Success in helping isn’t measured by how indispensable you become. Sometimes it’s measured by how well someone functions when you’re no longer there.
There’s a strange contradiction built into helping professions. We want to matter. We want clients to value us. We want students to remember us. We want employees to seek our wisdom. We want children to need us. And yet, if we’re doing our job well, they should gradually need less from us.
If our goal is to increase another person’s capacity, we should be asking ourselves, Can this person increasingly function, think, decide, and cope without relying on me to do those things for them?
Why Being Needed Feels Good
Being needed is highly satisfying for a number of reasons:
- Significance: I’m important in this person’s life.
- Connection: I’m the one they turn to when they need something.
- Safety & Security: We can’t pretend that income isn’t a factor for people in the helping professions. We need to pay our bills, too. I know I genuinely feel amazing when I can help someone and get paid for it, too!
None of this makes helpers bad people. Helping relationships can appropriately satisfy both people. Helpers gain Significance, Connection, and Safety & Security while the people they help can benefit enormously from the continued conversations and support.
Our needs aren’t the problem. The ethical issue arises when satisfying our needs begins to interfere with the other person’s growth and development.
That means we need to self-evaluate regularly. Is the decision I’m making primarily serving the person I’m helping, or am I allowing my own needs to interfere with their growth?
Helping vs. Creating Dependence
I don’t want to call anyone out personally, but I have heard about counselors being reprimanded for discharging clients before their tenth session. The business owner, often a therapist themself, will suggest that if the presenting problem is resolved, the therapist should find something else to work on.
When treatment continues primarily because the practice needs the revenue rather than because the client has goals they want to continue addressing, the helper’s needs are being prioritized over the client’s.
In supervision, I’ve also become aware of counselors who are reluctant to discharge clients because they fear they won’t be successful on their own. Sometimes helpers remain involved because the other person’s independence makes the helper anxious.
When we’re truly helping, we’re saying, Let’s strengthen your ability to do this. When we’re fostering dependence, we might be saying, You need me to do this with you every time.
Sometimes the latter can look like excellent service, but it may actually be serving our own need to protect clients from failing or our reluctance to lose the sense of importance we have in their lives.
The question to ask yourself is, Am I making this choice because it serves the person I’m helping, or because I’m uncomfortable with what happens if they need me less?
Independence Doesn’t Mean Abandonment
It’s important to understand that fostering independence doesn’t mean withdrawing support before someone is ready. Like parenting, it can happen in stages.
Some people may need long-term assistance. Interdependence is not the same thing as dependence. Even after a helping relationship ends, someone may want to return because they’ve encountered a situation they don’t yet have the capacity to manage. Asking for help is not failure, and providing that help doesn’t make you an enabler.
The goal is not to never need anyone. The goal is to avoid making someone unnecessarily dependent on you for abilities they already have or can develop themselves.
Coaching
A coach’s job isn’t to become the client’s permanent external brain.
Good coaches want clients increasingly able to ask themselves good questions, evaluate their options, recognize their patterns, make thoughtful decisions, and recover well when something doesn’t work.
Counseling
Clients often come to counselors looking for answers. Providing those answers can make the counselor feel useful.
But ultimately, good counseling increases a client’s ability to self-regulate, evaluate, cope, and make decisions outside their sessions.
Leadership
As a leader, it can feel great when your employees come to you for advice, verification, validation, and recognition. But if your people can’t think for themselves and make good decisions in your absence, you are not going to be able to do your job because you’ll constantly be doing theirs.
If everything falls apart when you leave the room, what have you actually developed?
Strong leaders work to develop people who can think, make good decisions, and act appropriately without constantly seeking permission.
Education
The teacher’s goal shouldn’t be merely to gain students’ compliance and get them to memorize material long enough to pass the exam. A good teacher wants to develop students who learn how to think, question, discover, and continue learning when the teacher isn’t there.
The goal of teaching is not to tell students what to think. Excellent teachers provide information and help students learn how to evaluate it, find relevant information, consider different perspectives, and apply what they learn in the real world.
They teach students how to think.
Parenting
Obviously, your newborn needs you for virtually everything. You have to feed, clothe, burp, change, and comfort them almost on demand.
I’m not typically the overly sentimental type, but there is a Hallmark expression I once read on a card: A parent’s job is to provide their children with roots and wings.
As your child grows, they should slowly, gradually need you less. When they are younger, you help establish their roots. As they begin to spend more time away from you, you gradually help them test those wings.
That’s both the goal and often the heartbreak. We are super proud when our child demonstrates agency in an area we didn’t know they possessed, but there can also be a pang of regret at no longer being needed in that particular area.
The same can be true for all helpers. Someone needing us less can be both evidence of our success and emotionally difficult to experience.
The Ethical Self-Check
Is my helping increasing this person’s capacity and agency, or is it increasing their dependence on me? If they needed me less tomorrow, would I experience that as a win?
Reflection
Where might helping someone become less dependent on you actually be evidence that you’ve helped them well?
