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.