There is a help that helps and a help that injures. We are reminded of this by Giorgio Nardone in his book Psicotrappole (‘Psycho-traps’), that is to say the various ways of thinking and acting by which we complicate our lives or complicate the lives of other people. And this is then explained: ‘To offer our help to a person in difficulty is certainly a noble and useful act, but to strive to distance every obstacle from a son or a daughter means to impede him (or impede her) from developing confidence in his or her own resources’. There is a form of behaviour that ‘helps’ in the immediate but ‘injures’ the journey of growth of the people we want to help and the journey of discovery of their own strengths towards transforming limitations into resources and problems into solutions. It is important to help but it is injurious to take the place of the person who is interested in our help.

This also applies if we look at the relationship of help from the point of view of the person who asks for help. ‘To ask for help when one is in difficulty is an act of humility; it means admitting our own limitations and it enables us, if we receive the correct help, to learn to overcome them. Instead, to want someone to take our place confirms and strengthens our incapacities’. To be constantly saved by the saviour of the moment reassures us but it also runs the risk of pushing our self-esteem into crisis and nourishing our sense of insecurity.

This ‘psycho-trap’ can be observed in those various relationships of help and care in which one can create an authentic mutual dependence (co-dependence) in which the helper feels confirmed in his or her identity of being a saviour and the person who is helped is confirmed in his or her identity of being saved: the helper needs the other person to be in need, otherwise he or she no longer knows who he or she is; the person who is helped feels that he or she is a chosen son or daughter and will not easily forgo this reassuring identity.

To help and to be helped can be a source of satisfaction for the various partners of the relationship. But it can also cause injury every time that it limits the ability of the people who receive help to discover and to develop their own resources, their own talents and their own capacities. Although there are ‘psycho-traps’, there are also ‘psycho-solutions’. It is always important to bear in mind the popular maxim ‘teach people to fish rather than giving them fish’. Or the other such maxim: ‘help yourself and heaven will help you’, even when we ourselves are heaven. It is important to ask for help without delegating but also knowing how to offer without taking the place of those who should personally act to deal with their own problems.

In relationships in which we help other people there is another aspect that should be taken into consideration. When one helps a person one takes for granted that the person concerned appreciates this. But such is not always the case. This is something that I emphasised in my book Aiutare gli altri: la psicologia del buon samaritano (‘Helping Others: the Psychology of the Good Samaritan’). The point of view of the person receiving help can be different from the point of view of the person who gives a present or provides help. In the eyes of the person who receives help, all help appears as a ‘mixed blessing’: the comforting message of being worthy of the interest of other people but also, and especially when this takes place in a public context, the embarrassing confirmation of the inability to solve one’s problems on one’s own and consequent shame because of the fact that this reveals one’s frailty and confirms one’s own inferiority.

    Seen from the point of view of both partners of the relationship, the sequence of behaviour that provides help is complex: the request (or lack of request) for help by a person who is in difficulty; the choice of the helper or giver who should be turned to; the decision to help or otherwise by the person who could provide help; the way in which help is given or received; and the long-term consequences of the relationship of help that has been established. One psychologist has written: ‘The crucial moment of help, indeed, produces not only an instrumental effect but also a profound change in our self-image or our image of the other – this is a change that takes place both in those who have given and in those who have received’. And we have to take this into account.

Help should respect the dignity of the person who receives it and last for the right period of time. ‘Benevolent help’ often runs the risk of becoming ‘excessive help’ that creates further dependence and makes the need for help chronic.

When a person receives help, or asks for help, he or she needs to find a point of balance between needing other people and his or her wish for independence. The right balance is dynamic. We are reminded by Giorgio Nardone at the end of his book that one cannot stay balanced on a stretched-out rope for long because balance needs movement and constant oscillations. This is a circus image that has fascinated us ever since we were children.

Luciano Sandrin