Why Do Some People Become Helpers?

A Childhood Dream to Help

Since I was a little kid I wanted to help people. I remember at some point in my childhood declaring that my dream job, what I wanted to be when I grew up, was the Salvation Army bell-ringer outside of a grocery store. (You can ask my family, they’ll confirm this declaration I often made.) In my mind, at that age, that seemed like such a direct and accessible way to help people who were suffering.

Of course, with time and maturity, how I express my desire to help those who are suffering has morphed, evolved, and become more nuanced and sophisticated. But I did in fact become a professional “helper”. Because the internal mandate to help people never diminished.

The Making of A Helper

Over the years, this has led me to ponder… What are the makings of a “helper”? What is it about our personality, temperament, set of life experiences, and the environment in which we grow up that develops empathetic helpers?

I have come to understand that sometimes people become helpers at an early age because they had to, in order to survive. Maybe they had to emotionally caretake for a parent, because the parent was emotionally immature or dysregulated, and the child developed strategies to help their parent stay stable so that they (the child) could, in turn, feel some sense of stability. Or maybe they had to caretake for younger siblings because mom or dad’s addiction made them unavailable for real parenting.

There are a lot of potential scenarios where helping is developed as a strategy to survive a less-than-ideal situation at home, and it can develop into a pattern in the nervous system that outlasts the stage and set of circumstances. Basically, we can end up as adults still wired for “helping”, not aware that that tendency comes from a deeply embedded nervous system pattern and survival mechanism. It’s as if the body has not gotten the memo that we no longer have to “help” in order to survive.

When Helping Becomes a Burden

In these situations, being a “helper” gets coupled with over-extending ourselves for the sake of others' betterment, as if our survival depends on it (which, it might very well have at some point in the past). In this scenario, helping, by default, takes us outside our window of tolerance–without conscious awareness of the fact. (We often lose contact with just where the edges of our window of tolerance are when they’ve been busted through repeatedly in the name of survival, and so we don’t even recognize when we’re outside of it.) And thus it can easily turn into a scenario in which we lose ourselves in our “helping”. We abandon our own needs, emotional processes, and longings, as they get lost in and swallowed up by the needs of those around us that seem bigger and more key to our survival.

So the question this has led me to over the years is: How does one be a helper, in a “clean” way?

• In a way that does not forsake my own needs?

• In a way that does not require that I abandon or betray myself in the process?

• In a way that isn’t just a trauma response that I’m not in control of?

The Path to Healthy Helping

Fast forward many years to now, and I’ve figured out a thing or two. I’ve discovered answers to those questions, and am now a much healthier helper than I used to be.

• I’ve gained awareness of the survival strategies at play in my “helping”

• I’ve healed up the trauma that was still alive in my body related to my early role as a young helper

• I’ve rediscovered where the edges of my window of tolerance are and what it feels like in my body to be taken outside of it.

  
  

All of that ended up impacting in a very positive way my ability to stay fully present in the moment while helping people, and not carrying a burden into the treatment/therapy space I hold for clients, nor carrying a burden out of the treatment space from the client. Light and easy. Not tethered to my survival. Not hinging on me overextending myself. And definitely not wearing me down, leading to burnout.

Join Me in Learning to Help in a Sustainable Way

If you want to understand at a deeper level these mechanisms that may be at play in your own “helping” role, whether that’s as a therapist, coach, bodyworker, first responder, minister, social worker, addictions counselor, or some other helping profession, I invite you to join my online course called Healthy Helpers: Developing Therapeutic Longevity. We go into this plus discuss how to create healthy buffers for yourself when you are exposed to clients’ or patients’ trauma stories or traumatic material day-in and day-out. We dive into what’s going on in your own nervous system, so we can rewire it and equip you better for your role.

‘Cause we really need you to stay in your helping role. The world has a lot of hurting people, so we definitely don’t want our helpers to burn out and quit. So let’s figure out how to do this in a sustainable, life-giving (vs life-draining) way.

Check out all of the details and access the course here.