Kate's Nuggets

The Difference Between Helping and Being of Service
Episode 30

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about the difference between helping others and being of service.

I want to talk about this because it's really important for healthy relationships at work or at home and healthy relationships inside our own head between the different parts of ourselves. Think for a moment about a time when you tried to help somebody else and it didn't go well and you offered something up thinking that you were offering something that was going to be super useful and they ended up resentful or angry. What happened, and maybe you've been on the receiving end of that, maybe you were struggling with something and somebody offered you unsolicited advice and you became angry at them for trying to help. What happened?

Most likely the person offering help had the best of intentions, at least consciously. The problem is that even with good intentions, where we are coming from when we offer assistance has everything to do with the impact that it has. When I use the word help, I am talking about trying to solve their problem. When I am talking of being of service, I am talking about putting your resources at their disposal for meeting their needs, helping comes from discomfort with their struggle, from empathetic sympathy with them and for a desire to relieve their suffering.

Being of service comes from love and caring and compassion and openness and is based on trusting them to make use of the resources available and letting yourself be available to them for their purposes.

This is a little abstract and to get a little bit more concrete, I'm going to give you another model of the difference between the anxiety-based solving the problem and the love-based being available as a resource, and for this I'm going to look at the drama triangle.

If you are not familiar with the drama triangle, the drama triangle shows three roles that people take in interpersonal drama. This also happens between the parts of yourself in your heads, so if you start seeing those analogies, don't be surprised.

In the triangle, the triangle is typically drawn with two points of the triangle up at the top and one at the bottom and this is because the two rolls at the top seem to have higher status than the roll at the bottom. In fact, all three are fear-based and suffering and are a form of the mentality of the body under threat. This is when the sympathetic nervous system is activated. These are roles that we fall into as a way of dealing with threat. At the bottom is the victim perspective. The victim role is, the world happens to me, I am at its mercy, other people hurt me and I have no power. Someone who's taking this role sees themselves as incompetent. At the top of the triangle are the villain or persecutor role and the hero or rescuer role.

The persecutor or villain protects themselves through authoritarian controlling behavior. They believe that other people are untrustworthy and need to be called to account. They are looking for the attack. They need someone to dominate and blame, and they compensate for their feelings of worthlessness with grandiosity. Their survival depends on their ability to strike first. That's the persecutor role.

The helper, hero, rescuer role is also a fear and anxiety-based role. This is the role where the rescuer believes that their own needs are unimportant, that other people do not take their needs into consideration, that their job is to take care of others. They believe that it is in taking care of others, that they will be valued. They need people in their lives who need to be taken care of. They need victims. They see themselves as strong and capable because if they weren't strong and capable, they wouldn't be able to take care of others.

Both the hero, rescuer and the persecutor, villain roles need people in the victim position to play out their part of the dynamic. It is easy for people to see the problems of the victim position and the persecutor position. It is often very difficult for people who like to think of themselves as nice or kind or generous or loving to recognize when they get into the rescuer, hero role and this is why I want to talk specifically about the difference between helping, which often comes from the hero role and being of service, which comes from the other triangle we can be on.

We can be on an empowerment triangle, and I don't really like the language of empowerment because empowerment is a hero move. If we believe that we are empowering others, we are taking a hero perspective towards them. If I believe that I can empower you, I believe that you don't inherently have power, I have power and I can give it to you and this is the problem with the hero mode. The hero mode implicitly makes the hero better than, superior to the victim.

The hero mode is the worst. It's what the author of Radical Candor calls ruinous empathy. We see ourselves as empathetic, kind people when we fill the hero role. We think we're doing everything right when we're standing in this role, and the reality is that we are destroying everything we hold dear.

So how do we get out of this place? We get out of this place by stopping, solving other people's problems, by stopping offering fixes, by stopping believing we know what's best for other people, by offering our resources to them, for them to use in meeting their own needs when and how they choose and we let them fully exercise the power that is inherently theirs, which includes the power to not do anything at all.

Once we stand firmly committed in our decision to always come from love and caring and compassion with an open heart, with our parasympathetic nervous system engaged and making our resources available for them to put into service, we become maybe a coach asking good questions, maybe an inspiration, maybe someone who is thought provoking, maybe someone who calls into question their stories that they're telling themselves. This calling into question and reflecting back things that might be hard to see.

When we come from love and caring and compassion and doing that, we take a sort of challenger role rather than a persecutor role. We are simply offering what we see. The most important part of this process is to leave them a hundred percent in control of what they do with what we make available, to see them as the creator of their own lives.

Now, they may not want to see themselves as the creator of their own lives. If they are used to being in victim mode, it will be terrifying to be made responsible for their own lives and you, as you are deciding that you are going to step off the rescuer mold and into the dynamics of love, caring, and compassion and true service, you need to let them have that discomfort and decide what to do with it. You need to let them decide what to do with it. It is their business whether they choose to take leadership of their own lives or not.

Guilt and shame keep people on the drama triangle. In order to get out of drama, everybody needs to wrestle with their own guilt and shame. To wrestle with your own guilt and shame, is to wrestle with the places that you have disappointed yourself and hurt others and requires a huge amount of courage and self-compassion. It is not possible to make somebody else courageous.

It is not possible to give somebody self-compassion. Courage and self-compassion come from within. They come from suffering. They come from a readiness to do the hard, hard work of integrating the parts of themselves that they are ashamed of and disappointed about and that make them sad and this is work that each of us needs to do in our own head if we want to step out of the drama triangle.

The most that you can do in relationship with another person is to do your work in terms of getting off the drama triangle and invite them to join you in a relationship that spends more time in the empowerment triangle than the drama triangle.

Now here's the really tricky thing. The really tricky thing is it's very, very difficult to stay in the empowerment triangle.

For most of us, when we start doing this work, we discover we are living in the drama triangle most of the time, and we need to be gentle with ourselves, compassionate with ourselves, to know that we're building skills and habits and rewiring our brains and we have at our disposal in this modern world, so many tools for activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the nervous system that needs to be online for us to be standing in the empowerment triangle. They're all tools that live in the land of increasing our ability to be fully present with whatever is without fear, without reactivity, and we need to build our ability to tolerate discomfort.

We need to increase our ability to see fear as a warning that we need to pay attention to and to respond appropriately to let fear trigger in us conscious risk management rather than unconscious reactivity. We need to build our capacity to love others from an open-hearted and non-attached place even when they are suffering.

The reason that the drama triangle shows up with such power and intensity in families is because we care so much. It hurts us so much when the people around us are suffering.

If we cannot be with our own hurt non reactively, when people we love are suffering, we jump into the drama triangle to try and make things better or to make them wrong for making us feel so bad. In order to have a healthy relationship where we are genuinely of use to others without creating unnecessary drama, we have to come from open hearted, de-triggered caring and compassion, and make ourselves available for their use in meeting their needs and resist the temptation to fix their problems and meet our needs for comfort, control, and security and approval by controlling them or manipulating them or fixing them.

It is very easy for us to justify doing things to people for their own good that can be done in very, very subtle ways.

One of the most powerful practices that we can do when we want to genuinely have healthy relationships with people where we matter without creating resentment and unnecessary hurt is for us to constantly interrupt our desire to help people and to check in with ourselves. Am I offering this help because I'm looking to prove my value as someone with advice to give and wisdom? Am I looking to provide this help because I am uncomfortable with their discomfort or is what I'm doing offering myself and my resources to them for them to choose how or if that might be useful for them in creating a life that meets their needs? Am I attached to whether they use my advice or not? If I expect them to be grateful or I expect them to take my advice, I am on the drama triangle.

It is very difficult from the hero position to see our expectations. We know that expecting things of others is a power play at some level. So, one of the things that we need to ask ourselves is, will I be disappointed or feel betrayed if they don't do what I'm suggesting?

The reality is that we are human beings, and when we are in the presence of people who are suffering, we suffer in empathy. We feel what the people around us feel to some degree or another. We are impacted by it. If we have our own experience, it's not their experience. We're having our experience and so we need to take responsibility for our experience, for our ability to be with that sadness or fear or anger without trying to fix theirs and I offer you the language of service as an alternative to help, to help you remind yourself of the need to look at whether you are in anxiety based problem solving mode, or whether you are in love and trust based.

Let's meet everybody's needs. With practice, the following things happen. You notice when you've stepped on the drama triangle faster, you stay on the drama triangle unconsciously for a shorter period of time and you get better at getting yourself off. One of the hardest things to do is to stay in the empowerment triangle when you are in a close relationship with somebody who refuses to get off the drama triangle or who cannot get off the trauma triangle, or who doesn't want to get off the drama triangle.

If you change, when you change, you take away from the other person that role, and you leave them with a choice and their choice is to step off the drama triangle and become the creator of their own lives or to find somebody else to fill those roles. One of the ways that job relationships and dating and marriage relationships fall apart is that one person decides that they are more committed to being on the drama triangle than they are to being in relationship with someone who has decided that they are more committed to being in the empowerment triangle than they are to staying in relationship. A relationship cannot survive if it is a war between one partner on the empowerment triangle and one partner on the drama triangle.

A relationship can survive when both people are trying their best to stay on the empowerment triangle and helping each other get off the drama triangle when they notice that they're on it or when both people are happy or content or willing to stay in the drama triangle, there is a stability. It's a bit of a vicious circle and it makes people miserable over time, but it's stable and secure in the drama triangle. There is also stability when a partnership commits to trying to keep both people on the empowerment triangle. One in each camp is not stable and it will fall apart. This is the story of my divorce, and it's the story of many other people's divorces.

So if you know somebody who is stuck on the drama triangle and it breaks your heart to see them in that triangle and you wonder why they complain about all the drama but aren't doing anything about it and you want to be of service to them meeting their needs, one of the things that they need is to have that fear of losing the relationship that currently feels so stable, completely and totally validated.

I have seen people who are unwilling to leave relationships get dragged into the drama triangle over and over and over again by someone who was committed so strongly seeing the world from their fear. What the people who stay stuck on the drama triangle need is compassion for how scared, ashamed, or guilty they are.

Most of us spend most of our time scared of something that seems to threaten our control, our security, our sense of approval, our sense of worthiness, our sense of connection and belonging. Growing stronger in our healthiness of our relationships is a dance of dealing with our own fears, learning how to shift our internal physiology from fear-based sympathetic nervous system engaged living to trust and love-based parasympathetic nervous system engaged living.

More and more and more often strengthening our ability to stay on the empowerment triangle with our parasympathetic nervous system engaged in more and more challenging situations, knowing that the most challenging situations are when our lives and our lives of our family and our deepest, closest relationships feel like they're in danger. If you want healthy relationships based on love, working to get off the drama triangle is a thing that you can put some energy into building some skills around and the first thing to do is to just notice when things flare up.

When things flare up, chances are one or both of you is on the drama triangle. So when things flare up, just notice which role are you in. That's a place to start. I wish you love and communities of people who are working together to meet the needs of each other from a place of love and trust.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.