RESCUE COMPLEX

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Have heard, perhaps, about the so-called "Karpman triangle". This is a model that describes the psychological behavior of people playing three classic roles:

Victim

Pursuer

Rescuer

I’ll better tell about the role of victim and persecutor in the video (because the topic is too extensive for the framework of the article). And here I would like to briefly walk through the role of a rescuer.

The rescuer, at first glance, is a positive character. After all, he seems to be interested in helping people. Interested in doing good to the other person, as if he wants to be useful. However, this role is attributed to a form of neurotic behavior, that is, not healthy.

Why? Because the Rescuer's behavior is based on a mixed motive:

• It can be building your self-esteem on "helping": reinforcing a sense of self-importance, significance, nobility. The way to be good, right.
• This may be the expectation of gratitude from the person to whom help was provided (or rather, "good is done").
• It can be atonement for your feelings of guilt for something.
• It may be a latent desire for power and control (to make the victim helpless, dependent, dependent on his "help").
• This can be a legalized form of expression of his suppressed aggression, when the rescuer becomes the persecutor of the persecutor (then he becomes the "intercessor" for the Victim before the Persecutor of this Victim).
• It can be a way to earn love through your usefulness and suitability.
• This can be a way to close the gestalt, complete the action: for example, as a child, he could not save his mother from depression, alcohol or a tyrant dad, and now he will complete the rescue mission that he started then by saving another person.
• This can be a way to switch from your unresolved problems to someone else's, more obvious for the Rescuer (a shoemaker without boots).

Please note that the very motives can "overwhelm" the Rescuer either in the Persecutor or in the Victim. Actually, all these roles are intertwined and one and the same person can play them all during one conflict.

In other words, the Rescuer's motives are ALWAYS selfish.

So what is the danger of salvation? A good deed, it seems, though selfish … But no!

First, the Rescuer is unconsciously uninterested in the final salvation of the Victim. After all, then his mission will end, he will "be left without work." And he will be left without those bonuses and benefits that the "mission of salvation" gives him. That is, by and large, all the activities of the Rescuer are a violent imitation of salvation, and not help as such. This is a permanent process of "pulling a hippopotamus out of the swamp".

Secondly, by his actions, causing good and irreparable benefit, the Rescuer can psychologically invalidate another person to whom the "help" is addressed. That is, the purpose of the Rescuer is not to help another become independent, to teach them how to solve their problems, providing ongoing support with a view to returning responsibility to the person being helped. And the goal is to take responsibility for the life and well-being of another - to yourself. Making another dependent on help, dependent. That is, unconsciously, the Rescuer, solving the difficulties of another, multiplies them or "does not complete the solution".

And thirdly, it is fraught with burnout of the Rescuer himself. Because he often realizes his mission of salvation in conditions of a strong deficit of internal resources, lack of his own livability. "Shining on others - you burn yourself." Or as in a fairy tale "… a beaten unbeaten is lucky".

So is any help self-serving? How to distinguish a sincere desire to help another from compassion and empathy - from salvation? And how to get out of the unhealthy role of the Rescuer? How to distinguish a "mission of salvation" from a sincere desire to help a person in a difficult situation? Where is the line between unconscious selfish motives and an altruistic attitude?

In contrast to salvation, we refer to such a concept as "service." And at the heart of service is love for another person. The main condition for the very possibility of service is complete personal well-being. That is, a person is content to be who he is and to have what he has, to live where he lives. What is missing in the rescue!

It is easy to love people when everything is fine for yourself. When overflowing with happiness, the need to share rises: to create something for others, to build, to give, to teach others what you know, to share experiences, to warn against mistakes, to create the world for others from your abundance.

I am sincerely convinced that an unhappy person who does not love himself, who is not satisfied with his life, cannot and does not know how to love other people. This means that he does not know how to care. After all, at the heart of care is love. There is no love - then it is guardianship. Or compensation for your own cockroaches.

High awareness is required for service. Harmony in oneself, integrity.

If this is not the case, then for the help of others there is always some own neurosis: fears, complexes, unmet needs.

Service does not make the other helpless, powerless. On the contrary, the purpose of service is to help another person become prosperous independently of anyone else.

In rescue, the other person is tied to the giving hand. In service, he sets out on an independent path. Rescue is when you fish for another. Service is when you show someone else how to use a fishing rod. When you create a fishing rod for another and donate it for free.

In rescue, you take care of a person for yourself (unconsciously, of course, but for your own sake). In service, you save life for the person himself.

Rescue arises as a continuation, a consequence of internal scarcity. Serving - from inner abundance, well-being, well-being.

To get out of salvation, you need to become aware of those behavioral patterns when you behave, act like a Rescuer. Get out of the situation, look from the outside and evaluate what role you are unconsciously playing. Think about the motives, about the true reasons, what makes you strive to solve other people's problems for other people, to do good when you have your own unsolved problems and difficulties. If saving and rescuing others is to the detriment of their own interests, this becomes a problem. For its solution, you can contact a psychologist. And for a start - just realize your role.