How to Understand and Overcome Help-Rejecting Behavior

by Grant H. Brenner

Have you ever sincerely tried to help someone, and gotten back dismissal, anger, or worse? The power struggle between “help-rejectors” and “compulsive caregivers” ends in painful stalemate.

Some people have temperamental inclinations to feel emotional and physical pain strongly and/or recover slower from social exclusion. Supercharging the loop between help-rejection and help-offering, the mismatch burns through resources. From a trauma-informed perspective, this repeats adverse childhood dynamics, happening in all sorts of human relationships, from personal to professional, and on collective levels.

Fortunately, compassion can rewire the brain, protecting us from the hazards of over-empathizing.

Well-being Is Not Only the Absence of Illness But the Presence of Health

Positive psychiatry highlights the importance of well-being. Compassion fosters health and mitigates illness. Compassion-based approaches may help with depression, reducing self-criticism, anxiety and depression; social anxiety; post-traumatic growth in cancer survivors; balanced work environment; overall well-being; smoking cessation, especially when ready to quit; support trauma recovery; and build resilience by allowing us to recognize and respond better to suffering, just to scratch the surface.

Self-Care Includes Getting Help from Others

It seems hard to learn self-care after a lifetime of self-neglect. Receiving help is the same as self-help, (what authors and I have termed “self-other help”). There are three subscales in the Fears of Compassion Scale : 1) expressing compassion for others, 2) responding to compassion from others, and 3) expressing kindness and compassion towards yourself. Thirteen cross-culturally validated items address barriers to responding to compassion from others. Rated from “don’t agree at all” to “completely agree”, they are:

1. Wanting others to be kind to oneself is a sign of weakness: It can be hard to be vulnerable. Extreme self-sufficiency can be over-valued in families where parents themselves experienced deprivation during their own upbringing. It’s not a bad strategy for resilience when others really aren’t there to help, but can persist even across generations.
2. I fear that when I need people to be kind and understanding, they won’t be: Feeling misunderstood in moments of need can be shockingly painful. Especially when it happens with people we expect it from. Risking betrayal again doesn’t feel safe.
3. I’m fearful of becoming dependent on the care from others because they might not always be available or willing to give it: This reflects a concern about material needs being met, in addition to emotional ones.
4. I often wonder whether displays of warmth and kindness from others are genuine: People who promised one thing and did another or didn’t show up when they were supposed to be there leave one with chronic difficulty knowing who to trust, because we may not know how to trust.
5. Feelings of kindness from others are somehow frightening: When we feel this way, it may suggest that caregivers in intimate relationships used kindness as a way to gain trust before perpetrating abuse or as a way to try and cover up prior neglect or abuse or both. Kindness can trigger post-traumatic reactions and difficulty dealing with normal letdowns from people who are reliable but not perfect.
6. When people are kind and compassionate towards me, I feel anxious or embarrassed: It’s normal to need help and seek it out, in fact a component of resilience and post-traumatic growth. When we’ve been shamed publicly and/or privately for needing help, it’s natural to feel awkward about it when it is offered, and to want to withdraw.
7. If people are friendly and kind, I worry they will find out something bad about me that will change their mind: We can feel like we have a secret due to having secrets, such as shame from abuse that wasn’t our fault but feels like it is (and maybe we were blamed for the abuser’s behavior), and because we can secretly feel inadequate on the inside, even if we act secure.
8. I worry that people are only kind and compassionate if they want something from me: Especially if we have been taken advantage of by people who were supposed to take care of us, we may think people want only to use others, including us. It’s a blanket solution to protect oneself but prevents us from developing trust-radar, making us paradoxically more vulnerable to gaslighting.
9. When people are kind and compassionate towards me, I feel empty and sad: One way to stay strong is to pretend to have no needs; when someone shows love, it can destabilize those defenses and make us aware of feelings we haven’t fully embraced.
10. If people are kind, I feel they are getting too close: Fear of intimacy is an underlying factor because getting help can initiate a bond, though it’s easy to cut and run to nip it in the bud. Opening up creates intimacy; staying closed protects us from intimacy at the expense of fostering dysfunctional relationships and loneliness.
11. Even though other people are kind to me, I have rarely felt warmth from my relationships with others: Numbness to feeling warmth is another sign of disconnection from important emotions. Emotional numbing keeps us from using our inner experiences as a guide in healthy relationships, so while it may work during survival situations, it isn’t useful in the long run.
12. I try to keep my distance from others even if I know they are kind: Sometimes, there is enough insight to identify kindness as something to be recognized and avoided. Rather than gravitate toward kindness, we recoil. If this happens, slowing down and paying attention can provide insight.
13. If I think someone is being kind and caring towards me, I put up a barrier: This is an alarm response when someone caring gets too close. It can take the form of politely declining help, being awkward or even offensive, making a dismissive, often self-deprecating, joke, or otherwise expressing that help is not necessary.

Under conditions of great need, people who are most afraid of compassion can come to see people offering help as dangerous or malicious, as mistrust gives way to paranoia and projection. For caregivers trying to help people low in compassion for themselves, afraid of kindness from others, who have difficulty caring for others, the situation can become problematic very quickly.

In addition to cultivating compassion on the caregiver's part, creating a holding space where the urge to fix things can settle down, having clear boundaries, providing education on fear of compassion, setting expectations, and looking for and highlighting glimmers of motivation for change while accepting when people aren't ready to change—without giving up—is useful. Understanding the stages of change, based on the transtheoretical model, can contextualize the process, buffering against frustration.

Fearing compassion from others means being unable to practice self-compassion properly, if at all. Focusing on fears of compassion from others allows us to break the cycle.

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