When Helping Hurts: The Archetypes of Giving and Receiving, Part 5

Accepting the Gift that Hurts

Given all this complexity, and all the potential for giving and receiving to force us to come to grips with shadow, it’s understandable that people try various ways to manage this situation, or avoid it altogether.  Coming to grips with shadow is almost always painful, and we humans generally try to avoid pain, even when the avoidance leads to greater pain.  I call this talk “Accepting the Gift that Hurts,” because it is about how people attempt, usually unsuccessfully, to avoid accepting such gifts, or avoid making such gifts.  But the key is acceptance, for both the giver and the receiver.  But first, let’s talk about those typical ways we try to avoid the hurt.

The first strategy is to avoid giving to anyone, and to avoid asking for help entirely.  In the words of Shakespeare:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Is this desirable, much less possible?  Jung teaches us that we cannot repress shadow and pretend that it will simply go away.  I have come to see that shadow is a sort of impurity or unprocessed stuff of life, and the events of our time here on earth are meant to process it, to purify it, bringing us to greater consciousness and peace.  Wherever there is shadow, life will provide an opportunity for us to confront it, understand it in a deeper way, heal the pain around it, and become more whole as a result.  If you choose to avoid giving and receiving, it is likely you will end up avoiding most intimate relationships, because they almost always come to some kind of giving and receiving.  But shadow will still find a way to break through.

A less drastic avoidance strategy is to very tightly contain the giving and the receiving. Typically, ego dominates in this type of strategy, and with ego comes control and judgment.  A person says, “I will only give if I can do so anonymously.”  Or, “I will only help those who help themselves.  I will not be exploited.”  I think you can see that these strategies are meant to prevent the shadowy consequences of giving and receiving.  If we know the person too well, we may be disappointed that they did no show the gratitude we hoped.  If we hold the receiver at a distance, we will not be drawn into their shadow.  This is the difference between writing a check to Save the Children and bringing an orphan into your house to live with you.  It is shadow encounter at an entirely different level of magnitude.  Even then, sometimes, the shadow intercedes.  I have an interesting anecdote.  Last year, I began sponsoring a child in the Philippines, through Save the Children.  Pretty safe giving, you might suppose.  But within a few months, they starting sending me items written by the child, and they were filled with Christian content.  For instance, in answer to a question about what music she likes, this little girl wrote, “Christian hymns.”  This raised all sorts of shadowy issues for me.  Is part of my donation going to religiously indoctrinate this girl?  What sort of judgment would she have of me, if she knew who I really was – a left-leaning, homosexual who mostly scorns traditional religion?  I did not renew my sponsorship, but I feel slightly guilty about it.

Let’s reflect a bit on the phrase “helping those who help themselves.” On some level, this is saying that you only help people who are relatively capable and self-sufficient, just in need of a bit of temporary support.  But what about all the people who just aren’t equipped to help themselves; they are too weighed down by their trauma, by their complexes, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.  We fear that level of shadow, not just in them, but in ourselves, and so we avoid it.

A similar strategy involves minimizing the gift, thereby minimizing the level of hurt that might come from it.  For instance, we may try to limit the gift to just a monetary amount, and set up a payment plan, so it is more of a loan.  Sometimes that actually does work, but in my experience, it just sets up a drama that comes later, when the payments are skipped, or the checks bounce.  It is NEVER just about the money, because money is a tremendous carrier of expectation, shame, and shadow.  Arguments about money almost inevitably turn into arguments about control, worthiness, shame, and fear.

So many strategies to avoid the shadow and potential hurt that comes from giving and receiving.   And so many ways to fail in such strategies.  Why might that be so?  I believe it comes back to the individual model of giving and receiving.  Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you are drawn to give, or drawn to receive, a drama is about to be enacted, and it is a drama with meaning and purpose.  It is a drama that has at least the potential for something that has been unconscious to become more conscious, in both the receiver and the giver.  That meaning, that purpose, will not be foiled by the mere acts of the ego.  It has the force of the Self, and of individuation, behind it.

It seems to me that the key quality of the individual model of giving and receiving is acceptance.  And I don’t mean just the superficial aspect of acceptance, meaning that an offer of help is accepted.  I mean that BOTH the giver and the receiver practice a radical form of acceptance of EVERYTHING that proceeds from their relationship.  What do I mean by acceptance?  Do I mean a sort of fatalism, a resignation to the futility of it all?  Absolutely not.  I would like to quote from Steven Hayes, a modern psychologist who has studied acceptance:

The goal is to open yourself to the vitality of the moment and to move more effectively toward what you value . . . By assuming the stance of willingness and acceptance you can open all the blinds and windows in your house and allow life to flow through; you let fresh air and light enter into what was previously closed and dark.  To be willing and accepting means to be able to walk through the swamps of your difficult history when the swamps are directly on the path that goes in a direction you care about.  To be willing and accepting means noticing that you are the sky, not the clouds, the ocean, not the waves.  It means noticing that you are large enough to contain all of your experiences, just as the sky can contain any cloud and the ocean any wave.” (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, page 45)

Dr. Hayes is not a Jungian, but there is a lot of Jungian philosophy in what he has written.  It is about trying to keep the largest possible context for whatever happens in our lives, in this case being a giver or a receiver.  The ego will always try to reduce it to the lowest denominator – did I get scammed, was I violated, should I demand justice, am I properly appreciated, what do I owe, what is owed back to me.  By redirecting it to the larger context the questions change dramatically, “What has been brought to the surface by what I have experienced?  How can I take that lead and process it into gold?”

I would like to end with a quote from an online book called Living the Generous Life:

Reflections on Giving and Receiving which was funded by the Fetzer Institute and edited by Wayne Muller and Megan Scribner:

If generosity is fundamentally relational, then the giving/receiving relationship is prey to all the challenges and obstacles inherent in any human relationship. Jealousy, dependency, power struggles, and deception can all infect the purity of an honest, easy kindness.

Any or all of these familiar human foibles can create a corrosive dilemma that impedes the authentic flow of generosity. Fear and dependency create scarcity in the giver, and lack of
empowerment in the receiver. What kinds of giving challenge both giver and receiver to be more open, honest, and authentic as they strive together to grow a relationship that is beneficial to both?

It is useful to remember that the act of giving begins on the inside. The rhythm of honest kindness arises out of an honest heart. If we are to be truly kind, we must be truly awake to our motivations, our fears, our strengths, and our gifts. In other words, we must first become the gift that we would give.
(p. 8, available at http://www.fetzer.org/sites/default/files/images/resources/attachment/2012-07-12/generous_life.pdf)