DailyJim: Sometimes helping is harming

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Monday, September 16th. Gosh, I don't know these days anymore. 2024. Today I want to talk about how sometimes helping is harming. And what to do about that, I suppose.

So, sometimes when we help people, it can harm us. Stress so maybe we are uh i mean an example in some way physical harm is that we give a kidney to somebody because they need a kidney so we are physically being harmed um sometimes it's emotional harm or sometimes it's stress to help somebody out we do something that we don't necessarily want to do or it costs us a lot of time and energy and and uh emotional stress and it but it helps the other person. The other person feels help, they feel grateful for it. Sometimes we help the other person and we feel grateful that we're doing it and they feel harmed by the help because they don't want help because it helps them, or sorry, because it shows them that they need help and they feel too, not proud, it's actually ashamed that they need help and resistance to receiving help because sometimes receiving help can make us feel harmed because we start thinking Thinking about how helpless we are or powerless we are or how much we're independent on the other person. Another one is that sometimes when we receive help from someone else, we feel harmed because we think they feel harmed. Even if they don't, even if they're grateful to help, we can feel so guilty and so frustrated that they're helping us. That we reject the help because we feel harmed by it. So this is spawned by a conversation of just thinking, sometimes in relationships, especially romantic, the close ones, but any type of relationship that maybe we, are we helping more than we're harming?

And if we perceive that we're helping them, maybe they perceive that they're being harmed more than they are being helped, which can be really tricky.

If I'm asking for help, which is something I plan to do a lot more these days because I realize if I'm helping other people, I need other people to help me. Asking for help was the essence of the rejection drills that I do in class, that I train on. This is something I need help with will you help me and the other person says no no what's wrong with you you can't figure that out yourself etc etc so asking for help can if they reject us can make us feel harmed but even just the asking the other person can make the other person feel harmed because they feel guilty they feel stressed they feel worried they feel ashamed maybe that they can't help or all these different angry that the other person is asking and then perceive this as being harmed because I think it's okay to feel these things but sometimes when we feel these things we perceive it as an attack and yeah so this is something I'm really trying to understand and I don't know if it's possible to make other people not feel attacked or not feel harmed by our actions. I think maybe we can try our best to not make them feel that way. But sometimes, like even talking to a friend today who was going through a breakup, saying that, you know, as she was opening up and being more vulnerable, the guy seemed to pull away and said, why don't we just break up? And for me, it seems like sometimes the more loving and kind we can be towards ourselves or to other people, the more that other people can feel harmed. Hell, maybe even the more that we can feel harmed, if we're very kind towards ourself, that we start to think maybe we're getting soft, maybe we're not really standing up for what we believe in, maybe we're just making excuses, because we can be kind towards ourself, but then the harshness can jump in, and we can say, ah, no, you're just making excuses, excuses you're really weak you don't you're not as smart as you think you are.

So I talk about this because I think there's almost a myth that if we just became more compassionate, more kind, and more helping towards ourselves and towards other people, then conflict would go away. Then people wouldn't feel harmed or people wouldn't feel attacked. And I just don't think that's true. I think what I've seen is that as I've become better at giving help and asking for help and receiving help and offering help, maybe those are the four, offering and giving, asking and receiving, it can make a lot of people feel attacked.

As I feel in other words as I feel less harmed or less attacked by all four of those I realize a lot of other people can feel really harmed and attacked by them and for something that doesn't feel like a huge sacrifice to me where I don't feel attacked or I don't feel harmed the other person may feel totally offended aggrieved attacked attacked, betrayed, rejected, whatever the phrase may be. Somebody asks me for help and I say no because I'm struggling with this and this and this and they feel rejected and don't talk to me for six months or longer. Real example. I offer, I give help to somebody and they feel harmed by the help and they tell me to stop helping them, which just happened today. I simply ask for help and And people tell me I'm greedy and I'm selfish and I'm like, hmm.

So it can be people seem to feel really offended of me asking for help sometimes. And it's just, I don't know if there's a way to avoid people feeling attacked or people feeling harmed. Maybe if we all got really, really, really good at dealing with this emotional combat and these emotional attacks, then we wouldn't feel so attacked so often, people say oh stop being so sensitive no actually be more sensitive be more sensitive to everything that you're feeling be more sensitive to what the other person might be feeling and if we do this we won't feel so offended we won't feel so attacked, we'll actually want to respond to people with love to ourselves with love um.

But I read this article the other day that said, all therapy is exposure therapy. And I think the whole premise of the article was that exposure therapy is that we slowly become desensitized to things like phobias of a spider or whatnot. First you see a photo of the spider, and once you start to realize that the photo is not dangerous to you, then it's a live spider in a cage, and then it's a live spider running on you, etc. And they said the idea is that all therapy, and I would argue most interaction in life, is exposure therapy. That slowly we get used to realizing, exposed to things that we see as threats, and we learn how to deal with them. Sometimes the threat is crying, sometimes the threat is asking for help, sometimes the threat is looking in a mirror. I mean, the threat can be so many different things. so so much of life is really confronting these fears that we have and learning how to realize that things in the world are not trying to hurt us and if they are, it's because they're trying to survive.

And yeah, I mean I really just wish people would learn these skills and part of it is running classes I think a big part of it is just doing, these things with people, really just asking for help and offering help and giving help and receiving help and practicing those four things, more than most things really, just practicing those four things, despite maybe really angering some people or really making some people scared. I think over time, if we have the endurance to keep practicing these things with ourselves and with other people, outside of the classroom, outside of the therapy room, just in real life, with the real relationships that we have, have with the friends and family and lovers and co-workers and all these people in our lives if we just really practice these things where could we get how much more love could we have in this world for ourselves and for other people so i'm going to start asking for more help because i need more help i don't want to pretend that i don't need help anymore and i know if i'm going to ask for this help some people are probably going to feel really attacked by it and my hope is that over time, they slowly get used to me asking for help. Maybe they get encouraged or inspired to ask for help as well. Maybe they feel really grateful to offer the help and to give the help. And ideally, they also feel grateful to receive the help as well.

That's the idea. So look out. I'm going to be starting to ask probably individuals one-on-one and then maybe some more bulk messaging to ask for help. And the help that I'm primarily going to be asking for is threefold at this point. One, financial help. So this help is either one-off, like, hey, there's some money that you just want to give right now that would be super helpful to me. Or money that you want to give on a recurring basis would be even more helpful in the way of being able to predict what I can, you know, there's recurring expenses that I have to pay for as well in terms of personal things, but also in terms of doing the work, because, for me, often they're one and the same. So if I travel out to East Africa, yes, there's personal reasons to go out to East Africa, but I can also attend my friend's organization in Northern Uganda, which does peer to mental health, and I can help them learn these skills informally and And maybe formally or more formally on how to deal with just the wide variety of conflict that we're experiencing in our lives. Also, especially related to giving and receiving help. Then the other type of help I'd like, so if you're not in the position or you don't really believe or know what I'm working on with this idea of emotional combat and training people on how to deal with all these conflicts in our lives, um then i i would say if you've been sorry if you've been helped by something that i've done and you have a story please please send me the story like if just it could be a small story of how i've helped you that would help me so much and also help other people understand, how this work actually works um and the third one is if you don't really know what i'm doing. Um read some of these stories and testimonials if you just go to jim cliber.com helping helping, you can see the stories there. And it'll show you stories about how I've helped people around the world, often dealing with emotional conflict and dealing with this wide variety of, conflicts that we deal with in our lives. Almost this nonstop, constant conflict. So those are the three main things I'm going to be asking for help right now. Honestly, the one that's most important right now for me is the financial one. But they reinforce each other so if the financial one doesn't work for you I totally get it, maybe again you might feel even offended that I've asked but I also hope that you could help in a different way and if that's not one of those maybe even just helping me know how I can help you, telling me about a conflict you're experiencing or a situation that you're struggling with and that can help me better understand what podcast episodes I should do, maybe have a one-on-one conversation with you maybe run a class that would help me so much so on that note i'm going to end because i'm in the car and i'm sweating and talking about conflict i want to stay on the call but i also want to not sweat through my shirt so maybe too much detail all right well i will talk to you all tomorrow and some of you today because i'm going to be reaching out thanks.