When Helping Hurts: The Archetypes of Giving and Receiving

Part 2 -- The Role of the Giver

Summarizing our discussion so far, giving and receiving is a powerful archetypal theme in many lives.  Why does it so often go wrong?  Last week, I proposed four underlying reasons.  First, there are actually six relationships going on whenever we give or receive, as summarized in the chart from Vol. 16 of Jung’s Collected Works

As if that weren’t enough, there can be disconnect around the nature of the need being expressed, as summarized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

Third, there is the involvement of the “power shadow,” since giving and receiving automatically set up one party as having something that the other one wants or needs.

This week, we will explore in more depth one of the roles in the drama of giving and receiving, the role of the giver.

Before we start talking about how things can and often go wrong for whomever offers help to others, let’s start with an archetypal tale of giving, the story of Kuan-Yin, the Chinese goddess of compassion.  This tale is retold by Mark Nepo in the Summer 2013 edition of Parabola magazine.

There are many aspects of the drama of giving and receiving in this tale, particularly the role of the giver.  Here are just a few of the archetypal themes.

Kwan-Yin was drawn, from the outset, to look inside the situation, inside the very bodies of the victims.  Was this just her morbid curiosity?  No, not at all.  She was not drawn by the drama of the scene, intent on punishing the perpetrators, living out her sense of rage or need for justice born out of her personal history. Symbolically, she was drawn to the inner experience or meaning of what had occurred, and she felt drawn to feel it, not just think about it or enact further damage from it.

Neither did Kuan Yin shrink from sharing in the suffering.  She allowed the blood to coat her – in other words, she made herself vulnerable to the experience of suffering and allowed herself to have her own experience of it.  She took the burden of caring for the little boy.  She actually felt the pain of the mother, of the father, and of the little boy.  Whenever you offer help to someone, to some extent, there is a potential that you will share in their suffering, inviting what harmed them into your own life.  The fear of this makes some people not offer help the first place, or give help in a “distancing” way, i.e., “what you are going through could never happen to me.” 

Kuan-yin willingly put aside her original destination; as the story says, “that life, that plan, that dream was gone.”  Archetypally speaking, this kind of decision does not come from the ego; indeed, it is usually counter to the ego.

Kuan Yin persevered through this process, although the likelihood that it would be “successful” in any outer-world sense was basically zero.  But she was not broken by the tragic outcome – the death of the boy, which is what she was so intent to prevent.  Even then, she was drawn to the inner experience of it – she literally opened the eyelids of the little dead child to “see what was left within him.”  And it was through that effort that this entire drama of giving and receiving left the mundane and rose to archetypal dimensions.  The child’s suffering and death became the root of all suffering, in all its infinite variations.  She did not shrink from this, nor did she allow it to destroy and possess her.  As the story says, “letting them move through her began to open her heart like a lotus flower.” 

She slept – symbolically an act of integration – and then became a conduit for the archetypal energy of compassion.  She found the strength that can come from fully grieving.

We are not goddesses, we are human, so things usually don’t go the way it did in the story.  We mere humans have shadows, and they present themselves in the giving and receiving drama.  What is it that keeps the archetype of giving and compassion from flowing as it did through Kuan-yin:  to keep focusing not just on the outer events but the inner meanings, opening ourselves to the suffering without being overtaken by it, persevering and even finding the ultimate blessing in what seems to be the ultimate defeat of our intentions as givers of help?

To put it brutally, sometimes the act of giving comes from an unhealthy place in the giver.  What can seem as a pure, unselfish act has its roots in trauma, pain, and longing for resolution in the giver, and has only a passing association with the true needs or realities of the person reaching out for help.  I offer five examples, but I am sure there are many, many more.

1)            Sometimes we give material things because we equate such giving with loving, and we equate gratitude with being loved.

This is particularly likely in a hyper-materialistic culture such as our own.  Giving things is much easier than truly opening one’s heart and making oneself vulnerable to the actual suffering of the person in need.  Further, when the person expresses gratitude, it can feel very satisfying, but even at best, one is left with a troubling question.  Do you love the things I gave you, or do you love me, as the giver?

2)            Sometimes we give because we want to magically undo an unresolved or painful part of our personal history

Sometimes we give out of the magical belief that, by re-enacting what went wrong in our childhood, and giving what we needed back then, it will be like getting into a time machine and preventing the original wounding from ever happening to us.  That is not the same as growing in empathy from the resolution of our own complexes;  it is a vain attempt to deal with our complexes by somehow re-living the past and “getting it right” this time.  We can heal from trauma, but we can’t remove it from our past.  No matter how many times you prevent others from experiencing the wound, the fact of our original wound will remain.

3)            Givers may succumb to “vicarious living” through the receiver. 

Sometimes, it may seem as if the act of giving has conferred a special access to the life of the receiver, and it may seem like a very interesting, intriguing, even seductive life.  This is especially true if the giver has an unacknowledged shadow which she or he fears living out up front and personally.  Instead, the giver may insinuate him or herself very deeply into the situation of the receiver, thirsting for every detail of how the receiver got into her predicament and how the help is easing his burden.  Warning signs are the stunting of the life of the giver.

4)            Sometimes givers are motivated by their own feelings of weakness or insecurity. 

In such cases, givers consciously or unconsciously encourage a dependence relationship, exaggerate the problems of the receiver, and feel more powerful and capable as a result.  They similarly exaggerate their ability to help.  They take joy in the deepening of the receiver’s problems, and disappointment when the receiver becomes more independent. If the receiver is defiant and ungrateful, it might be a reaction to this part of the giver’s shadow.

5)            Sometimes, in giving, we only see the potential good we wish for the receiver, and we overlook the actual human being with his or her true realities and needs

This is the situation where someone says, “I gave to him or her because I saw such potential, and they deserved a break.”  This often involves a confusion of Maslow’s hierarchy.   The giver is projecting her or his need into the situation.  The receiver just wants $20 and a safe place to spend the night; the giver sees that they could become a successful rocket scientist with a happy spouse and a beautiful home in the suburbs. In writing about how this can play out in the analytic relationship, Adolf Guggenbuhl Craig notes a paradox. Many of us had parents or other adults in our lives who wove fantasies about us, imagining us to be capable of nearly miraculous things, many of which were unlived and stunted parental hopes and dreams for themselves.  Sometimes, that elevates our expectations of ourselves; people who lack this entirely, such as people in orphanages, suffer for the lack of it.  On the other hand, such fantasies can be highly destructive if they are insisted upon, made as a condition for love, and continually harped upon when not achieved.  A classic line from the unconscious giver:  “After all I did for you, all the sacrifices I made, all the chances I gave you to have the advantages I lacked, this is the thanks I get!”  Translation:  I gave you the chance to have the life I wanted for myself, and you had the audacity to demand your own life!

This is a vivid illustration of the playing out of the power shadow.  The giver takes on a role of being smarter, more powerful, and wiser than the receiver.  That may or may not be true, but the act of giving does not make it absolutely true.

Is the answer to refrain from giving?  These five traps seem so common and so insidious, even if we think we have done a lot of shadow work.  There is something about the drama of giving and receiving that will surface whatever remains to be done.  But let us go back and remember the story of Kuan-yin and find some inspiration there.  In his commentary on the tale, Mark Nepo writes:

There are always things to be done in the face of suffering. We hare bread and water and shelter in the storm. But when we arrive at what suffering does to us, there is only compassion-the genuine, tender ways we can be those who suffer.

Some days, I can barely stand the storms of feeling and fear civilization will end, if we can't honor each other's pain. But in spite of my own complaints and resistance, I know in my bones that openness of heart makes the mystery visible. Openness to the suffering we come across makes our common heart visible. If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world. We must forego our obsession with avoiding pain and start sense the one cry of life that allows us to flow to each other.

When Helping Hurts: The Archetypes of Giving and Receiving

Part 1 -- The Drama of Receiving and Giving

Every day, we experience giving and we experience receiving.  It seems so simple, at least on the surface.  One person expresses a need, and a second person steps forward to help fill that need.  If it is so simple, why does it so often go very wrong.? Givers are often left feeling scammed and unappreciated.  Receivers are often left feeling shamed and further victimized.  This is not always the case, of course.  But I would say that giving and receiving is just as likely, if not more likely, to produce hurt as well as help.  Is that because somebody did something wrong?  Or is it just built into the pattern of giving and receiving?  That is the theme of the next series of lectures.

Carl Jung wrote extensively on one particular type of giving and receiving – the analytical relationship.  In particular, he delved deeply into the phenomena he called transference and countertransference.  One of the key skills of an analyst is to recognize when analysands are projecting something onto her or him, and to use that in order to assist in the healing process.  For example, I am not actually your father, but if I were your analyst, you might start thinking about me and acting toward me as if I were your father, because I remind you of him somehow.  My job as your analyst would be to help you recognize the unhealed aspects of your relationship with your father, using that transference as a valuable opportunity for you to work through it with me.  On the other hand, I might recognize that I am also projecting something onto you – perhaps treating you as a child, having parental feelings toward, even working through my own parenting issues using the analysand as a fill-in child. That is called counter-transference, and it is the analyst’s obligation to minimize the detrimental effect of it on the analysand’s healing process, perhaps even withdrawing from the analysis if it detracts to much from the analysand’s needs.

In this series, I will not be talking much about the analyst/analysand type of giving and receiving.  Instead, I will be exploring the types of giving and receiving where neither party is trained or obliged to deal with the transference or countertransference.  For instance, there is the parent and the child, the medical doctor and the patient, the philanthropist and the charity, the employer and the employee, or even two friends. Lacking awareness of the deeper processes going on, givers and receivers revert to more common, emotion-laden vocabulary to describe their experiences – like exploitation, gratitude, scamming, generosity, enmeshment, self-sufficiency, and unconditional love.

As I put together this series, I starting thinking about giving and receiving as involving agreements, many of which go unspoken or even unrecognized by both parties.  When I give, even when I insist it is unconditional, there is some sort of agreement about it.  And the same is true when I receive.  There is some insight that can be gained from that approach, but I have decided not to use that model.  For one thing, it involves too much ego process, which means that it leads to solutions that are just too simplistic and makes it all seem like a transaction.  As long as we have clear, mutual expectations and agreements, it will all turn out happily, right?  Just ask someone with a pre-nuptual agreement if it guarantees a happy marriage.  Sometimes, helping just hurts, and that is exactly what it must do in order to serve something greater, to serve a higher purpose.  The agreement/transaction approach simply cannot get to that level of insight.

Instead, I have opted to use the analogy of drama, like the drama we experience in the form of films or stage plays.  In fact, you can translate almost all of Jung’s essential theories into dramatic analogies.  Every film or movie has a larger plot or narrative, which renders the roles of the individual characters meaningfully related.  Events transpire, some of which are wildly unexpected, some of which are natural consequences of decisions made by characters.  Characters confront these events, react to these events, interact with one another through these events.  Sometimes the characters fall into old ruts, old patterns from their personal history, and they are held back from taking the action they need to take, caught in side stories of fear and avoidance. Eventually, there is usually a dramatic turning point – a character triumphs heroically, fails tragically, gains a new insight, makes a bold decision, and is often transformed or reborn as a result.  In Jungian terms, the big patterns or themes are the archetypes, often carried by nearly every member of a culture or society, passed down from untold numbers of generations. The events of the unfolding plot are synchronicities.  The old ruts and side stories of fear and avoidance are personal complexes. The plot line that leads to transformation and rebirth is individuation.  And who is the playwright?  That would be our Higher Power, whatever you know that to be, which expresses itself in us as the transcendent Self.

There are thousands of potential dramas, but a smaller number of themes come up over and over, in the theater and in life.  The tragic love story, the thriller, the avenging hero, good triumphing over evil – all worthy themes that have dominated untold numbers of lives.  And the theme of giving and receiving is among the most compelling and transformative of these themes.  Who, among us, has not been drawn into giving or receiving, only to get much more than we anticipated?  How many of us have discovered who we really are, or gained a new insight into someone else, by either giving or receiving help?

Giving and receiving is perhaps the major theme of my life.  Professionally, I have spent nearly my entire career raising funds and turning those funds into grants for others.  I am continually a receiver and giver, and I have innumerable stories about how that can go terribly wrong.  In my personal life, the last two years have been dominated by my offering help to young gay men and being caught up in the ensuing dramatic twists and turns, tearing me down to my most basic assumptions and fears, challenging me in ways I never imagined.  And, for all the grief, I am so grateful for it.

So, what is it about giving and receiving that can produce such drama and such transformation?  For one thing, it involves at least two human beings, sometimes more, each of which carries their own history and plot line.  A chart from Volume 16 of Jung’s Collected Works, slightly modified for this topic, can be helpful.

I call this the “six way” diagram, because it illustrates how, in any human interaction, there are actually six relationships being played out.  The blue line is the most obvious relationship, and it is the one that we usually over-emphasize.  This is the relationship between the ego of the giver and the ego of the receiver, the blue arrow in the diagram.  At this level, we talk things through on the conscious level.  I have a sense of who I am and why I want to give help, you have a sense of who you are and why you need help.  It can all seem so simple on this level.  Of course we can make this work, of course our motives are pure, of course I am giving unconditionally, of course you are receiving with just the right amount of gratitude.  If only that were the whole story.

Let’s move to the green arrows now.  The ego of the giver has some level of relationship with her or his interior life.  If that relationship is strong, the giver has a relationship with the interior feminine or masculine, with the complexes, and even with those embarrassing things he or she would prefer not to be true about him- or herself, called shadow.  Similarly, the same could be said of the receiver and the aspects of his or her interior life.  In the vast majority of cases, however, that interior relationship is not strong, perhaps even nonexistent, and so the giver tends to project all of that material outward, onto the receiver.  And visa versa, for the receiver.  That brings us to the black lines, which is the relationship of the ego to the interior life of the other person.  How does this play itself out?  Here is an example.  A friend asks me to loan him some money so he can make his rent this month.  On the ego level, all seems fine – the terms of the loan are mutually acceptable, the giver can affordit, the receiver shows gratitude.  But, just as the giver is handing over the check, the receiver says, “I guess you finally have me where you wanted me.”  The giver is shocked.  Where did that come from?  The receiver says, “Don’t get bent out of shape.  I only meant it as a joke. At that moment, the receiver has a look of shame and disgust on his face, and the giver catches a glimpse of it.  The ego of the giver has seen the shadow of the receiver.

As if that weren’t complicated enough, Jung adds the sixth dimension to the situation, the red arrow in the diagram.  In ways that our egos don’t even recognize, my interior life is interacting with your interior life. My unhealed psychological wounds are constellating your unhealed psychological wounds.  In our simple example, although the ego of the giver seems shocked by the somewhat cutting statement made by the receiver, suppose he does feel a little surge of satisfaction at having some power and superiority over his friend.  He does not acknowledge it consciously, but on the unconscious level, the giver’s unconscious need to have power of his friend is gratified by his friend’s feelings of shame at needing help.

Just imagine all of the different ways that something can go wrong in giving and receiving help!  Problems can happen at any of the six levels, and since some of the levels are unconscious, it may happen with a great deal of surprise and even savagery. 

As if that weren’t enough, there can be disconnect around the nature of the need being expressed.  Here is a chart of Malow’s hierarchy of needs:

Suppose the receiver is thinking of the request as simply involving a physiological need – help getting shelter for a month.  But, to the giver, the loan involves a belongingness need.  By giving you this loan, I am showing you that I love you, and by receiving it, you show that you love me back.  Or, in another example, I am going to refuse to loan you the money, because I feel that if you work hard and earn the money yourself, you will acquire a sense of accomplishment, meeting a higher level esteem need. But you are just afraid of sleeping on the streets tonight and getting mugged – a safety need.

There is one more concept I would like to introduce this week, to which we will return in future talks in this series – the power shadow.  It is implicit in some of the examples I have offered, and it seems to be unavoidable in the drama of giving and receiving. To ask for help is to acknowledge a need, which sets up a power dynamic.  If the person needing help has experienced trauma associated with power, that power shadow will permeate the entire situation.  It could dissuade the person from requesting or accepting help in the first place, and it could prime that person to expect abuse from the giver.  If it is the giver who has had a negative or ambivalent experience of power in the past, the results may be even more unpredictable, ranging from a smothering level of rescue, infantilization of the person in need, or asserting an exaggerated level of control over the situation.

So, given all of this, is it possible to help without hurting?  Can a person express a need for help without feeling shame or repeating past traumas of abuse at the hands of people with power?  Can a person really offer help unconditionally, and have it received in the same way?  Once you see the six levels of relationship, and the further complications around the type of need and the pervasive power shadow, helping without any level of hurt seems pretty unlikely.  But that should not dissuade people from enacting the drama of giving and receiving in their lives.  Like all of life’s dramas, giving and receiving holds tremendous potential to grow new levels of consciousness, to bring things to light that have long festered in the darkness. We can’t undo past wounding by re-enacting it in the present, but we can learn the lessons that were left undone back there in the past, and perhaps finally move further on in our path toward individuation.