People Who Need to Insert Themselves Into Other People's Tragedies

 

I’m reading a book in which one of the characters is described as “always inserting herself into other people’s tragedies.”

The sentence stopped me cold, because I know someone like that: their compartmentalized compassion and the tendency to go about their own life until something happens in someone else’s life--whom they are not close to--and suddenly they hop on their white horse (corralled in the barn for moments such as these) to the rescue that they are sure only they are truly capable of!

When times of stress or life-change happen, be it emotional or medical, we all have our innies: our budds, our cohorts who we have, in the evangelical phrase, “done life with” and been doing life with for quite a while. These are the true heroes of anyone’s crisis or stumbling blocks of life, not the Lone Rangers who swoop in on a sense of uber self-importance, thinking to save the day.

For me, personally, my inner circle has always been God in Christ first, then spouse, best female friends and one sister, and my kids. 

For many, all or part of extended family would make the list. But that isn't true for everyone. Just because extended family is “family,” as everyone loves to emphasize, does not make them qualified to “be there,” especially when they haven’t. 

This is not to knock the general “well-meaningness” of family. It is, however to set the record straight on the opportunism that extended family members take advantage of when they want the scoop and to be in the know, and in the most important way. Meaning, even if they’ve visited us once in a decade, or never call when we’re well and healthy, they take it upon themselves to inject themselves now, in this present trying moment, as our medicine du jour. 

When I had a medical situation, a very close friend of mine, one of those genuine lifers who meets me where I’m at—and more—and has been since high school, said, 

“I suppose you get offerings of help from some pretty pesky people.” 

How did she know? Well, because she’s been there herself. 

Pesky people. What a delightful way to name those who come out of the woodwork on a rainy, or more often, a torrential day, but who, in the past, only tended to seem resentful of anything good in our life. One can’t help wonder at a bit of schadenfreude going on? 

Many people will say, 

“Well, so and so never showed up in my pain.” 

As if to show up opportunistically and self-centeredly is better than not showing up at all!

I listen empathetically, but can’t help asking myself in my own head, 

“Did they ever show up in your non-pain? On a good day, a boring day, a day in which you harbored no news or were not a project for them to rest their need for public affirmation upon? Did they show up then?" 

Why, if they’d never "been there" before, or were there only in a gossipy, “did you hear” basis, would you want them coming around in a time of anguish?

I say, yes, It’s great if they send a card. 

But don’t pull into my driveway with your cavalry, expecting to turn over a new leaf, thinking you’re God’s gift to me. Because honestly, you aren’t. I have those gifts in others. 

The truly compassionate will know this. The sincere will honor this. The non-needy folks will pay us respect by acknowledging our situation while stepping back, knowing their place. And their place is this: having not visited or worked on a two-way relationship, they let the proverbial “support network” of the other play out organically and authentically. They know where they stand with someone in crisis, and it isn’t in the center of that person’s life. 

All of this is to ponder, and perhaps ask, 

“What about grace?”

I found out for myself, during my bumps in the road, that the onus is oddly on us who are suffering to show grace to those who are not. Because in fact, they do suffer. They suffer from a suffocating sense of lostness that puts them focused and centered upon (in an unbalanced prerogative) worldly acclaim and perspective. 

They cannot fathom esteem, redemption, or being held up by God, and have placed themselves as the true carrier of protocol and action. They are big on action—not so much on self-reflection or reading the room—and not at all on Godly reflection in the truest sense of who God is.

Because if they had, they wouldn’t have the addictive need to pressure, to direct, to demand that they be allowed into another’s worst moments. They would see how narcissistic that is: how uncaring and unhelpful: that it makes things worse for the struggling other person. 

So grace on our part can come in, not to enable, or engage on this level, but to see it all laid out so clearly that we are never flummoxed or perturbed, but can instead heap our compassion for their sorry state back onto them, turning the tables. 

We do this in our inner attitude and prayer, while outwardly, we grace them with a knowing,

“Thank you for your offers of help, but I’m good, I really am. I’ll let you know if anything changes.” 

And stick to it. If they truly want to turn over a new leaf with us, they’ll show it by going forward with us in our future good times. And that doesn’t happen over night.

The best thing we can do for a help addict is to turn the spigot off. Don’t become their casework, their load to carry, their font of news to spew to the “less-helpful” (in their minds). Don’t drink from their well or let them drink from yours. 

Instead, stay focused on the precious commitment needed for your own recovery, made possible with the encouragement of those in your life whose motivations are pure, and always have been. 

"Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves." Matthew 10:16

"Make sure that none of you suffers as a...troublesome meddler." 1 Peter 4:15

Copyright Barb Harwood