'Helpless Helping'

The title of this art photo is "I swear I am helping" and it inspired me to write this short essay. The photo is created by the talented Irish artist Niamh Swanton and is currently on display in one of my favourite Galway cafes Coffeewerks. When ordering my morning flatwhite, I take time to look at the picture. My first reaction was that it made me smile, I enjoyed the humorous image. Later, I found it thought-provoking, perhaps it wasn’t so amusing, this reaction to crisis is actually quite commonplace. My third response after seeing it a few times was that the picture made me feel emotionally moved.

The photo imagery speaks to my experience of our times, and also reminds me of the many instances when I have witnessed what I will call 'helpless helping' - when individuals, groups or businesses may seem to be helping but in reality they are not acting in ‘good faith’. Their actions can be driven by conscious or unconscious desires, and sometimes cause more harm than good. Below I will explore the underlying causes of this ‘helpless helping’.

‘Helpless Helping’ Three underlying causes

I will share examples of each cause in the next paragraph.

1. Self-Interest: Helpless helping in this case is a calculated conscious act driven by selfish desires i.e. we pretend to help but we are serving our own purposes, whilst fully aware that our actions are not really helping at all.

2. Unconscious Repression: We have a conscious desire to help, but unconsciously we undermine, limit or distort the help we want to give in order to satisfy our own needs and desires. In this case, we repress our lack of commitment to helping the other fully, to protect our idealised self. Our ego-identity of being a ‘good person’ won’t allow us to see our true selves, and the shame of our selfishness is buried and rationalised away while we convince ourselves “I swear I am helping”

3. Performative Helping: This stance is often blurred between the conscious act in point 1 and the unconscious act in point 2.

   We see the need of the suffering other and want to help, yet we also see benefits to ourselves. For example, to get attention and make others think how generous we are. In this case, our helping becomes performative, and often overshadows the actual need of the suffering other we are helping. This creates a conflict within ourselves and/or within the group we are acting with. We have to wrestle with our conscience but too often the help we give is distorted towards ‘helpless helping’ as our priority becomes the performance of helping to make us look good.

Often our helpless helping goes beyond a lack of help, it can also cause more harm.

Examples of the three causes are below.

Pharmaceutical companies pushing dangerous drugs: "I swear I am helping"

This is an example of position 1: Pharmaceutical companies selling opioid drugs to ‘help patients’ control pain. Yet these companies acknowledged that they were putting profit before patient welfare. Pharmaceutical companies have made incredible profits from pushing these dangerously addictive medications which has led to terrible consequences. Many Americans with opioid use disorder have shifted from taking prescription pain pills to street fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is far more powerful and lethal. Drug overdoses now kill more than 100,000 people in the USA each year.

“As today's plea to felony charges shows, pharmaceutical company Purdue put opioid profits ahead of people and corrupted the sacred doctor-patient relationship,” said Christina Nolan, U.S Attorney for the District of Vermont. 

Corporate greenwashing "I swear I am helping"

The planet/chair burns and many corporations and political actors perform acts of ‘helpless helping’ that are more about promoting an ethical brand than really making a difference. Sometimes this comes from position 1, where profits are put before ethics, and sometimes from positions 2 and 3 where there is a desire to be greener, but self-interest trumps the desire to actually help the planet. This is then either rationalised as in position 2, or more often the performative greenwashing takes precedence over actual change.

These two examples of greenwashing are shared by Ibrahim Okunade:

i) Innocent Drinks Innocent Drinks was accused of greenwashing for pushing adverts that claim that buying their smoothies can help save the environment. Innocent Drinks is a subsidiary of Coca-Cola, and the beverage company is widely regarded as one of the worst plastic polluters globally.

ii) Volkswagen Another famous example of greenwashing is the case of Volkswagen's "Clean Diesel" campaign. In the mid-2000s, Volkswagen marketed its diesel vehicles as environmentally friendly, claiming they had lower carbon dioxide emissions and better fuel efficiency. However, in 2015, it was revealed that Volkswagen had installed software in their vehicles that manipulated emissions tests, allowing the cars to pass regulatory standards while emitting much higher levels of pollutants in real-world driving conditions.

The invasion of Iraq: "I swear I am helping"

In my opinion, Tony Blair and George Bush, when they pushed for the Iraq invasion were acting from position 3. They did want to get rid of a dictator and ‘help’ and they also wanted to serve their own political agendas at home. The performative act of ‘helping Iraq’ by killing the dictator Sadam Hussein turned into a humanitarian disaster. To really help a very different path would need to have been followed.

Helpless helping closer to home

Bringing it closer to home, I interpreted the picture as a reflection of our narcissistic-cultural response to the many challenges we face. I have witnessed so many situations where individuals focus on themselves, incapable of making the connection to the needs of the other….even when the other is really suffering.

In workplaces, many people suffer mental health challenges due to toxic cultures or work demands, and yet the organisation’s rhetoric will claim to be one of well-being and employee engagement. The HR departments and senior leadership teams metaphorically pour water over their own heads in a performative act such as offering mindfulness classes to show they are helping; whilst the structural and systemic causes such as a bullying culture or hyper-workloads go unchallenged. Many in the organisation suffer whilst they are told by their leaders “We swear we are helping”.

As a family therapist, I would so often see caring parents undermine their children through unconscious acts of ‘helpless helping’. For example, parents who do everything for a child to ‘help them’ without seeing how their help was undermining the child’s development to become more independent. The parents would rationalise their behaviour ‘we are only trying to help’ while their behaviour served an unconscious purpose to keep the parents in ‘control’ and therefore alleviate the parental anxiety about their child going into the dangerous external world. Even when a child would rebel in a dangerous way such as self-harming, the parents would often struggle to change their dominating and controlling behaviour saying “but we are only trying to help”

Conclusion - Acting in Good Faith

Some people make a conscious choice when they are in a dilemma between self-interest and helping others, and they sacrifice their own needs a little to help more. Others turn to rationalising their approach, defending their ideal good-selves with everything they can, and often blame others who point out their help is at best performative.

The Eco-Leadership Institute, which I founded, has the aim of supporting leaders to act in ‘good faith’ to create the ‘good society’.

To act in ‘good faith’ means not only to perform good deeds, it means to take on Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to really look deeply at ourselves, and to question ourselves with an honesty and transparency that can be painfully revealing. Our idealised good-selves are not always as ideal as we would like them to be. Only when we undertake this deep soul searching, with ourselves and with others, can we avoid acting in bad-faith and challenge the ‘helpless helping’ that we observe, enact and collude with.

Facing ourselves in this way has two upsides. Firstly, after the initial reality check on who we really are, it’s quite liberating to see ourselves more clearly, and to see how our unconscious works to repress things we don’t like about ourselves. We then regain some power to make real changes that can be life-affirming. Secondly, when we shift from helpless helping to really helping, the rewards are immense.

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