The Super-Helper Syndrome: A Survival Guide for Compassionate People

by Jess Baker, Rod Vincent

Overview

Do you ever find yourself helping others even when you are exhausted and have nothing left to give? Do you put others’ needs before your own? Or do you know someone who fits that description? Then this book is for you.

I was hooked right from the authors' note; there was such beautiful humanity to it. 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

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. In their efforts to help wherever they can they typically overstretch themselves. 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 lurks unnoticed. It dwells in the psychology of the helper.

Where people feel compelled to help others and don’t look after their own needs, that’s the Super-Helper Syndrome. Until recently this phenomenon has gone unnoticed and unnamed, but it has now been highlighted by chartered psychologists Jess Baker and Rod Vincent. The Super-Helper Syndrome offers a new perspective on the psychology of helping. It sets out how helping works and why it sometimes goes wrong. It brings to life psychological and neuroscientific research to explain the roots of compassion and empathy. It goes deep into the belief system of helpers and reveals what really motivates them. It illustrates all this with excerpts from a broad spectrum of interviews with paid and unpaid helpers, from ICU nurses to lawyers, volunteers to live-in carers.

The book provides activities for the reader to profile and analyze their own helping relationships. It offers support for people who want to adopt a Healthy Helper Mindset, including meeting their own needs, building assertiveness and setting helping boundaries. It guides the reader towards countering the inner critic with mindful self-compassion. 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: colleagues, employees, family members or friends. And it’s for anyone who wants to understand how helping works and to be better at it.

It has been written because it’s vital to improve the lives of those who improve the lives of others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781803996523
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Edition description:	New edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

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 provid-
ing 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, materialsand dataincluded
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 inHamlet, 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 inHamlet, 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 knowl-
edge. 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 – informa-
tion 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 impor-
tant 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 ofHelpingby MIT psycholo-
gist 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 shar-
ing insights too. Sparking self-discovery is one of the most rewarding parts
of being a coach. When people understand their own motives and underly-
ing 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 profes-
sional 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 where -
withal. 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 advan-
tages 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 some-
one 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.
Usually, expert help works better when it is blended with the other forms.
In their urgency, professional experts sometimes overlook the need for
information or support. The helpee wants more than just something done
for them. The engineer could tell the customer how to reset the intruder
alarm. Sometimes it’s important to give information as a form of support. A
healthcare professional might talk you through a procedure to reassure you
that everything is going okay.
Another type of risk has to do with the level of responsibility attached to
this form of help; the expert is to blame if it all goes wrong. It is one more
reason to think about the forms of help you offer. It’s also the reason the global
professional indemnity insurance industry is worth nearly 40 billion dollars.
Giving expert help can put the helper in a position of power. There is a
risk that the helpee feels inadequate or vulnerable in the hands of an expert,
or that the expert might abuse their power.
Finally, the biggest risk for experts who are also compulsive helpers ... as
much as they love their friends and family, they get inundated with requests
to apply their skills for free. There were many examples from the interviews.
One dentist was at a party where a woman cornered her in the kitchen and
pulled her cheek back asking her to take a look at a chipped tooth. The den-
tist said she grabbed the torch in her handbag without thinking.
Help Form 4:Supportive Help – The Heart of Helping
Empathising, encouraging, reassuring, consoling and soothing are a differ-
ent kind of help from the other three forms we’ve explored. Supportive help
is the odd one out because it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem; it makes
the problem easier to cope with. When it’s the principal form of help, sup-
portive help works by facilitating someone to solve their own problem. It’s
about showing the helpee that they already have the resources, informa-
tion or expertise to help themselves. Commonly, it’s required in addition to
the other forms of help. Support is the steel joist that underpins the other
forms. You can’t always see it, but it reinforces them.
For some of us, supportive help is the most rewarding form of help to
give. But as we’ve seen, it is often neglected. There are times when all
the helpee wants is a listening ear, but it’s tempting to jump to solution
mode – to start squawking. That’s why it can be one of the most skilled and
demanding forms of help. But sadly, it is underrated or seen as nebulous,
rather than as a means of tangible results. Management trainers call it a
soft skill. But it’s vital. Louis Penner of the Cancer Institute at Wayne State
University studied children with acute lymphocytic leukaemia attending
outpatient clinics. He found that children whose parents showed greater
‘empathic concern’ experienced less pain and suffering during treatments
such as lumbar punctures. Those parents tended to protect and comfort
their children more. They also engaged in ‘normalising’ behaviours such as
playing with their children, chatting to them or reading to them during the
procedures. This kind of research shows the value of supportive help.
Supportive help comes in many guises. It can be purely non-verbal, such
as smiling and nodding to show understanding, or murmuring your con-
cern. It can also be physical, hugging someone or stroking their arm. It can
actually be passive – just sitting by the bedside. Although it’s nice to know,
you don’t always have to know that you are helping, to help; it still fits the
definition we discussed.
Occasionally support can even be helping by inaction. For example,
if a child wants to reorganise their bedroom with their own collection of
knick-knacks and posters, their parent might be tempted to get involved.
Depending on the situation, it can be more helpful to do nothing. If the
parent holds back, the child has more opportunity to express themselves
and take ownership of the end result.
Supportive help relies heavily on the quality of the relationship. It
typically requires personal disclosure which can leave the helpee feeling
vulnerable. At a crisis point in my own life, I spent a couple of years in psy-
chotherapy. Before I met the therapist I could work with, I had two sessions
with another woman. When I arrived for the second one, she said, ‘Before
we start, can I ask what colour eyeshadow you are wearing and where you
get your hair cut?’ That was after I had spent much of the first session dis-
closing issues about appearance and identity. An important element of
effective supportive help is to foster an atmosphere of mutual trust so both
of you feel safe.
Supportive help demands a different mix of skills from the other forms of
help. The most critical of those is listening. Stillness and patience play a part
too: giving the helpee time to talk and allowing space for silence. Not eve-
ryone is good at this. Using these skills might seem passive to an onlooker,
but they do take a great deal of internal control. To give supportive help is
to give something of yourself and that comes at an emotional cost. And it
expends energy. These are risks for compassionate people.
Spotlight 1.1:How IHelp
Think about the four forms of help: resources, information, expert,
supportive. Which of them come most naturally to you in the various
aspects of your life? Make a note of your answers to the following
questions:
Which forms of help do you tend to give at work?
Which forms of help do you tend to give in your personal life?
Which forms of help do you rarely give?
Try to see if there’s a pattern as this will give you a sense of how you
position yourself as a helper. There are no right or wrong answers. You
might find you tend to give one particular form of help or that you
give all four. At this stage you are just trying to build more awareness of
yourself as a helper.
As well as thinking about your own helping style in Spotlight 1.1, you might
consider what help you receive from your community, colleagues, friends
or family. What help do you ask for, and what do you need? Do different
people offer you different things? In my life there are certain people I would
turn to for resources but would never go to for support, and vice versa.
Skilled helpers balance the four forms of help like a sound engineer at
a mixing desk. They enhance their expert help by increasing their level
of support where it’s needed. They discern when a helpee really needs
resources. They’re able to efficiently switch to giving information. As well
as making use of the subtle interplay of all four forms, skilled helpers
instinctively know how the following three key dynamics play out in
different helping situations.
Help Dynamic 1:Autonomy vs. Dependency – Teach a Man to Fish
and then You Don’t Have to Give Him a Fish
The first distinction is between whether the helpee is equipped to solve
their own problems in the future versus having to repeatedly come back for
assistance. Psychologists who study prosocial behaviour have labelled this
distinction autonomy-oriented versus dependency-oriented help. It mat-
ters to us because a common feature of the Super-Helper Syndrome is that
you can become embroiled in relationships where people are dependent on
your help.
I was the only mum on the PTA who worked full time. Typical me. I started
off assisting the treasurer with the finances, then she left, so I was thrown
into that role, and then the chair left so I take over that and I find myself
doing a dual role managing everything – that was interesting for three
and a half years [rolls eyes]. Sometimes you help so much that everyone
just gets used to you doing it all.
Accountant, Interviewee
When I am coaching people, I try to leave them with tools and techniques
to be self-sufficient in the longer term (autonomy oriented). But I do offer
a brief emergency call as part of the contract. When clients take me up on
that, my job is to bring them down off the ceiling or pick them up from the
floor. In those calls I’m more likely to give direct advice or short-term coping
strategies (dependency oriented). Both types of help have value if they are
congruous with what people need in that moment.
Creating autonomy isn’t always easy. A common experience of coaches
is what I call the therapy-go-round. At first the client turns up glazed with
enthusiasm. In every session after that they want to be reminded of what
was said before. The coach – desperate to help – tries numerous strategies.
The therapy-go-round client dismisses any hint that they might come up
with their own ideas. They agree to the coach’s recommendations but don’t
take any action. They turn up week after week. Eventually they begin to
express disappointment that they haven’t got more out of the sessions. It’s a
shame. They do need help but all they are able to do at this stage is maintain
a dependency-oriented relationship.
Thinking back to the four forms of help, they are autonomy oriented or
dependency oriented to varying degrees. This is worth considering when
you look at the forms of help you typically give. Expert help is essentially
dependency oriented. Offering resources also invites dependency, as in the
famous fishing example referenced in this section’s heading. One of the
advantages of information help is that it is more likely to promote inde -
pendence. Supportive help is a subtle game. On the face of it, it’s autonomy
oriented because it’s about enabling someone to solve their own problems,
but it can morph into a dependent relationship, as in the therapy-go-
round, or be subject to the helper’s motives: do they genuinely want to
create autonomy?
Spotlight 1.2:Increasing Autonomy
Looking back at your responses to Spotlight 1.1:
Are the forms of help that you tend to give more autonomy or
dependency oriented?
Who are the people in your life that depend on your help?
How much control do you have over the extent to which they
depend on you?
Are there ways you could reduce their long-term dependency on you?
Again, in this spotlight, you are just making notes on your own experi-
ence. Clients of mine, when thinking about the third question, often
believe they have no control at all. They feel overwhelmed by the
demands of so many people. At this stage, I’m encouraging you to
become aware of the dynamics of your helping relationships. We’ll
tackle how to change the dynamics later.

Table of Contents

Contents
Authors’ Note 7
Prologue&# 58 ; Is Helping in Our Nature? 13
Part One&# 58 ; The Art of Helping
1 How Can I Help? 21
2 Love or Money? 39
Part Two&# 58 ; The Super-Helper Syndrome
3 The Unhealthy Helper 57
4 Irrational Beliefs 73
5 The Good Person Belief 89
6 The Help Everyone Belief 113
7 They Couldn’t Survive Without Me 137
8 The No Needs Belief 163
Part Three&# 58 ; The Healthy Helper
9 The Healthy Helper Mindset 179
10 The Hardy Helper 203
11 The Compassionate Life 219
Postscript 227
List of Spotlights 228
Notes 230
Select Bibliography 244
Acknowledgements 249
Index 251