“With all of my Heart”.
When I read the first line of her Facebook post, I had a pretty good idea what the rest of it was going to be like.
I have been friends with her for a while, and I have been incredibly impressed with her dedication to her work, and her desire to help people. But as she continued through the post, she listed more and more of the things that are difficult for her.
And I wonder if she sees her ‘inability to balance her desire to serve’ as a symptom of these problems.
Because in her post she talked about being scared of rejection, of struggling to feel enough, of being afraid of letting people down, of being hard on people to show that she loves them.
Again, let me say that I have been incredibly impressed by her, and I think she is somebody who truly, truly cares from the bottom of her heart about other people, and somebody who is a good person.
But when she said in her post that she would “give anything she had to help someone”… Well, that’s where I see a problem.
Because we seem to have this societal belief that in order to be a good person, you have to care a lot. Not that caring isn’t important, because it obviously is, but like all of our virtues, caring has to be balanced in order to serve both ourselves and the person who we are serving.
If you’re one of the people who didn’t like that last sentence; who believes that we should be always serving others without taking any concern for ourselves, congratulations! This post is about you too.
Because any system of thought that asks you to sacrifice for others without any concern for yourself is not teaching you to value yourself, but is instead teaching you that your value is only in what you can give.
My wife struggles with this. And for the record, she encouraged me to write this post and mention her so I’m not doing this without her explicit permission, and insistence.
She grew up with a feeling that she was never going to be good enough, and at some point in her life was taught the belief that if she served hard enough, gave enough, sacrificed enough and put herself down enough, she would someday be “good enough”.
Which is why my wife also struggles with many of the things my friend wrote in her Facebook post.
Sadly, these two wonderful woman are not the outliers of this particular problem, rather they are prima facie examples of a pathological process of philosophy and principle that has caused so many people so many problems.
I have talked to many people, sadly primarily women, who struggle with finding a balance between what they owe themselves, and what they owe the world at large.
And most of the time, they default to lessening themselves in some strange concept of virtue that actually demeans their existence and denies their individual worth.
Someday I will hopefully talk with my friend on Facebook, and share with her the principles that I teach in my coaching practice.
Hopefully one day I will be able to help her find her way to a stronger sense of herself, so that she may recognize her own individual worth, and realize that she never had to do anything to have value, nor did she need to sacrifice so much of herself in order to be worthy of anything.
Any process of thought that teaches you that your value is only in what you can do for others does not respect you as an individual, nor does it recognize your nobility as an aware intelligent consciousness.
Most of all, I hope that someday I will be able to help my friend on Facebook find that place in her own soul where she realizes that the things that she has been taught are not the things that will bring her peace in her heart.
I hope I will be able to help her to find balance, and serve not from a desire to make up for what is she was taught was wrong, but simply out of the love she has for those around her.
Because service out of fear is not service, it is an attempt to satisfy the lie that you are not worthy, and you will never be able to make right that which is wrong. When you finally know your worth, then you will serve from a completely different place in your soul.
And then you (and she) will know peace.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings