Well, hello and welcome to this episode of The Terri Cole Show that I'm gonna start with
a question.
Are you a natural born helper, right?
Are you always willing to lend a hand or jump in when something is needed?
Yeah?
You're nodding your head?
Well, then this video is for you because I'm gonna be breaking down compulsive helping
(not that helpful), when helping is unhelpful, like when is it not actually helping?
And I'm gonna give you some ideas of what you can do instead of auto helping.
So before we get into it, if you are new to my channel, well, hello and welcome.
Please introduce yourself in the comments, cuz we are a friendly crew.
Don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell because I want you to get notified when I
put out new stuff, which is at least twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And I don't want you to miss a thing.
So if you don't know me, my name is Terri Cole.
I'm a licensed psychotherapist, a relationship expert and the author of Boundary Boss, which
you can get at boundarybossbook.com.
I also love to acknowledge you and say thank you so much for all of your questions and
your comments.
We have a really active comment section on this YouTube channel.
So thank you because you know I read every single one and I love to highlight them.
So today I'm highlighting coyote, and it was under Money Mindset and Manifestation with
Allison Byrd, which was an amazing interview that I did.
Which if you didn't watch, you should.
She wrote "Powerful video, great conversation.
I'm glad I subscribed to this channel" and wow coyote.
I'm glad you subscribed to this channel as well.
All right.
So let's move into today's content.
What is helping and what is unhelpful helping?
That's really what we're talking about because so much of the time we see ourselves as nice
people and we are nice people.
I always wanna help people, but there is a line, a tipping point, where the helping itself
pushes over into not really being about the other person, but really being about what
you need.
Right?
You need to see yourself as a helper.
This also sort of folds into a lot of codependent behaviors.
So let's just start with some examples of unhelpful helping.
Unsolicited advice giving.
Are you the person who is always there offering suggestions or problem solving for someone
else?
Is that you really, and be honest with yourself, listen, there's nothing to feel bad about.
What do we do in my podcast and my channel?
What are we doing?
Raising our awareness about why we do the things that we do so that whatever we're doing
in life, we can mindfully choose to do that.
Another symptom of unhelpful helping is checking in on people all the time.
Are you okay?
Are you sure you're okay?
Constantly asking if someone needs help, even if they've already said that they don't.
So frequent checking in is another one.
Another thing is if you are overly soothing, like "it's gonna be okay" or "are you sure
you're okay?"
with that face that stays like concern for a long time, right?
Again, the person has said I'm okay.
And it's like pushing the envelope.
Another thing is the auto fixing, just offering to take over for someone else, or "I can do
that" or "I can do it for you."
And again, this may feel like you're being helpful, but what is missing in this equation
of being unhelpfully helpful in quotes is understanding how the other person feels.
So this auto fixing this auto advice giving again so much of that falls under codependency.
So let's talk a little bit about why we do it and then I'll give you some ideas of things
that you can do instead.
So think about it for yourself.
If this is resonating with you, why do you think you do that?
Well, a lot of my therapy clients would say, "well, I see myself as a helpful person because
I like to be needed."
I've heard that zillions of times in my career as a therapist, "I like to be needed.
It feels good to be needed."
Here's the thing.
If we are sort of pushing our help on someone else, then are we really being needed or are
we doing what we need to do?
Which is to feel needed.
So what is really happening if we break down co-dependency as many of you know, which I'll
talk about a little bit though, because this is a big part of unhelpful helping is that
we are overly invested in the feeling states, the situations, the decisions, the relationships,
the outcomes of the people in our lives.
There's so many myths out there about codependency, but what a lot of people don't know is that
it's really an overt or a covert bid to control a situation, someone else's situation.
So in your mind, you may go, "no, I just they're in pain and I just want them to be out of
pain."
But this is where we need to understand boundaries, our own emotional boundaries, that someone
else's life, even if it's a grown child or your best friend, that is their life to manage,
we can be supportive.
We can be helpful.
We can be loving.
But when you are an auto advice giver, what you're really saying underneath auto advice
giving basically is I know better.
I know what you should do more than you know what you should do.
And even if a friend comes to you and says, I don't know what to do, that's okay.
You know, Deepak Chopra says, "The infinite possibilities of your life are in the not
knowing- are in the unknown.
In the unknown, everything is possible".
Now that might sound super esoteric, but there's truth in it.
And the only way, think about how you come to decisions in your life.
The only way to really come to them for yourself is we must be in the pain of the unknown of
the I'm afraid to make a mistake or of the, I hope I don't choose the wrong quote, unquote
decision.
But again, that whole thing is a process.
And what I find at least in my own life, in my twenties, I was highly codependent.
Many of you know this, but with like everybody, not, not just the close people in my life.
I could become codependently invested in literally anybody from my mail carrier to my hair stylist,
where if anybody was in pain, I didn't like it.
Like I took on the weight of the world, but in doing so, I was trampling on the emotional
boundaries and the sovereignty of other people.
So it's not about having a bad motive.
So if this is you, if you are someone who is a perpetual perennial helper of others,
if you're a fixer, if you're the one everyone comes to, or if you're the one who offers,
even when no one's asking, that doesn't make you a bad person, but you're doing it for
a reason.
And here's the thing.
If you can't not do it, if it is a compulsive reaction to how you are feeling about the
other person being in distress, which is what it is so much of the time, there are so many
unconscious processes that are going on when we are helping quote unquote or fixing quote
unquote, that we're uncomfortable with what is happening.
Here's the reason why I'm doing an episode on this: is that it is really damaging to
our relationships because what happens when I am in my twenties, when I was auto advice
giving all over town to everyone in the world, when someone came to me and they had a problem,
I was almost always inserting myself into the middle of their situation, but I was inserting
myself as the solution.
And I would go to great lengths, like almost any length to get it done, quote unquote,
because that person's distress was so distressing to me.
Now, why are we like this?
Why does this happen in my own life?
Listen, we all have families.
We all grew up in family systems and most of those family systems are dysfunctional.
Come on.
I don't think I know anyone who came from a functional quote, unquote, like super functional
home and didn't have any dysfunction.
So in my family system, it was a highly functioning alcoholic system and I was designated the
hero child.
So even though I was chronologically the youngest, I was psychologically the oldest.
So I was put in that position, but I also put myself in that position.
So I was the youngest and the family system could agree that I was good and that I was
helpful.
And so I was set up to be the fixer and the helper and the hero child and the golden child
in my family of origin.
And interestingly, my mother played that same role in her family of origin.
So again, most of these things don't just come out of nowhere.
There's a reason why my mother related to me the way that she did.
And also I am, by nature, a helper, right?
So there's adaptive ways that we can take this desire to help others and sublimate that
into something that is adaptive, like me becoming a psychotherapist, right?
So now it's my job to help other people.
And that's okay because that's what I get paid to do.
But it's, for me, the challenge was not doing it in my own personal life.
And with my clients, I needed to learn to be a healthy helper, right?
It wouldn't help my clients if I just gave them answers or told them what I thought that
they should do.
Obviously the role of a therapist is helping people come to their own answers because I
don't really know what's right for other people to do.
My job as a psychotherapist is to help people decode and find the answers within themselves.
I always say I'm, nobody's guru, but I'm a damn good GPS to help you to get to the answers
that you need for yourself, which would be different than answers that I would need for
myself, because we're all so unique.
So there's millions of reasons why we do this, but it is painful whether you are on the receiving
end of an unhelpful helper.
Now think about it right now.
Do you have people in your life who sort of insist on helping you, even though you don't
need help?
I give this example sometimes of one of my closest friends and we've been friends for
many, many years, and this was many, many years ago, but we would travel together and
she would grab her suitcase and also grab mine, like, think about that.
She was such an over-functioning unhelpful helper helper at the time I would be like,
dude, like I can carry my own bag.
And she was like, but I got it.
I'm like, but why that makes no sense.
I have a backpack on it.
I have nothing in my hands.
Like it was so ingrained in her.
And of course it's no coincidence that we're best friends, cuz we were both so bad at this
at the time.
And of course have both had a ton of therapy since then and we no longer do that, but there's
something very depersonalizing when you're on the receiving end of someone constantly
looking at you, like you are a problem to be solved, anticipating your needs, doing
something before you ask them to do it or doing things that you don't even want them
to do.
And maybe you're that person doing that for others.
And if you are, I guarantee you that you've had experiences where you don't understand
why people aren't more grateful or you don't understand people's negative reaction to your
overextending yourself on things.
So let's move into what can we do instead?
Because there's nothing wrong with being a natural born helper, right?
You're you're kind, you're a lover.
So am I, there's nothing wrong with that.
Let's get it into a healthy place though.
So the first thing is having a deeper understanding of why do you do it for you?
Cuz you have your own "why"- we all have our own "why?"
I'm gonna give you the secondary gain questions that I have.
So you are continuing this behavior.
The question is what do you get to not feel, not face or not experience by killing yourself
helping other people?
What does it do for you?
So all of this will be in the guide, just go to terricole.com/guide, because this is
where the gems are hidden.
A lot of this stuff is unconscious and there is something that you get out of doing it.
It might be avoiding your own life.
When I was super high functioning codependent in my twenties, active in all kinds of relationships,
I was exhausted.
So much of the time I was using so much bandwidth taking on the problems of other people.
I'll give you another quick example because this one was pretty extreme and pretty painful.
I was doing a weekend long training to help rape survivors.
So to work in an ER and sort of be someone on call and there was another person who was
there.
Now I met her on Saturday during the training, we kind of connected on Sunday.
She's like, Hey, I'm in a really bad situation.
Can I stay with you tonight?
I'm in an abusive relationship, blah, blah, blah.
I would not say yes now, I would give her other ideas.
But I said, yes, I didn't even know this person.
And she came to my house on Sunday night with her dog and like five huge suitcases.
And I'm not kidding.
I mean she had no intention of leaving and she stayed way more than one night.
And it took me so much support from my therapist to get her out.
I wasn't even friends with her.
I didn't even know her, but I was so overly impacted by her tale of woe and by just seeing
someone in need.
So that is an extreme example of unhealthy helping, because it was bad for me to do that.
Not to mention she could have been a very unstable individual.
Maybe she could have harmed me or robbed me, but she didn't do any of those things.
And I eventually, I mean, it was a week, but I got her out eventually, but it was so the
whole thing was so painful and that's all about unhealthy helping, but also having just
super disordered boundaries.
It was like that really started with a disordered emotional boundary where I was so appalled
and terrified for her as she was describing the abuse that she was dealing with, that
I couldn't protect myself.
Right.
I could only fix because that was the only skillset I had at that point.
And when I say fix, those of you listening can't see, I'm saying fixing with quote unquote
marks around it.
So the first thing we're gonna do is look at the secondary gain.
And of course, once I started healing from being an overfunctioning being an over helper,
being a codependent, I realized what I was gaining from that, which was in so many ways,
avoiding my own life, the things that I needed to handle, the things that I needed to deal
with, you know, my own wounds from childhood.
Where if I could just be superwoman during the day, I didn't have to feel those feelings
because that filled me up.
It made me feel good about myself.
But then I'm always seeking the next person to save so to speak.
All right.
So that's the first thing you're gonna do.
And the second thing, and I'll provide this to you in the guide is when someone comes
to you with a problem, you have got to learn to stop the auto fixing.
We have to learn to ask expansive questions, respect the other person's autonomy and get
it through your mind, the truth- that you do not know what anyone else should do.
Really, what really matters is them coming to that themselves.
So you can ask, well, what does your gut instinct say?
How do you feel about it?
What do you think you should do?
And then just let it be silent.
Let that just sit.
And it'll be hard in the beginning to do this, but it is completely possible to do it learning
how to ask questions.
And then the last thing to do is really get dialed into how codependent are you?
You may be like me.
I'm from the high functioning codependency brand of codependency, which means that you're
overly invested in the feeling states, the outcomes, the situations, the relationships,
as I said before, of other people, but high functioning means that you're so highly capable
that you make it all look easy, that people think it is easy for you.
That a lot of times you are the person who's like the rock in your friends group and your
family system.
You're the people that people come to.
So you may not in the past have recognized that that is still codependent behavior just
happen to be really good at it.
So I'm gonna give you a couple of questions in the guide that you can answer, which will
give you a better idea of how much of a high functioning codependent you may be.
So I hope that this episode was helpful to you.
If it was please share it with the people in your life.
I hope you have an amazing week and as always take care of you.