Are there times when you try to help someone you love, but you end up hurting them instead? You can feel frustrated because you wonder why is it that when you try to help, they can’t seem to receive your help. It makes you feel powerless. You think that if only they would listen to you, you have the solutions, you know what they should do to heal, to be happy. What you don’t realize is that you are not really helping them when you try to help.
 
The polarity of helping is hurting. When you engage in one polarity, you automatically engage in the other. When someone is hurting, we feel their pain as ours and so we want to eliminate the pain we feel by helping them. On the surface, it seems that we are trying to be good and caring people. But if we go deeper and be really honest with ourselves, we find that what actually drives our desire to help is that we want the pain to go away. We help in order not to hurt.

When someone is hurting and you try to help, they may feel your helping as hurt because they have the right to their pain and now you burden them with judgment and with the intrinsic knowing that their pain is hurting you. They may accept your help just to not hurt you more. But how do you think they really feel? Are they being supported and held? Or are they being judged and feared? They may hear the message of “go away”, under the guise of others wanting to help them.