The Appeal of Rescuing Other People

We might assume that our great longing in relationships would be to be looked after by someone; an exceptionally kind person who could listen to us, nurture us, assist us and make us feel comforted and seen. 

But this is to ignore just how strong there is – in some of us – a diametrically opposed aspiration: a wish to find someone who is in a lot of pain and trouble, who is confused and sad, unhappy and overwhelmed, and who cannot therefore possibly do very much for us, but who we, on the other hand, have every opportunity to hold, appease, calm, and heal. 

For this group among us, troubles aren’t just nuisances to be managed, they lie at the core of what we positively desire to find in others. We feel our heart tighten when we learn that someone had a difficult childhood, or is isolated and adrift or has been bullied at work or made to feel worthless in a past relationship. These are not merely regrettable incidentals, they lie at the centre of our feelings of love.

For us to be this way, there tends to have been a certain sort of childhood. Something has happened to us early on which means that giving assistance has become decisively easier than receiving it.

We might say that everyone, at the start, longs to receive love. But when it has not been especially forthcoming, one way to handle its absence is to turn into a compulsive caregiver; to offer others what we wish could have been offered to us, to turn our deficiency into a bounty, to locate the needy part of us in someone else and then to heal it in them as an alternative to addressing it in ourselves.

When we have had to forego our wish to be nurtured and understood – because mum was elsewhere or dad low in spirits – we might have begun by looking after our teddy bear, then moved on to friends, and eventually in adulthood, discovered our greatest satisfaction in salving the woes of our lovers. 

We may now be rendered hugely uncomfortable whenever the tables turn even for a moment. If a lover said, ‘tonight it’s going to be all about you,’ we would flinch. To hear ‘I want to put you at the centre of my world’ could bring on panic.

It’s not that such care isn’t fundamentally wanted, it’s that it was never experienced and so has grown alien and frightening, a reminder of a wound we haven’t been strong enough to contemplate, rage at and move on from. 

The way out of our cul-de-sac is to start to notice how scared we are. We may have justified our behaviour by thinking of ourselves principally as selfless. But we are something more complicated and more interesting: terrified. We aren’t just without reciprocity, we are manically intolerant of it. And yet, as we still stand to discover, sometimes, the real generosity is to let a lover do to us what a parent did not at the start. It’s to stop occupying the powerful position of the rescuer and learn, at points, to take the risk of being at another’s mercy. It’s to experience – as if for the first time – how much we need someone else. Real maturity may be as much about a capacity to receive as to give.