The More You Rescue, The More They Sink
I know what you may be thinking: Let adults be adults? But what if the person I’m trying to change is in serious trouble? What am I supposed to do, just let them spiral? Let them drink and drive?
Of course not.
If someone is doing something dangerous or self-destructive, you don’t just Let Them. You step in, take the keys, or do whatever is necessary to help because your response might just save their life—whether that’s calling for help, or calling the police, or driving them to detox, or staying with them through a crisis until they are in a safe place.
The problem is that most people who are struggling hide it from you. They are not doing drugs in front of you; they are lying to you about it. They’re putting on a brave face at work but secretly struggling with depression.
Part of the challenge with people who are struggling is not knowing the extent to which they have been, until it’s really serious or it’s too late. And, I guarantee you, there is at least one person in your life who is struggling immensely and you have no idea.
When people are struggling, they have a lot of shame and are often in denial about it. They already feel like a burden and often tell themselves they are letting everyone down. Which is why people often don’t ask for help or open up about what is going on.
Watching someone you love struggle with their mental health, crippling grief, or an addiction is one of the hardest experiences you will face in life. And an even harder truth is: Not everyone is ready to get better, be sober, do the work, use their tools, or face their issues. And not everybody can.
As much as you may love someone and believe in them and would do anything in the world to make their pain go away, you cannot want someone else’s sobriety, healing, or health more than they do.
In this section of the book, we will unpack how, in your attempt to help, you may unknowingly be preventing other adults from finding their strength to face their struggles. The more you try to rescue someone from their problems, the more likely they will continue to drown in them. Allowing someone to face the natural consequences of their actions is a necessary part of healing. The fact is, adults only get better when they are ready to do the work, and you will be ready way before they are. It sounds harsh, but it’s true.
You and I are going to take everything you’ve learned so far about relationships, friendships, and human nature, and build on it to show you how those truths apply even in the most difficult situations.
You will also learn a brand-new approach to supporting someone through their struggles, which is grounded in the belief that someone can do the work to get better.
But before we jump in, one BIG disclaimer: There is a difference between supporting an adult who is struggling and supporting a child who is struggling. When you are dealing with a child, you are responsible for their emotional, financial, and physical support.
When you are dealing with an adult, you are not.
As you learned, pressuring someone to change creates resistance to changing, and your frustration and judgment are only going to make the situation with someone struggling worse. The higher the stakes, the more shame and paralysis the other person feels.
People only heal when they are ready. And if they haven’t, it’s because they aren’t ready. When someone you love is going through an internal struggle, they will not get better for you, their kids, or their family. They have to want to get better for themselves.
You may not understand it. You may think you would act differently if you were in the same situation. None of that matters. All of your opinions are judgment. And your judgment of the other person and what you think they should do is part of the problem, because it translates to pressure.
You need an outlet for your judgment—a therapist, a friend—because it won’t help to aim it at the other person. In times of struggle, what the other person needs is acceptance. Let Them struggle.
People only heal when they are ready to do it for themselves. These are deeply personal, difficult battles. . . and they can only be fought by that person when they’re ready to fight. You cannot make them fight. You cannot make them get sober. You cannot make someone financially responsible. You cannot make them heal.
Yes, they need your love and support. But here’s the hard part: They do not need to be “rescued.” I will say this again: The more you try to rescue someone from their problems, the more likely they will continue to drown in them. The more you judge someone for their behavior, the better they will get at lying to you about it.
It’s imperative that you realize that rescuing someone isn’t supporting them, and enabling someone’s self-destructive behavior isn’t loving them. There is a thin line between what constitutes support, and what is enabling people.
Enabling is when you justify or support someone’s problematic behaviors because you think you’re helping them. For example, it can include things like giving money to an adult child who is not using it responsibly and is not looking for a job. It can look like covering for people because they were out drinking last night, making excuses for your spouse’s anger, or ignoring the problem to avoid conflict.
Often, loving someone will require you to let them learn the hard way. Sometimes, reclaiming your power means not fixing everyone else’s problems or making excuses for their behavior.
When you enable others with your money, words, and actions, you don’t foster independence—you hinder their healing. You prolong their suffering, their debt, their breakdown, and in turn, your own. You think you’re making it easier, but you’re actually making their recovery or their self-improvement harder.
Allowing other adults to face and feel the natural consequences of their actions is one of the most important steps of healing.
The Let Them Theory teaches you that helping others doesn’t mean solving their problems for them—it means giving them the space, support, and tools to do it themselves.
Think of healing as a game that the person you love must choose to play. Offering support is like throwing someone the ball. You can toss the ball to them over and over, but they have to choose to catch it and run down the field. Enabling is when you grab the ball and try to run it down the field every time they won’t.
Let Them drop the ball. Let Me stop throwing it. Let Me resist the urge to pick it up and run down the field. Let Me stop lying about what is happening. Let Me accept the fact that they are not ready to change. I get it: One of the hardest things in the world is to watch somebody that you love struggle. I’m not a heartless person. I have lost too many people that I love to the diseases of hopelessness and addiction. I wish they would have caught the ball. But no amount of wishing can bring them back or make someone who’s struggling do the work to get better.
All you can do is recognize the situation that you are in. If they are unwilling to catch the ball, you must stop throwing it. We both know that deep in your heart, the second they are ready to catch the ball, you will be waiting to toss it.
You can’t want somebody’s sobriety or their healing or their financial freedom or their ambition or their happiness more than they do. You will be ready for your loved one to get better, way before they are. Which is why you need to remain in control of your response to the situation. You are not dealing with someone who is capable of rational thought or healthy decision-making.
This is always true when you’re dealing with a child, because their brains are not fully formed. Which is why you cannot allow a child to drive their own healing. According to the experts, a human brain from a developmental perspective doesn’t mature fully until 25 years old. Legally you are an adult at 18, but from a neuroscience perspective, someone between the ages of 18 and 25 still needs a lot of guidance.
So you have to be the adult in the room getting professional help and steering what is happening. With adults over 25, it is different. Adults are responsible for their own healing. And they are also capable of it.
But regardless of the age of the person who is struggling, they are likely in pure survival mode, from a neurological standpoint. Particularly if someone is spiraling from depression or addiction or facing a tragedy, they are in a chronic state of fight, flight, or freeze.
And this is why things get painful and tricky. You can’t get them out of survival mode. You can soothe someone in the moment by giving them a hug, or sitting with them while they cry, or listening until they feel calm and present, but you can’t get them out of a chronically stressed state. They are going to have to do the work to get there themselves.
Everything that you learned in the chapters about managing stress, influencing other people to change, and the wiring of the brain applies here. Dr. K taught you that human beings are hardwired to move toward what feels easier and pleasurable in the moment, and to avoid what is painful and hard.
When you are depressed, staying in bed feels easier. When you are grieving, it’s easy to think you’ll never get through this. When you are struggling, reaching for a drink eases the pain.
That is why the people you love can find themselves struggling with the same demons for years. They would love to get better. They probably doubt that they can.
In periods of my life where I’ve struggled with severe postpartum depression or crippling anxiety, that was one of my many fears: that I would never climb out of this. That’s why the process of getting better will always feel worse in the beginning. That is why people avoid it and act out in ways that don’t make sense.
I once heard an addiction specialist say that no one gets sober until being drunk is more painful than facing the thing you are running from. Hearing that made so much sense for me and it can help you move from a place of judgment into a place of understanding and compassion.
That person needs pain in order to galvanize the will to change.
It’s true about any struggle. No one heals an eating disorder until restricting is more painful than facing the issues they are running from. No one faces sex addiction until hiding it is more painful than facing the truth.
What every expert I spoke to in researching this book said is that struggling is a critical part of the human experience, and it is one of the most necessary elements of someone choosing to get better.
Notice the word choosing.
Someone who is struggling is running away from their problems and numbing their pain. Healing is a choice. This fact creates a problem for you and me, because you will always feel this tension between letting someone struggle and, at the exact same time, desperately wanting to make someone’s pain go away.
I’ve made this mistake. I thought, If I can just make their life easier, I make change easier, right? Wrong.
There is a huge difference between trying to make someone’s pain go away and offering support that allows them to do the work themselves. What’s difficult about this is that every situation is different, and you’re going to have to figure out what support looks like for you.
These painful experiences are also part of the motivational circuitry that Dr. K talked about. In other words, if it’s easier to avoid the problem, they will never face it.
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He also leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most extensive and long-standing research projects on adult life. Dr. Waldinger addressed this specifically when I talked to him:
Let people learn from life. Don’t shield them from the consequences of what they choose. If somebody says, “I don’t really want to get a job.” “Okay, well, how are you going to pay your rent?” There are lots of things we can do to help people meet the challenges of life by not shielding them from the challenges of life. This often happens in the realm of addiction with loved ones. We have to let people deal with the pain of losing a job, or losing a partner because they’re addicted to some substance. Don’t try to run in and make it all better. When we let people face the real-world consequences of the choices they make, they hopefully learn from them.
Maybe they need to spend a night in jail.
Maybe they need to lose their job, or their family.
Maybe you need to take them out of college.
Maybe they need to live with you, because they need family around them.
Maybe they are so far gone, they are going to become homeless.
And it’s not just in the most extreme cases like addiction and severe mental illness. This same principle applies when someone is struggling with homesickness, anxiety, or self-doubt.
Dr. Luana Marques, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, told me that avoidance is a habit and coping mechanism that is very common when someone is confronted.
Your loved one is going to avoid situations, conversations, or behavior changes that feel hard. It’s human nature to reach for what feels easy and move away from facing what is difficult. It’s important to embrace the facts here, so that you can approach this from a rational and science-backed approach.
I’ll give you an example from my life when one of my kids was struggling. I didn’t handle it the right way. In my attempts to lessen my daughter’s anxiety, I actually ended up making everything worse.
While this book is really about adult relationships, the laws of human nature apply to parenting young adults as well. Just remember: When you’re the parent, you are responsible for your child’s physical, mental, and emotional needs.
When our daughter was in middle school, she had a very scary bout of anxiety. It would rev up all day long, and culminate in her waking up in the middle of the night and not wanting to be alone in her room. She would come to our bedroom, and I made the mistake of welcoming her into our bed for the first couple nights.
Every time I said it was okay for her to sleep in our room, I was helping her avoid the anxious feelings and I thought I was making things easier for her. But what I didn’t realize is that I was actually making it harder for her to face whatever was underneath this anxiety.
Every single night, she would wake up just before midnight and wander down, and I tried to get up and reassure her, but she refused to go back upstairs alone. Eventually, she would wear me down, and after several nights of her climbing into my bed, I just started creating a little bed on the floor of my room for her.
This went on for six months, every single night.
This is what Dr. Marques meant when she explained that “avoidance is a coping mechanism when someone is struggling.” Our daughter was scared to sleep in her room, so she was avoiding it. By allowing her to sleep on our floor, I made her anxiety worse. Every day, when I said, “You can sleep on the floor of our room,” I was telling her with my actions, “I believe you’re not strong enough to face this.”
This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s a really big deal. Over the next few years, her anxiety got way worse, because I had helped her learn how to avoid facing it. I had taught her that the solution to anxious feelings was to run away from them. That only made her anxiety worse and her impulse to run stronger.
Everything made her anxious: going to school, sitting in the car alone, sleeping at a friend’s house, going to guitar practice. Any small, normal moment of nerves would escalate into an anxiety attack where she “needed me.”
I flew home from a vacation with my husband because she was inconsolable, and our babysitter had no idea how to handle her—and neither did I. I blame myself. I’m the parent. And I allowed both of us to avoid facing this difficult situation head on. I was rescuing her, when the truth is, she had the strength, the ability, and the power to work through her anxiety and fears, and learn how to be okay whenever she was feeling anxious or uncomfortable.
It wasn’t until Chris had finally had enough that we took her to see a therapist, and learned that the only way somebody gets stronger is by facing the things they feel too weak to face. And it’s exactly what the Let Them Theory is going to help you do.
The fact is, it is normal to wake up in the middle of the night and feel anxious. It didn’t have to spiral into a six-month ordeal. Anxiety didn’t have to become the predominant issue in my daughter’s life for the next decade.
You are way more capable than you give yourself credit for, and so is the person you love. You can’t control whether or not someone else feels anxious. You can’t control whether or not they get up in the middle of the night and come down to your bedroom. But you can always control what YOU think, do, and say in response.
When someone you love is struggling, I want you to picture yourself putting your arm around their shoulders and offering support, as you encourage them to face what they are avoiding.
You can’t control their anxious reactions. Your power is in your response. Here’s how you can use Let Me to offer that support:
Let Me validate what they are feeling: “Oh honey, I’m sorry you feel so scared.”
Let Me separate my emotions from theirs: “This is hard for me, too, to see you so sad.”
Let Me comfort the person I love who is struggling: A hug always does wonders.
And then Let Me support them by assuring them that they have within them the ability to do something that feels hard.
Then, stand by their side as they do the hard thing—which, for me, meant getting up every night, in the middle of the night, and walking my daughter back to her room, and putting her back in her bed.
And I’m not going to lie, for the first few nights, I felt like a monster as she would cry and plead. I wanted to fire the therapist and throw in the towel on this plan, and allow her to sleep back on the floor. I mean eventually she will want her own bed, right?!
But I didn’t do that. It took about five days, and it was not easy for me to see her crying and pleading. It wasn’t easy to tuck her into her bed and then go stand outside her door until I heard her drift back to sleep. Some nights she would wake up again and come down again, not once but a few more times, and I would take the time to comfort her, put my arm around her, and walk with her back up those stairs to help her face what she was avoiding.
Look at people’s struggles as an opportunity to support them in discovering their strengths. If someone learns that they are too weak to face their struggles, they will never experience what is truly possible.
And if you always swoop in and rescue someone, they will start expecting you to do it when life gets hard. But if they see themselves moment by moment, day by day, facing the hard and scary things in life with you by their side, you teach them that they are capable of doing things that are way beyond what they see for themselves.
Stop rescuing people from their problems and start acting as if you believe in their ability to face them. Your actions are the loudest and truest form of communication. So when you act in a way that supports someone in facing what scares them, your behavior says, “I believe in you. You can do this. And I’ll be here by your side as you face it.”
Supporting people through struggle is very hard to do. It is draining. It takes a lot of time and patience. It is frustrating. That is why a lot of us resort to enabling or rescuing people. It is much easier to let them sleep on the floor, transfer schools, quit their job, ignore it and hope it goes away, or, the most common way people enable others: throw money at it.
So the question becomes: How do you support someone effectively?