A familiar character trait that shows up in therapy is the people-pleaser, the appeaser, the rescuer. Broadly, anyone who, by some measure, over-gives.
It’s unlikely that this is just a personality quirk or predisposition. More probably, it’s the legacy of a childhood in which they had to (or felt they had to) care for those who would ideally have been caring for them. The child attuned to their parents’ distress or needs, and decided unconsciously (and probably rationally) that their okayness depended on managing the okayness of the adults.
This is what is meant by parentification. The child takes on a parental role, a duty beyond what is developmentally appropriate.
Devoting yourself to others may have been a plausible survival mechanism, but it comes at a cost that may have echoes in later life. Deep beneath the generosity and helpfulness, there may be complex, suppressed emotions. Anger at having to apparently give so much. Resentment at never being looked after in return. Guilt, layered over all that, about having no right to be angry (“others have it worse than me”), so giving more to feel less guilty. And on it goes.
These are difficult emotions to own, and the over-giver may never allow themselves to consciously feel them, until they become intolerable and are expressed in sudden despair or inarticulate fury.
Or, as something more subtle. Because the rescuer cannot tolerate them in themselves, the unwanted feelings might be “given” to the person they are caring for, outside of the awareness of both parties. The recipient starts to feel oddly resentful, burdened by, or indifferent toward the carer. The feelings don’t quite make sense to them; they are unfamiliar because by some unconscious transfer they are now having the rescuer’s disowned emotions.
Also, from the outside the setup can look like a simple rescuer-victim pairing: one person endlessly giving, the other passively receiving. But it may well be the rescuer who is stuck in a victim role. The victim of circumstances that forced them to survive by becoming someone who compulsively cares for others.
For the people-pleaser, the deeper work is not to stop caring, but to recover a sense of their original right to be cared for. To feel that they are themselves deserving of attention without having to earn it by (over)giving. Caring for others is a beautiful thing, but it works best on an equal footing, where everyone is seen as worthy of care, and where giving is an unburdened choice rather than a reenactment of an old perceived necessity.
Image credit: SJ Objio
