For the vast majority of my life I’ve been a ‘helper’; if someone has a problem I tend to throw all my energy into supporting them and doing whatever I can to repair the damage.  I like for people to feel good and I guess it made me feel useful and, if I’m being honest, worthy.  I liked people thinking about me as that person; the one who put all their needs before my own and did whatever I had to do to get them back on their feet.

I started writing “the problem with this is…” but then quickly realized that wouldn’t work because there isn’t one problem with this…there are many. The three main ones for me:

    • First, inevitably, I ended up burnt out.
    • Second, often I ended up resenting the person I was helping….usually because….
    • Third, you can’t help someone if they don’t want to help themselves.

 

Ever heard the expression “you can’t pour from an empty cup”? Well an empty cup represents burn out.  If you don’t take care of yourself, eventually you will have NOTHING left to take care of yourself with, let alone give anyone else. And if you let yourself get completely drained, it’s a lot harder to refill yourself (with energy, motivation, passion, excitement, love…whatever it is that is at the heart of you)…especially if the person you’ve been helping isn’t in a position to reciprocate by supporting you in turn.  As a “see the best in people and give everyone a chance” person, this often ended up the case for me; the wounded souls I gravitated to were not ones that could return to me what I gave to them.  While some people can receive kindness from others and use it to fuel paying it forward, others just use it up…and, surprise surprise, I tended towards the ones with the use it or lose it mentality.  The people who think the world had done them wrong and they were owed something.

So, once I had emptied my cup moving heaven and earth for someone, only to discover that they were not there for me once I couldn’t do anything for them, I ended up resentful.  I gave them my blood, sweat and tears, I bent over backwards, I gave them the shirt off my back…and where were they?  Who knows.  And I can tell you, there is not a lot of hurt worse than when you make your whole life about helping someone else, and they love you like crazy for it, but then they disappear when you’re not doing it anymore.  You can end up feeling pretty worthless…if ALL THAT is not sufficient to make someone love you, then what will ever be good enough?

For some people?  Nothing will be good enough.  Because sometimes people don’t want help.  They may SAY they want help.  They may LET YOU help if you just do it for them.  They may spend most of their free time bemoaning how unfair and difficult their lives are…but if when they are offered solutions that they have to participate in executing, they find a problem for every solution, then they don’t, in fact, want to help themselves.  Which, in my experience with most people, means they don’t really want help.

If you encounter someone who is not actively participating in finding solutions for the problems in their lives, is blaming outside “things” or people for their struggles and is happy to let you do things for them without any commitments on their part, well, they are not someone you should be bending over backwards, moving heaven and earth, taking the shirt off of your back, or sweating, bleeding and crying for.

If I am known for saying one thing I think it’s probably the title of this post, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”  I read it somewhere maybe five or so years ago and since then I have said it a lot. You could also say, none of my business, stay in your lane, or those who live in glass houses, shouldn’t throw stones.  Essentially, when I feel myself being pulled towards wanting to “help” (or even comment) but I haven’t been asked, I don’t see the person working at it themselves or my cup is not full enough, then I can’t.

That is not to say you can’t help people.  Of course you can, and totally should…the world needs more people helping each other…but you have to know that you can afford to give what you’re giving and that your own circus is running smoothly…if your monkeys are running rampant then you really aren’t in a position to help anyone else.

When we got our first dog, Sprocket, I was taking him to work with me to become a therapy dog so we got a private dog trainer to come help us with obedience training.  Having a puppy at work was literal chaos (though honestly so amazing and rewarding too!) and I knew I needed help.  One of the first things the trainer said when he got there was that he wasn’t there to train Sprocket, he was there to train my husband and I on how to train Sprocket.  It wasn’t about what happened in that one or two hours a week that was going to do it, it was what happened the rest of the week, how consistent we were, how frequently we practiced, how thoroughly we enforced the same expectations every day.  If our trainer had just trained Sprocket, he probably would have gotten results pretty quickly but when it came to problem solving in the moment, Sprocket probably wouldn’t have listened really well to anyone else.  By giving us the tools to address problems that came up, like getting him to focus on days when he’s got the zoomies and doesn’t want to listen, he allowed us to help ourselves. Sort of like that phrase “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Sprocket at about three months old at work…the staff badge didn’t stay on long or he chewed it of course, but it was cute while it lasted.

I remember when it dawned on me that therapy was like that too.  That it wasn’t about the one hour you’re there, it was about doing the work, using the insights that they gave you in that hour the rest of the week.  You can go religiously for years to a therapist and get absolutely nowhere if you aren’t implementing anything they talk about with you outside of that office.  If you’re just using them to vent, not much is going to change.

That’s how help should work the majority of the time, the help someone else gives you or you give someone else should be a boost to get the momentum moving forwards.

If someone just constantly sucks energy from you without using it to actually help create a lasting solution, and you cannot replenish that energy in yourself at the same rate that you are giving it away…well, it’s probably time to cut your losses and stop helping them.  As in, leave their circus in exactly the state that it is, monkeys and all, accept there will be no refund on your admission, and walk away.

It doesn’t really matter if you agree about the state of their circus (their life).  It doesn’t matter if you disagree with how they treat their monkeys (themselves, their loved ones).  You cannot afford to bankrupt your own operation.

Is this easy to do?  Hell no.  It is incredibly hard for me not to swoop in and help when I know that I can…but I realize now that in situations like this, it isn’t really helping that much for me to swoop in and save the day.  It feeds my ego.  It temporarily lets me feel good about myself.  But in the end I feel worse, they feel worse…anyone who has to listen to me filter through my hurt and resentment probably feels worse (or at least more annoyed)…objectively, there’s no winner.

Until I adopted this circus analogy, I was never able to take care of myself properly.  I couldn’t find the time I needed to dedicate to my health and wellness, I was burnt out and felt used and taken for granted most of the time.  This set a boundary.  I do not help when I’m not requested.  I do not help if my help is being abused or taken for granted.  I do not help if what I am giving cannot be replenished.

Life truly is a circus. And some days it’s going to feel like all the monkeys have escaped their cages and are wreaking havoc on the rest of our carefully constructed exhibits…so before you visit anyone else’s spectacle, make sure your own house is in order, because that IS your circus, and those ARE your monkeys.