learning to let people Go when you Cant Help them

 I am a self described Fixer/Helper.

I have wanted to help others since I was 4 years old and decided that it wasnt right of me to eat animals when I really liked animals. I always wanted to help homeless people on the street and would become indignant when my parents wouldnt give me change for every single person, or when my dad wouldnt let the men who came to our door in the winter asking to shovel do the work for a few dollars, i remember him chuckling at me for getting enraged and saying he was so mean because these people needed help!

this trait as it manifests in relationships however, is very dangerous. Whether it be a friendship or a relationship, if someone is in need of help, emotional or mental, you need to be aware of the Scale. Picture a scale and one side is how much energy and love and attention you are giving to a relationship, and the other side is how much you are receiving. If you are giving way more than you are getting, you need to cut that person out of your life. Cutting out people who are suffering whether they want help or not, is one of the most difficult tasks for someone with this personality type. However, it is the most valuable and helpful lessons I have ever learned. I credit a man that I met in India with teaching me this lesson. He was a guru who had the ability to read someones aura. there is a proper place and time for the details of this amazing experience but for the purpose of this entry I'll only share one piece of what he told me.

He explained that my heart chakra was too open, that I was giving more than I was receiving and that if I didn't change it one day my husband would tell me that I am cold. That scared me in many ways one being the idea that i would even ever have a husband, but I took what he said to heart. He also knew about an unhealthy relationship that I had been in and he told me that it was Not My Fault. He told me that I needed to be around people who cared about me for the right reasons and who were not draining me. The chakras are seven energy centers on the body which energy flows through naturally. they can be blocked or too open however and the energy is not balanced. I noticed that in that unhealthy relationship I had been in, I wanted to fix and help my partner. Instead of feeling the fury of his temper and rage and resisting the possessiveness and jealousy, I instead too it upon myself to Help him. I wanted him to learn to control his anger and to trust me so I kept trying and trying. I put up with his irate tantrums with his cruel language and watched him punch walls and got into screaming crying arguments in the street. I would forgive and forgive him because he seemed to feel so bad after each bout. And in all likelihood he probably Did feel bad, but that didnt mean that he would change. He didnt know How to change. Also, since I didnt leave him, he never had a real motivation To change, because the relationship was working for him just fine since I gradually adjusted my entire life to how he wanted it in order to minimize the number of crazy fights, so essentially I was giving him what he wanted so why would he think that it wasnt working for him. It wasnt until I was so drained and fragile that I didnt have an ounce of energy left to fight and I was just so miserable I wanted to just blink and be out of the situation, that I could finally allow him to walk away in a rage and not follow him. I was empty. I had nothing left to help or fix. And this is what the guru taught me. That I had to look at relationships in my life and evaluate if they were just filling up with my energy as it poured out of my heart chakra and never gave anything back.
at the time i had a friend who was depressed. As I started to get in  a less happy state of mind, I began to realize just how much of myself and my energy I had been dedicating to trying to help her. Her depression made her perpetually negative and unsatisfied and down on herself. As her friend it was so hard for me to see her feel that way when I really admired and respected her in so many ways. I tried to help her I talked to my psychiatrist father and asked him how I could help her not be so negative, but nothing worked nothing changed her mind. Finally it came to a point one night where she was denying her own worth to such an extreme that it scared me. The next day  I had to confront her about it. I knew that I was running out of energy and that it was going to destroy our friendship if I continued trying to be her counselor and her friend. I confronted her with the hopes that she could see that I was coming from a place of true concern for her well being and really wanting her to realize something was wrong and go get help from someone who knew more what they were doing and who wasnt also a burnt out college student. It backfired. She made lots of assumptions about all the negative things I thought about her. Despite my protests and my carefully worded and outlined messages about how I really did just want her to get better, our friendship disentegrated.

About the same time she became involved with a male friend of mine who I had also been in an unhealthy relationship with. He and I were friends with a sprinkling of romantic interest and had been for 3 years. Our friendships pattern was that we would be very close for a few months, we had a good time laughign and joking and understood each others humor. At the same time however, he would tease me all the time and constantly make fun of me; most of the time I laughed it off but after awhile and some comments really did hurt me. Then on a random day, he would stop talking to me. All of a sudden the day after we had been hanging out at work like the good friensd we were, the next day he would walk in and you would think he'd never laid eyes on my in his life. He would ignore me and act like he didnt even know my name and why was i bothering him. I would implore him to explain to me what I had done to make him act this way, but to no avail. I would sit with the confusion and the hurt for weeks turning into months, always wondering what I had done to make him treat me that way and always trying to be nice to him or bring him presents in the hopes that our friendship would turn back on. Usually after about 6 months he would pop in one day and act like nothing had happened, and I was so releieved to have my friend back that I just let all the pain and confusion go. This happened two years in a row.

Then, as I was struggling with my friend who was depressed, I leaned on the guy who at that time was on friendly terms. Through me, the two met, and it was instant chemistry designed to end in an explosion. Her depressed mind responded to any male attention as one of the sole forms of validation of her worth. He preyed on vulnerable females and enjoyed telling htem what they wanted to hear regardless of its truth. I remember one time before this he had written a letter to a girl he was seeing which was very sweet and romantic. I remember saying "aw" and expressing that I didnt realize he really liked her so much. He nonchalantly responded "I dont, I just knew it would make her smile". This floored me because of the sheer deception and cruelty of it. That he would tell her what she wanted to hear even though he didnt mean it, I'm not sure he is capable of feeling true emotions for anyone, at least at that time.

So the girl and guy met each other and started becoming involved. I felt like I was drowning in the middle of them because suddenly my two closest friends who were both unhealthy were suddenly spending all their time with each other. I was miserable and confused and stressed out. There were the multiple layers of my concern for my female friend and her self esteem dealing with the depression, my concern for her becoming involved with a man who had hurt me and other women multiple times. There was the concern of my own twisted but present romantic feelings for the guy, and the fact that he was now dating my best friend and that she had betrayed me by dating him when she knew that we had been close. I did my absolute best to separate my anger at her as the girl who was dating a guy i liked, from my concern for her own well being as a friend of mine. Yet her warped mind projected only negative emotions from me to her despite my very clear explanations that this was not the case. He quickly stopped caring about my friendship with him and focused on developing a relationship with this girl based on making her feel better.

I left the following semester because I knew I had to get out of the situation. I tried for the next few months to repair my friendships with both of them. I explained myself over and over and shared my former and current emotions intentions and grievances, yet all I received was rejection and negativity. It was extremely painful to let these two people who had once been my close friends go, but I remembered to look at the situation and analyze how much I was giving compared to how much I was getting. In that frame, I saw my energy roaring out of me like a waterfall, full of concern and compassion and a profound desire to help both of these people for themselves and for my relationship with them. Howver, all I got in return was pain. I let them go. I've never been friends with either one truly since and it is still hard some days when I remember the fun times and miss htem.

It hurt to see them in a relationship and I was jealous and sad. On some level however, I hoped that perhaps they did need each other and that somehow miraculously they had changed each other for the better. I help onto this as a reassurance that at least in the end maybe they were both happier, until a few months later. I saw the female friend at a party and she apologized to me for the pain that i had experienced. I did not forgive her because i felt that she had never listened to my true intentions in the first place, in my head and heart i had resolved to let htem go and i did not want to pretend like we still had a frienship when that bridge had burned in flames months before. I did however make a genuine comment that i hoped they were at least happy with each other. She promptly burst into hysterical tears and explained tht he didnt care about her hte way i thought he did. I didnt want to stand there and say "i told you so" or "i warned you" so I just left.

I learned a lot from this experience because it taught me how to evaluate the pros and cons and when to choose the less painful way. It was painful for me to acept that i could not help these two people whom I cared about immensely. It was painful to accept that they would no longer be part of my life. It was painful for me to let them go but I knew that it was what I had to do if I wanted to keep any energy inside left for myself. I didnt want to become a shadow of a person, drained to the last drop and miserable, so I took what energy I had left and began sealing up that open chakra, keeping the energy for people from whom I would receive energy back.

I now have a tattoo of the heart chakra to remind myself of these valuable lessons and to never give so much of myself that I end up drained, because in reality then you have nothing left to give and you wont help anyone.

the ultimate test of this lesson came to me a few years later. I fell deeply in love with a young man from the moment that I met him. My love for him was the most profound energy I had ever felt for another person. At first I was terrified but I grew to love it as well. We werent together long before I felt so comfortable and trusting of our relationship that I followed my heart and knew I had to travel because that is a profound part of me. By the end of our time apart he could not continue. He ended things with me abruptly and cruelly telling me that he had "no feelings for me" and that it was just over. This was a mere week or so after I thought we were fine and we were expressing our strong love for each other. Needless to say it was a shock. My heart was hammered into pieces and ground into dust. Instead of anger however or rejection of him, guess what I felt? I wanted to Help him! I saw his destructive relationship pattern for what it was, unhealthy, and desired so much to point it out to him and help him see what was wrong with it and help him to change. I diagnosed him in the DSM and analyzed his childhood and family trying to understand why he acted the way he did. I was so absorbed with trying to help him get better from the unhealthy cycle of sudden relationships and grandiose promises which often ended suddenly, that I forgot about my own pain and right to be angry. I looked at my tattoo which I had just recently gotten, and took a deep breath and took out the figurative scales. I knew I had given my all to the relationship, and while we were together, I had been receiving a healthy amount of energy. But now, he had broken up with me and was so numb and cold that I was not getting an ounce of energy out of him. I reminded myself what I had learned with my friend who was depressed, which was that until she wanted to change and get help, she wouldnt and I couldnt help her, so I knew what I had to do. I wrote him a few final letters expressing what I needed to, pointing out a few traits of his pattern and giving a few suggestions because I couldn't help myself. But, I asked him to please not respond because I just needed to express it, I didnt want to fight him or convince him. and I let him go. I deleted his name and number and removed all the pictures and anything that reminded me of him. I cried my heart out and felt the misery, I leaned on my friends, wrote in journals, prayed and meditated to get through the day to day. And, week by week, month by month, the pain faded into a continuous ache instead of such sharp shooting pains. I had known that he needed to spend time alone, since his tendency was to jump into relationship after relationship. But just a few short weeks after we broke up, he jumped into another one. As painful as this was it actually also helped. It made it clear to me that he was not ready to change and did not see any of his behavior as unhealthy. I accepted that he had made this decision to continue being unhealthy and reassured myself that at least I hadnt wasted time chasing after him imploring him to change and get help. I knew that if he wanted to change he would decide to do it on his own. A few months later I heard from him that he was in fact alone, for the first time in years, and that he knew he had a lot of growing up to do. I breathed a sigh of relief because despite the pain, I knew I had done the right thing. Because now as he changes and gets help, I know hes doing it for himself and not because I'm telling him to. If he grows as a person and gets healthier, I'll know its because the time was right for it and its what he wanted. Its still hard and I still have to fight the urge some days not to contact him and make suggestions or give advice to help him grow, but I know that I have done the right thing.

I have learned to Let People Go when they are Costing more than you can Give. I have learned that you Cannot Help Everyone, and that you Cannot Help Anyone who does not profoundly want the help for themselves. I've learned that people are not going to Change until they decide theres a good reason to. and that as painful as it is to cut someone out, thats its less painful to jump ship and swim away then stay on deck until it sinks.