The Super-helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People - Hardcover

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Jess Baker is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She started her career in healthcare before specializing in business psychology. She has delivered webinars from her loft in Shropshire to global audiences. She is an award-winning coach. Over a thousand women have been through her online Tame Your Inner Critic program. She speaks at conferences and festivals and is a regular commissioned writer on the subject of wellbeing. She comments on leadership, psychology at work and mental health for magazines, newspapers and national radio. As an expert on the wellbeing of helpers she offers her services on a voluntary basis to charities.

Rod Vincent is an Anglo-Irish Chartered Psychologist, a writer and a musician. He is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and during his previous career as a business psychologist he helped to develop leaders in forty-one countries. He is now doing his best to rebalance that carbon footprint by confining himself to walking the Shropshire hills. His poems and stories have won prizes in competitions and been published in a number of literary journals including Poetry Ireland Review, Stand and The Rialto. His poems are also in the Iron Book of New Humorous Verse (Iron Press). He writes the lyrics and plays bass as one half of O’Reilly & Vincent.

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Chapter 1
How Can IHelp?
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 essen-
tial 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 theOxford Dictionary
ofEnglishas making it ‘easier or possible for (someone) to do something by
offering them one’s services or material aid’. What I like about that defini-
tion 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 todo something; but
you can help someone to justbe. 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 justbe: 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 respond-
ents 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 tenden-
cies. 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...