To Help And Be Helped
Reflections on our impact in life
As a child I have watched a few lunar eclipses and a couple of solar eclipses from the roof deck of the house I grew up in, together with my father. The earliest memory I have of that is me holding my father’s hand and asking him whether the moon would come back.
He used those moments to teach me some things about life. He liked making analogies between the vastness of the universe and the vastness of existence.
When Trisha Faye commented on my recent story “The Hidden Note”, she said something that touched me deeply:
Maybe somewhere your words will touch someone that needs to see them and change can come about from this, even though you’ll probably never know about it. — Trisha
Reflecting on it more, I went back in time to that little child who was holding their father’s hand and looking at the sky in awe. I was too young then to think about what matters anyway if the universe is so vast. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that moment when my only concern was about the moon’s well-being.
As a therapist, I often hear about how I helped someone. It feels good to know that you made a difference in someone’s life. Through training and my personal therapy, I have learned to cope with my thoughts about “what happens next”. Maybe the client changed in such a way that they will positively impact others around them. Or, maybe the client had more realizations a few years after our work together and I won’t get to learn about it.
Having worked and volunteered at positions where the feedback wasn’t as immediate, also helped me to be okay with knowing that I won’t know if someone got helped and how my actions or my words influenced them later on in life.
Detaching from mundane emotions and aspirations has helped me to see that more clearly. I also connected with that part of me that gets helped from others but can’t say it. For instance, in the therapy setting, I have been amazed by clients many times. Their resilience and their determination have been inspiring for me.
Sometimes through them I get an answer or an insight for something that concerns me. That’s not something I would disclose to them though. As I have explained in my article about empathy, self-disclosure in the therapeutic relationship can be damaging. Which is why I always take those realizations and thoughts to my personal therapy and in clinical supervision.
In those cases, therefore, it’s the clients who don’t know that they’ve been helpful to me. There are more people who don’t know that they have helped me with something they said or did. I’m not talking about friends or ex-partners. Rather, I’m talking about kind strangers who made me feel better without knowing that I needed it, through a smile or a compliment. I’m sure I could come up with many such examples.
If I had to choose between not knowing if I’ve helped someone and not being able to let someone know that they have helped me, I would choose the former. Maybe because I’m more used to it due to my profession.
Having said that, the following question comes to mind.
Why do I feel the need to let others know that they have helped me?
Perhaps that’s a nice observation that I can discuss in my analysis at some point.