The Appeal of Rescuing Other People

we might assume that our greatest longing in relationships would be to be looked after by someone an exceptionally kind person who could listen to us nurture us assist us and make us feel comforted and seen but this is to ignore just how strong there is in some of us a diametrically opposed aspiration a wish to find someone who is in a lot of pain and trouble who's confused and sad unhappy and overwhelmed and who therefore cannot possibly do very much for us but who we on the other hand have every opportunity to hold appease calm

and heal for this group Among Us troubles aren't just nuisances to be managed they lie at the core of what we positively desire to find in others we feel our heart tighten when we learn that someone had a difficult childhood or is isolated in a drift or has been bullied at work or made to feel worthless in a past relationship these are not merely regrettable incidentals they lie at the center of our feelings of love for us to be this way there tends to have been a certain sort of childhood something has happened to us

early on which means that giving assistance has become decisively easier than receiving it we might say that everyone at the start longs to receive love but when it's not been especially forthcoming one way to handle its absence is to turn into a compulsive caregiver to offer others what we wish could have been offered to us to turn our deficiency into a bounty to locate the needy part of us in someone else and then to heal it in them as an alternative to addressing it in ourselves when we've had to forgo our wish to be nurtured

and understood maybe because Mom was elsewhere or dad low in spirits we might have begun by looking after our teddy bear then moved on to our friends and eventually in adulthood discovered our greater satisfaction in salving the woes of our lovers we may now be rendered hugely uncomfortable whenever the tables turn even for a moment if a lover said tonight it's going to be all about you we might Flinch to hear I want to put you at the center of my world could bring on Panic it's not that such care isn't fundamentally wanted it's that

it was never experienced and so has grown alien and frightening a reminder of a wound we haven't been strong enough to contemplate rage at and move on from the way out of our culdesac is to start to notice how scared we are we may have Justified our Behavior by thinking of ourselves principally as selfless but we are something more complicated and more interesting terrified we aren't just without reciprocity we are manically intolerant of it and yet as we still stand to discover sometimes the real generosity is to let a lover do to us what a

parent did not at the start it's to stop occupying the powerful position of The Rescuer and learn at points to take the risk of being at another's Mercy it's to experience as if for the first time how much we need someone else real maturity may be as much about a capacity to receive as to give