When You Rescue Others, You Diminish Their Power

The word rescue has many meanings: to save from, to free from, to liberate from.

How many of us find ourselves in positions where we feel the need, the urge or the deep desire to save someone else from their suffering?

I know I do. All the time.

Sometimes it’s in a meeting at work, when I sense someone is feeling dismissed or confused or even frustrated. I can tell they are struggling with something and I immediately feel the need to “rescue” them.

Sometimes it’s with friends. When someone is struggling in their relationship or needs help moving or is trying to make a move in their career and wants help making connections.

Sometimes it’s with family. When my brother is struggling to get along with my parents or my mom is struggling at work or a sibling is struggling in school.  These ones trigger my desire to rescue big time.

In these scenarios, my first thoughts are: What can I do to relieve their suffering? How I can help meet their need? What can I do, say or offer that will make their life easier?

The problem is that by me stepping in to rescue them, I keep them from learning how to rescue themselves.

But it’s not just that they don’t learn how to do the one thing I am trying to help them with (handle frustration in a meeting or have a hard conversation with their parents) – it’s that they aren’t learning how to activate and utilize their own power. They are not learning how to access and manifest their own ability to face suffering, to be with suffering and to move through suffering into possibility and potential.

Why would I want to take that away from them? It’s not only a disservice to them, I’d go so far as to say it’s disrespectful.

I’m not saying it’s easy. If it’s a sibling, a best friend, a partner or a child – watching them suffer is torture. It can feel impossible and terrifying at the same time. You ache for them and may even be scared for their safety.

But take a moment to reflect on your own life. When you made the biggest shifts in service of yourself, the choices that you now know to be the ones that made your life better and made you stronger – what was happening right before those moments? Were you living a perfectly happy, happy-go-lucky life and simply decided one day to switch things up? Probably not. More likely, you were struggling or dealing with something challenging. And it was that pain that motivated you to find your own power.

Imagine if someone stepped in to your life right in the depths of things, and just handled it for you? They had the hard conversations, made the hard choices, and you just laid in bed while it all got sorted out. Would you be where you are now? And what would have happened the next time things got hard?

That rescuer would have diminished your power. And today, you would have less power than you do; you’d have less ability to face the next hard thing.

But there’s another side to this. Rescuers also diminish their own power by rescuing others. By taking on other’s suffering, they displace their own need and ability to handle their own life. They have less capacity to activate their own power – to move through suffering and to create joy. Their power becomes diffused.

Also, if you’re a rescuer who’s currently rescuing someone else – who’s rescuing you? Who’s watching out for your power? Likely no one.

So, if you are “rescuing” someone from their suffering – you are not only diminishing someone else’s power, you are sacrificing your own. This is a vicious cycle that deactivates power on several levels and keeps all of us from ultimately stepping fully into who WE are, so that we can achieve our greatest potential.

And that’s a disservice that impacts all of us.

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