There’s a story I once read about a man who wanted to help a butterfly he believed was struggling to get out of its cocoon. So he cut the end of the cocoon to make it easier for the butterfly to get out. The butterfly got out, spun in a circle and died. Turns out it needed the ‘struggle’ to strengthen its wings to fly. How do we judge when help is actually needed or was just our perception?
Here’s something I noticed when I stopped ‘helping.’ Often while I was trying to help someone or show them ‘the error of their ways’ they fought me on it. No matter how logical I was or how convincing, they just didn’t get it; even as I tried to corral all the evidence while still ‘helping’ them or doing it for them. In fact sometimes, at some point, there were several who expressed resentment even though they may have asked for my help in the first place.
When I stopped ‘helping,’ when I let them be responsible for their own decisions and how they did things, something interesting happened. Either:
a. I learned a new way that I hadn’t consider before or
b. as they started doing it themselves they came to the same conclusions I had and started telling me how it should be done often in the same words I had told them!
It was almost as though by ‘helping’ I had robbed them of a piece of what they needed to experience. And while I was ‘helping’ them, or robbing them of their experience, they fought me about what or how it should be done. Once I got out of the way we got along just fine and came to agreement whether they did it the way I did or not.
Have you had a similar experience?
A quote I love on giving and helping:
“When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself – and me – even as I give it away.”
~ Parker Palmer
Here’s another that just came across facebook:
“When we take more than 100% responsibility, we communicate to others, You are not capable, & I need to take over here because I’m right.”
~ CONSCIOUS LOVING RELATIONSHIPS with Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks
My cousin Betty Lou just sent this to me from Leo Buscaglia
“A four-year-old child, whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman, who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old
Gentleman’s’ yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there.
When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy just said, ‘Nothing, I just
Helped him cry.’”
Sometimes the best thing we can give is our presence.