How many nights have you stayed awake worrying about someone you’re trying to save? How many times were you so anxious about them you couldn’t eat? How many long texts did you send or nights did you stay up for hours on the phone trying to do the right thing? How many hundreds of hours have you worked trying to save them? Has it worked?

If this hits a nerve with you it’s only because I’ve been there. I have gotten up in the middle of the night to drive over so they weren’t alone, I have talked them back from suicide, I’ve put my life on pause trying to help people who could not help themselves. What I’m realizing now is that sometimes people can’t be saved.

If you think “But that’s heartless, we should do everything we can to save others!”…well, riddle me this:

• If you’ve already tried to save them a lot and it’s not working, then your help is probably not what they need right now.
• Some people won’t learn as long as they have someone helping them limp along. It might feel like compassion, but if they aren’t getting better with your help then you might actually be holding them back.
• Sometimes people can’t learn to save themselves until they have no other option. It’s not because they are bad people. Often the root cause of their bad decisions is trauma that wasn’t their fault.

I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t help people. I’m just saying that if you have been trying to save them for a long time and nothing has changed, maybe you’re not helping them as much as you think you are.

And what about your own life? How much have you given up to try and be there for them? How much of your life is on pause or gets interrupted because this person needs so much from you? 

And I’ll twist one more knife in your gut while I’m here: Are you using this person’s disasters as an escape from your own life? Are helping with their problems easier than solving your own? Do you struggle with being alone, and being someone else’s crutch is easier for you? That’s called codependency, and I can tell you from experience it is toxic for both parties. There are ways to heal it of course, but please think carefully about if this is the type of dynamic you are in. 

It might be more comfortable hiding from your problems inside someone else’s, but you are only living a fraction of what your life could be. And you’re also holding the other person back, because they won’t learn to walk as long as you are a crutch for them.

Further Reading: If this post resonated with you, I think you’d get a lot out of Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. Codependency has been described as “when each person in a relationship is responsible for the other person’s happiness.” What is hard is that often it feels like you’re helping and saving them from themselves, but that emotional dependency is not sustainable. This book really helped me escape the turmoil and resentment that characterizes codependency.