Rescuing people from their pain is as bad as emotional bypassing

Compassion is such a nuanced thing that care often sits on a knife’s edge between not caring enough on the one hand and enabling or rescuing on the other.

When I was planning Mum’s funeral last week, being the one conducting such a precious occasion, I gave one of my daughters the heads-up to be on the lookout for those who might try and rescue me.  Her task was to be a guard.  I didn’t want anyone interrupting the sanctity of that time of grieving.

Rescuing can seem the ideal opportunity to come to someone’s aid when they’re experiencing distress.  But it isn’t always a good idea.

Indeed, rescuing someone from the pain they could endure and learn from betrays their opportunity to grow.  It’s destructive.  At the very least, a person can learn to depend on another person instead of learning to bear the pain that is ordinary to life.  Oftentimes those who come in and rescue have the ulterior motive of, “I’ll be there for them on every occasion,” or “They need me,” or “They won’t get through this without my help.”  And so they intervene.  Some even see themselves — consciously or unconsciously — as playing the saviour role.  It’s always harmful.

Being rescued is like the opposite of emotional bypassing, but both are damaging to the grieving process.  Emotional bypassing interrupts the vocalising of pain and squashes that expression with some flippant remark like, “Time heals all wounds,” or “You’ll get over this,” or “Look at all the good things in life you have,” or there’s some justifying of the pain of grief that simply doesn’t belong.  Rescuing is at the other end of the continuum of over caring rather than under caring — which is what emotional bypassing is.

In terms of enabling, a person who rescues someone from a pain they could otherwise bear enables a toxic pattern of maladjustment to occur.  As emotional bypassing interrupts the vocalising of pain and squashes its expression, rescuing a person from the natural processes of lament also interrupts the grief process.

Such an interruption forestalls the grief process entirely, when simply engaging in truthful lament would actually facilitate healing, albeit a long process.  But it works, does lament.  Lament works because it is about facing truth, and it is only truth that will set us free.

But there are people, and I have manipulators in the frame here, who exist for a purpose to connive and coerce and control.  Some rescuers do have a good heart, but they still do the wrong thing.  Those who manipulate, however, manipulate people and situations so that they can control the narrative to make themselves look good.  This is birthed in insecurity.  It’s all about them and they bring death to the hope of healing.

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This article wouldn’t be complete without making some effort to explain what care looks like that neither enables nor rescues.

True care bears another person’s struggle 
without reaching in and attempting to fix it.

It takes management of one’s own anxiety.  It takes a heart that genuinely serves the other person.  It takes ‘putting off the self’ and ‘putting on the servant’.

It takes the authentic empathy of being ‘in’ the other person.

It takes silence by and large, with the only exceptions being to utter small though powerful affirmations, especially to counter untruths that those that suffer often speak over themselves, and doing this without lecturing, with silent affirmation being the predominant posture.

It takes the commitment to bear the tension of another person’s struggle WITH them, and in doing so they can see that it CAN be done.

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True lament connects us so intrinsically with our broader truth that it opens the door to reason and a more holistic perspective.

Whenever we connect deeply with painful truth we’re also inadvertently connected to the truths of the joys in our life.  Once peered into, truth is a prism through which many thoroughly good things are seen.  Commit to seeing the depth of pain and hurt, and inevitably the truths of joy and cheer also shine through.

Commit to the truth in the pain and the eventual reward is a deeper sense of joy.

But when the journey of grief is interrupted by rescuing, healing is averted.