves. If you find that being selfless is making you less self, then this is a book that will help you change, for the better.’

Amanda Winwood, founder, Made for Life Foundation

‘As a trainer of ADHD Coaches and an ADHD Coach myself, I genuinely recommend The Super-Helper Syndrome on a weekly basis to everybody I work with. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, packed with tangible tools for chronic people-pleasers to do the most helpful thing we can ultimately do for others: start with ourselves. A must-read.’

Leanne Maskell, author of ADHD: An A to Z

‘This book is a powerful catalyst in showing helpers how to help themselves. I loved the prompts bringing deep insight, expertly yet tenderly unpicking the core beliefs that keep us stuck in unhealthy helping habits, followed up with the practical tools to actually do things differently. This book is a game changer’

Suzy Reading, author of The Self-Care Revolution

‘If you have ever felt totally exhausted from relentlessly helping other people and putting their needs before yours then this book is a must-read. It’s packed with fascinating insights as to why you’re helping everyone except yourself and feeling burn out as a result. Read this if you want to redress the balance!’

Motherhood: The Real Deal, UK parenting blog

‘It offers carers tools to set boundaries, realise their own limitations and understand why they often have an unrealistic and overwhelming need to help others.’

The Lady

‘[This] book is now on my Christmas list …’

Kaye Adams, BBC Radio Scotland

‘This book is an essential read for anyone working in health or social care. It can help reveal why people respond in the way they do to the situations of others, the personal cost of doing so and how they can help without paying a high emotional price.’

Prof. Alison Leary PhD FRCN FQNI, MBE

‘Spend any time around most teachers and it probably won’t be long before you start seeing some visible signs of what co-authors Baker and Vincent, both chartered psychologists, identify as Super-Helper Syndrome.’

Teach Secondary magazine

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Collected Poems and Drawings by Stevie Smith, Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from Why Good Things Happen to Good People: The Exciting New Research That Proves the Link Between Doing Good and Living a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life by Stephen Post, Ph.D., copyright © 2007 by Stephen Post, Ph.D. and Jill Neimark. Used by permission of Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Hilda Rosner (trs), Peter Owen Publishers, UK.

Excerpt from The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good For You, And How To Get Good At It by Kelly McGonigal, copyright © 2015 by Kelly McGonigal, PhD. Used by permission of Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

First published 2022

This paperback edition published 2024

FLINT is an imprint of The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.flintbooks.co.uk

© Jess Baker & Rod Vincent, 2022, 2024

The right of Jess Baker & Rod Vincent to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 152 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

For my Auntie Jean (1931–2020),the woman who taught me how to like myself.

Contents

Authors’ Note

Prologue: Is Helping in Our Nature?

Part One: The Art of Helping

1 How Can I Help?

2 Love or Money?

Part Two: The Super-Helper Syndrome

3 The Unhealthy Helper

4 Irrational Beliefs

5 The Good Person Belief

6 The Help Everyone Belief

7 They Couldn’t Survive Without Me

8 The No Needs Belief

Part Three: The Healthy Helper

9 The Healthy Helper Mindset

10 The Hardy Helper

11 The Compassionate Life

Postscript

List of Spotlights

Notes

Select Bibliography

About the Authors

Acknowledgements

Authors’ Note

A psychotherapist with a pizza trying to connect with a self-harming boy behind his locked bedroom door.

A daughter crying in the car after leaving her screaming mother in a nursing home where she doesn’t want to be.

An emergency services operator with a backlog of 520 calls across the region trying to pacify an angry old man waiting for an ambulance for his neighbour.

A social worker searching for accommodation for a client with learning disabilities who had been raped in his home.

These are some of the people we spoke to when we were planning this book. Everyone knows helpers have to cope with traumatic and distressing events. We all know that in addition to the trauma, professional carers typically work prolonged hours with inadequate resources. They face abuse from members of the public or from those in their care. They put themselves in personal danger. And all of this for little monetary reward. During the Covid-19 crisis, their suffering became even more apparent. When Jess spoke to Nicki Credland, chair of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, she told her that even ICU nurses, who are normally some of the most resilient, have been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. Instead of one patient per nurse, they suddenly had to look after up to six. She said:

It’s just impossible to give quality care in that environment, so it has caused significant mental health issues in staff – feeling that they are not good enough, not doing their job well enough, not caring for their patients in the way they want to.

Absentee rates among healthcare workers have been at record levels. In the UK’s National Health Service, stress now accounts for over 30 per cent of sickness absence, but the problem existed long before the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2002, a US report on 10,000 nurses found that 43 per cent of them had high levels of emotional exhaustion. Unpaid carers are struggling too. There are around 6.5 million in the UK and their numbers have increased in the last couple of years. When 4,500 of them were surveyed in 2020, about 70 per cent reported negative impacts on their physical and mental health.

Deeper down, beneath all of this, there is something else that causes helpers to suffer. It lurks unnoticed. It is not about the challenges or level of trauma they face, though it can make those worse. It drags down everyday helpers and professionals alike and has to do with the very nature of helping. It dwells in the psychology of the helper. That is what this book is about.

This book is based on our experiences as practitioner psychologists and on years of discussing the ideas together. While we have sat side by side in front of a computer screen debating every single word, the concepts originally arose out of Jess’s work and are closely interwoven with her own life story. For this reason, we wrote the rest of the book in her voice.

In my early career in the health service and during the last fifteen years as a chartered psychologist, I’ve had the chance to work with hundreds of helpers. Some of them are in professional caring roles but many are not. Recent clients in my coaching practice have included a geologist, an accountant and a lawyer. Like many of the people you will meet in this book, they were 360-degree helpers. They were looking after others in every aspect of their lives: family, friends, those in their communities and strangers too. All of their jobs required helping as well.

In fact, it is hard to think of any job that doesn’t involve helping in some sense or another; perhaps that is the nature of work. How about the supermarket assistant passing down a jar from the top shelf; a festival steward pointing out the camping area; an academic encouraging a self-doubting student; or a boiler engineer replacing a thermostat? Helping is one of the most fundamental human behaviours. Once you start to look for it you find it everywhere: texting to ask how an interview went; setting up a new PlayStation for a friend; pointing a tourist towards the castle; throwing a tennis ball back over the fence. Helping is all around us. It is hard to think of any relationship that doesn’t involve it in some way or other. Perhaps that is the nature of life.

This book is about people for whom helping isn’t just a vocation; it is a way of life. Here are some of the things they’ve told me:

I sometimes feel I’ve spent my whole life looking after people … most of what I do in life is about helping … I feel guilty if I can’t help someone … ever since I was a child, I’ve done a lot for others… everyone comes to me with their problems.

As I got to know more of these people over time, two themes about their behaviour would not leave me alone. First, their tendency to help can become compulsive. Second, they are so focused on others, they overlook their own needs. I call this the Super-Helper Syndrome – where people feel compelled to help even to the detriment of their own wellbeing. Many of the clients I work with still take on requests for help long after their energies are depleted. They keep going when there is nothing left inside them, and they accept this as normal. They are tearful and frustrated by their own limitations to care for other people. They are reluctant to ask for help themselves because they believe their role is to provide. Only when they experience physical manifestations of stress or a state of collapse, do they finally accept help. This book offers practical advice on how to avoid being sucked into the Super-Helper Syndrome in the first place. For anyone who recognises the traits, I also offer ways out of unhealthy patterns of helping. Only by supporting their own mental and physical health can helpers have the strength to care for others in the way they long to.

The ideas in this book first began to take a hazy form nearly twenty years ago, when I was working as a qualitative researcher at Aston University. I lugged cumbersome rolls of flip charts up and down the country to facilitate focus groups with clinical staff to improve the questions in the NHS staff survey. In another project, I designed a stress-management programme as part of a European initiative for healthcare staff, presenting the UK findings in an icy room in the university hospital in Katowice, Poland. During my clinical psychology training, I worked on a project mapping the care of dementia patients in several nursing homes. In all of these settings I witnessed a dedication to helping. And in all of these settings I was alarmed at just how ready the staff were to put their own needs aside. I started to wonder why nobody ever questioned this; why the helpers themselves and everyone else simply accepted it.

The version of the Super-Helper Syndrome in this book comes from thousands of hours of coaching and working with the hundreds of people who have been through my online programmes. That time has given me ample opportunity to define and refine the set of solutions in this survival guide. I’ve also drawn on research in psychology and neuroscience to elucidate the processes underlying the Super-Helper Syndrome. I have tried to make the research accessible. In doing so, I have dared to draw conclusions from findings that are based on statistical tendencies. These conclusions are always debatable. In the behavioural sciences, especially, for every claim there is a counterclaim. That is the nature of science.

The word ‘syndrome’ is not meant to imply some sort of medical condition or personality type. I use it in the second sense given in my dictionary: a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions or behaviour. I have never labelled any of my clients as having Super-Helper Syndrome. I have coined the term as a useful moniker for the net effects of compulsive helping and not meeting your own needs. It’s a label for a combination of behaviours, not for a person. What I have found, again and again, is that when I describe the concept to people, it resonates with them. Putting a name to a problem can be a relief. It reminds someone that they are not alone. It hints that there is an answer out there. The term Super-Helper Syndrome is for people to self-identify. It’s not intended for typecasting others. The last thing I want is yet another label highlighting something wrong with certain groups, especially women, or blaming helpers.

This book is for all helpers, whatever their profession or gender, but I feel I should acknowledge that the majority of people in caring roles are women: 80 per cent 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. But I certainly don’t want to ignore all the men who are dedicated to helping. Plenty of the examples I’ve used came from them too. I want this book to be hospitable.

As I mentioned, my own natural habitat is qualitative research. That is the approach I’ve used to gather real-life examples for this book. Many amazing helpers have shared their experiences in interviews and questionnaires. I’ve been struck by how much they had to say and how much they were prepared to share. Some of them told me they hadn’t been asked about their experience of helping before. Wherever possible I’ve included their words verbatim. Driven by the principles of qualitative research and my love of NVivo, the data analytics platform, my aim has always been to capture people’s perceptions and honour their truth.

I have used the word ‘helper’ as a generic term. I have sometimes used ‘professional carer’ to refer to those in paid positions. But I’ve mostly avoided using ‘carer’ to describe unpaid helpers, even when they are in long-term helping relationships with someone who is dependent on them. I’ve done that because, as shown in Chapter 7, one of the ways the Super-Helper Syndrome takes hold is when people find themselves in unhealthy relationships as the ‘carer’. Throughout the book I’ve used the neologism ‘helpee’ as a catch-all for the person being helped.

The concepts that I have outlined and the examples I’ve provided do not cover every conceivable possibility. There will always be exceptions; everyone has their own unique set of circumstances. Rather than tie myself in verbal knots trying to cover every eventuality, I offer it all in the spirit that you can take what is useful to you and leave anything that does not apply.

To understand what is going on I start by laying out the working parts of helping – what it really is, how it operates and, crucially, why people want to help at all (Chapters 1 and 2). In the following chapters, you’ll find guidance for how helpers can build self-worth (in Chapter 5), keep themselves healthy and look after their own needs (Chapter 9), strengthen resilience and set effective boundaries (Chapter 10). To make any of that possible, we need to counteract the psychology of compulsive helping – that’s the main theme of this book (Chapters 4‒8). My hope is that if helpers can understand their own thought processes, they won’t fall prey to the Super-Helper Syndrome in the first place. By the end, in Chapter 11, I offer a path towards a compassionate life that considers your own story and needs too.

If you are suffering from Super-Helper Syndrome and really want to make some changes in your life, reading can only take you so far – you have to do the work. In each chapter you’ll find ‘spotlights’ that will encourage you to reflect on your own experience, and some exercises to try. In the early part of the book these are aimed at gathering data so that you build up a complete profile of yourself as a helper. Without being too finger-wagging about it, you will get more out of it if you write your answers down. That way you can come back to them in later chapters. By thoroughly exploring your own experience you can achieve change that lasts.

This book is also for the partners, families and friends of helpers, for colleagues and for anyone who manages or trains people in helping roles. As I pointed out just now, it’s not in the helper’s nature to ask for help. The concepts here can alert you to the signs that someone in your life is vulnerable to the Super-Helper Syndrome and show you how best to support them.

Prologue: Is Helping in Our Nature?

Helping is all around us – it is an essential and commonplace human behaviour. It’s fundamental to our relationships. For some it’s a way of life – the very heart of our identity. We help without even thinking about it. Yet, according to many of the world’s greatest thinkers, helpers shouldn’t even exist. According to them, all human behaviour is essentially selfish. In his book, The Brighter Side of Human Nature, Alfie Kohn writes, ‘We assume that genuine generosity is only a mirage on an endless desert of self-interest.’ Stepping back, it’s easy to agree. Much of what we are fed by the media highlights in depressing ways our capacity to do harm to each other – war, violence, crime, the antics of politicians.

The cynical view of humanity has been inherited from some of the great Western philosophers. In 1650, Thomas Hobbes, the granddaddy of modern political thought, wrote that our natural state is to fight each other:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

He believed the only way to keep us all in check was the iron fist of a leviathan state.

Bernard Mandeville, the Dutch social philosopher, even went so far as to claim that society couldn’t function if we weren’t selfish and corrupt. In his satirical poem, The Grumbling Hive, a colony of bees decide to live honest, good lives, but sadly this leads to the ultimate collapse of their hive; ‘Such were the Blessings of that State; Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great.’

Frederick Nietzsche, whose depiction of the Űbermensch has been used to inspire and justify totalitarians and fascists, would probably take a dim view of a book about the Super-Helper Syndrome (the Űberhelper?). He goes beyond merely thinking that our nature is flawed and that we survive only by strength. In his most famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his alter ego attacks one of the main themes of this book: compassion. I am appalled, but can’t contain my hollow laugh as I quote:

Truly, I do not like them, the compassionate who are happy in their compassion: they are too lacking in shame. If I must be compassionate, I still do not want to be called compassionate; and if I am compassionate then it is preferably from a distance.

Of course, there have been philosophers who have taken a more forgiving view, for example David Hume and Immanuel Kant. More recently, in his book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker sets out a smorgasbord of data to suggest humanity is gradually making things better. He laments the continued influence of Nietzsche in the twenty-first century, when such ideas had already inspired two world wars. The political philosopher Kristen Renwick Monroe recounts inspiring stories of philanthropists, heroic helpers and rescuers from the Holocaust. For her, at least some of our behaviour is purely altruistic: when we take on a different way of seeing things – the altruistic perspective. According to her, ‘Where the rest of us see a stranger, altruists see a fellow human being.’

In science, too, a negative view has often come out on top. Altruism presented a conundrum for evolutionary biology, which explained the development of humanity as a series of random mutations. And as with Nietzsche’s philosophy, people have used Charles Darwin’s discoveries to justify violent or competitive behaviour. The over-enthusiastic parent on the touchline who yells, ‘Come on Tarquin, smash his head in!’, might defend this by claiming, ‘It’s survival of the fittest.’ But Tarquin’s dad has only a partial view of evolutionary theory. Fitness, as Darwin coined it in On the Origin of Species, actually refers to survival of the most fit. In other words, organisms with the best fit to their environment will survive. While fitting the environment does frequently call for strength, aggression or competitiveness, it can indicate the need for nurturing behaviours too. That can be seen in behaviours like the instinct in orangutan mothers to nurse their young for up to seven years, longer than any other mammal. Evolutionary biologists developed theories of kin selection to explain behaviour like this. They also came up with ‘reciprocal altruism’ (the idea that there is a pay-off in return for helping behaviours). This allowed them to provide an explanation for apparently altruistic acts, such as drongo birds warning meerkats of an eagle overhead, without letting go of the essential underlying selfishness implied by the theory of natural selection.

When Richard Dawkins released The Selfish Gene in the 1970s, it gave everyone yet another excuse to claim that all behaviour is self-seeking. Now we were at the mercy of evil genes, bent only on replicating themselves down the centuries. Dawkins believed that if we want to act unselfishly, we will get little help from our biology; because we are born selfish, ‘We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes’. Recently I had to buy the fortieth anniversary edition of Dawkins’ book because my treasured and heavily annotated copy of the original paperback was lost in a house move. There is a hint of backspacing in the epilogue to the new edition. Dawkins stresses that genes actually repeatedly meet and cooperate with others as they troop through the generations. He goes so far as to say, ‘the cooperative gene might have been an equally appropriate title for the book’. That gives us hope that helping has some genetic roots (as we will see later).

Economists, too, have not given humanity much credit. They have often considered what appears to be altruism as a good. Not a good thing (which it obviously is), but a commodity that is bought and sold. In other words, we will only help if there is some sort of pay-off, either material or psychological. That type of reward, for example feeling good because you helped someone, is called ‘psychic utility’. The concept of reciprocity is therefore important for economists as well as biologists when it comes to accounting for altruism. And it is important to us because reciprocity is a fundamental dynamic in helping relationships, whether you believe in altruism or not – I’ll come back to it in Chapter 2.

Adam Smith is probably the greatest economist to have written about human nature. His early explorations of sympathy are strikingly similar to modern research into how empathy motivates helping behaviour, another topic we will look into. But strangely, he takes both sides of the argument, one in each of the two books he published. In The Wealth of Nations he claims that mankind is essentially selfish, but in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he acknowledges that we have something in our nature that gives us an interest in the happiness of others, even if we receive nothing in return, ‘except the pleasure of seeing it’. Apparently, German economists have labelled this contradiction ‘das Adam Smith Problem’.

In my own territory, psychologists too have been lured towards the darker side. Sigmund Freud believed our actions fall out of a combination of unconscious selfish drives and trying to protect our ego. These days social psychologists do research ‘prosocial behaviour’, but even this was precipitated by striking examples of a lack of helping, the most famous of which was when The New York Times reported that thirty-eight people ignored the cries of Kitty Genovese when she was murdered in public in 1964.

The most prominent researcher has been Daniel Batson. He set out on a thirty-year quest to disprove the existence of altruism. In his most famous experiment, students at Princeton Theological Seminary had to prepare a talk, then walk to another building to give the talk. On the way they passed a groaning man slumped in an alleyway. The experimenters found that those who were in a hurry were less likely to stop and help, even if they were on the way to give a talk on the subject of the Good Samaritan. Some of the seminarians even stepped over the groaning man.

So where does all this leave us? What if all those philosophers, economists, biologists and psychologists were right? What if the vast majority of human behaviour really is driven by egoistical motives? That is easy enough to believe. Just look at today’s headlines. If the prevailing view of Western thought has been that altruism is impossible, or at the very least extremely unlikely, what does that say about the helpers I meet? Perhaps it suggests that they are rare; that there are a relatively small number of people who do the lioness’s share of the caring. And if that is the case, then it is hardly surprising that they are overburdened. It is hardly surprising that they take on more than they can handle. It is hardly surprising that they sink into the Super-Helper Syndrome.

It suggests we need to help them survive.

Part One

The Art of Helping

Chapter 1

How Can I Help?

Isn’t it ever so slightly preposterous how little instruction we get for the things that matter most in life? You’re just expected to know how to be a good romantic partner – there is no training programme. You wake up one day to find yourself the parent of a teenager but you didn’t sit the exam. You arrive at work and you are told you are leading a team but the only role models you’ve had were bad managers. More examples keep coming to mind. What about resolving conflicts or managing money? What about helping?

We have seen how commonplace the act of helping is but hardly any of us set out to analyse it. There are surprisingly few books that directly address the question of what it means to help or how to do it well. Even people in the caring professions are given less training in the art of helping than you would think. The emphasis is on teaching technical skills, which are essential but not enough on their own. If we carefully dismantle helping and lay out all the working parts on the table, we can better understand why it sometimes goes wrong. This will also give us a shared language to talk about the Super-Helper Syndrome. By the end of this chapter, we should have some answers to questions like:

Why don’t people take the advice I give them?

Is it possible to help by doing nothing?

Are good intentions enough?

If you don’t know what impact you’ve had, is it still helping?

Is self-help help?

Does giving help make people dependent?

What is the single biggest mistake people make when trying to help?

So, What Exactly is Help?

The place to start is the dictionary. 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’. What I like about that definition is that it includes the word ‘offering’. That allows room for some sort of negotiation and the possibility of the helpee refusing. Personally, I would like the definition to go further and explicitly state that it only qualifies as help when it is wanted. And there is too much emphasis there on doing. The definition above describes making it easier for someone to do something; but you can help someone to just be. That is not semantic nit-picking. As we will see when we look at the different forms of help, supportive help is often neglected. Therapists help people to just be: be calmer, be more accepting of themselves. Going back to the dictionary, surely there is more to helping than ‘services or material aid’. What about sympathy, compassion or love? Supportive help is overlooked again.

Here is an alternative definition for our purposes:

Make something easier or possible for someone by offering them resources, information, expertise and, or, support, when they both want and need this.

The Four Forms of Help

This alternative definition goes beyond the one in the dictionary to spell out the ‘services or material aid’ that are being offered. Help always appears in these four forms: resources, information, expertise and support. Whenever we help someone, we offer one or more of these. If you cast your eyes back a few pages, you’ll find the supermarket assistant offering resources help in reaching for the jar, and the friend offering expert help in setting up the PlayStation. In fact, you will find two of each of the four forms of help.

When helping goes wrong, the chances are it’s because the wrong form of help has been offered. There’s a mismatch between the expectations of the helper and the expectations of the helpee. Imagine you call a friend to offload distress about your autocratic boss. Angry on your behalf, they squawk on about how you could find another job tomorrow with your qualifications and experience. They say you should tell them to stick it (information help). At the end of the call, you mumble all you wanted was a sympathetic ear (supportive help).

Taking a closer look at the four forms reveals a lot about what works and what doesn’t in different helping scenarios. As we go through them, think about which of the four forms you most naturally give. By doing this you can start to build up a picture of your own individual style as a helper. This can also reveal how vulnerable you might be to the Super-Helper Syndrome.

Help Form 1:Resources Help – The Edge of Husbandry

Are you constantly doing things for other people? Do you lend belongings that are never returned? Are you the first to reach for the bill? If so, you are like many of those I interviewed for this book. They were generous-hearted and free with their possessions. However, for helpers, having something is frequently associated with feeling guilty for having it. People with Super-Helper Syndrome who have a resource feel obliged to offer it to anyone who doesn’t. And once they start, they go on dishing out their resources like someone at a conveyor belt piping salted caramel fondant into chocolates.

When I analysed the data, the interviewees and questionnaire respondents were providing seven categories of resources: labour, status, space, tools, materials, data and finances. In addition to the overall obligation to give or lend resources, each of these categories sets its own traps. While I whizz through them, you might recognise your own helping tendencies. By labour I mean the most obvious type of resource, doing things for people. They were carrying in the shopping, driving neighbours to the doctor, ordering online groceries for elderly relatives and a multitude of other things. They were invariably squeezed by time. When they weren’t doing things themselves, they were supplying labour, as in, ‘I sent my son round to do that for her.’ They supplied other resources too. A common example was allowing access to their own status or attributes by proxy, as in, ‘I put in a good word for him with the HR director.’ Examples of providing space included storing an antique table in the garage so they couldn’t park their own car and allowing a friend to sleep on the sofa. There were several instances of helpers who had let someone else into their home but couldn’t get rid of them. The category of tools, materials and data included everything from umbrellas to clothes to books, even a van, as well as what we typically think of as tools, like a screwdriver.

Offering material resources brings up the question, do you want the resource returned and, if so, in what condition? Natural helpers aren’t good at protecting their own rights when they provide resources. And other people can be only too happy to take advantage of this.

Several of the interviewees talked about the frustration of getting things back late, damaged or not at all. When I was 15, I borrowed a bag of psychology books from my friend’s mum. I carted them around all summer to read on buses and in the park. When I handed them back, she took one out and caressed the scuffed cover, smoothing her fingers over the dog-eared pages. The others were the same. She was appalled. I still feel guilty about not looking after them as well as she’d expected.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulleth th’ edge of husbandry.

Shakespeare, Polonius in Hamlet, Act 1, Sc. 3

With finances help, the question of how to get the resources back is even more fraught. Money is emotive enough, even when we aren’t lending or giving it away. Just thinking about it makes many of us uneasy. People with Super-Helper Syndrome buy presents they can’t afford. They frequently lend money that is never repaid. In the end this leads to snowballing resentment and, as Polonius points out to his son who is heading off to college in Hamlet, it can even destroy friendships. Whether you agree with him or not, perhaps it’s a sound principle to write the money off in your head as soon as it leaves your wallet.

If you do hope to get your resources back, it’s important to clarify your expectations by contracting. If you find that difficult, you are not alone. We’ll come back to asserting boundaries. For now, contracting simply means agreeing in advance that you do want this back, when you want it back and in what condition you want it back.

Help Form 2:Information Help – L’help quotidien

I’ve just got back from Price’s bakery. As I left the house, Rod called out, ‘Don’t forget the eggs for Lilly’s cake.’ On my way up the hill I caught up with a neighbour to let her know her handbag was hanging open. She thanked me and told me the street barbecue has been confirmed for Saturday. I said I would do marinated kebabs, she said she would bring a big bowl of her creamy coleslaw. I waited at the kerb until a driver waved me across. At the bakery, Mrs Price said the sourdough was just out of the oven. As she was wrapping the loaf, she told me they would be closed Thursday. My phone vibrated. It was a text from Lucy: ‘the blue boar says ok for meeting next week’. I came back into the house and took one look at Rod sifting cocoa into flour. ‘Shit! I forgot the eggs.’

Information help is where you provide someone else with useful knowledge. In contrast with giving away resources, with this form of help you still have the information yourself after you have given it to someone else. For example, telling someone about a book you enjoyed rather than giving them your own copy. With information help you don’t run the risk of your resources being depleted. That’s one advantage for the helper – information is cheap. Of all the squillions of instances of help that go on every day around the world, information help is the most common. It’s so ubiquitous it goes unnoticed. Almost every conversation involves sharing information. In my fifteen-minute trip to the bakery above, I can find ten examples.

Information help is at the core of how we use language. There’s advising, explaining, giving feedback, notifying, storytelling and reminding. It can even be non-verbal, like sign language or the guy in the car who waved me across the road to the bakery. It’s how we learn just about everything important we know. It is the currency of schools and colleges. Teaching makes use of another advantage of this form of help: you can pass on information to a group of people at the same time. On the other hand, communication is notoriously tricky: you never know if you have been fully understood. Often you aren’t around to see whether someone implements your advice or to find out if it worked. With information help, you can’t always know if you have done the recipient any good. What’s more, because information is cheap, it has other disadvantages from the point of view of the helpee. They have to filter out the false, the fake, the advertising, the propaganda.

Remember your friend squawking at you to quit your job, and how that is an example of giving information help when supportive help is what’s wanted? On the desk beside me there is a copy of Helping by MIT psychologist Edgar Schein, one of the few books I could find on the subject. Professor Schein provides twenty-six examples of what he calls the ‘Many Forms of Help’. But going through his list, fifteen of them fall into my category of information help. Specifically, nine of them are advice. Schein gives only two examples of supportive help (even professors of psychology overlook this). That’s an easy oversight: readily giving advice is the default form of help for many of us. It’s a particular temptation if you have a compulsion to help.

Information help isn’t just about passing on facts or advice. There’s sharing insights too. Sparking self-discovery is one of the most rewarding parts of being a coach. When people understand their own motives and underlying beliefs it leads to breakthrough moments. So, information help is one of the most quotidian forms of help but can also be one of the most powerful.

Help Form 3:Expert Help – Can You Just Take a Quick Look at …

People who are prone to Super-Helper Syndrome are drawn to jobs where they provide expert help. They are found in health and social care, in professional services and any workplace where they can 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. Obvious examples are a surgeon repairing a hernia, an engineer servicing an alarm system or a techie removing a virus. Qualifications or authorisation come to mind when we think about expert help, but they are by no means always necessary. Remember this is about the form of help being given, not about who is doing the helping. If someone we consider to be an expert on a subject is teaching another person about that subject, that’s information help. Anyone doing something for someone else that they don’t know how to do for themselves is giving expert help, whether or not we might think of them as an ‘expert’. When you block a spam number from a colleague’s mobile phone or tune a guitar for a friend who’s just started to learn, that’s expert help. A lot of what we do for young children, such as tying up their shoelaces, is expert help.

He who does not know one thing knows another.

African Proverb

Now that we’ve differentiated exactly what it is, we can look at the advantages and disadvantages of this form of help. Expert help can be essential and even lifesaving, but it comes with several risks. Many of these relate to the fact that giving expert help is doing something for someone, or to someone, and it’s usually easier for the helper to just get on with it. In fact, one reason for choosing to give expert help in the first place is that it’s quicker to do something yourself than to show someone how to do it for themselves. Unlike with information help, experts don’t pass on their knowledge. The helpee is none the wiser after the event. That’s fine in some situations – I don’t need to know how to repair my own hernia – but, in others, it creates unnecessary dependency. If a parent keeps on tying their child’s shoelaces, the child never learns. For this reason, it’s worth considering whether another form of help is more appropriate before offering expert help.