“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.”
-Tyler Knott Gregson
I think about rescue often from different angles, particularly the down side of it. One of these angles is the cost of rescuing our children. What I mean by this, is going above and beyond what our children need or are capable of doing themselves. As a result of being rescued, you have people who then expect it. Rescue becomes the familiar exchange in relationships. Bring on the heavy shackles of obligation! People get trained that rescue equals love and caring. So then when our partner doesn’t rescue us or our kids don’t recuse us, we interpret that as I’m not loved or cared for or I don’t matter enough.
Rescue, by definition, is doing more than our share more of the time. One of the biggest motivations to rescue is a subversive attempt to get our own needs me. The thinking goes like this, if I show up for people the way I want them to show up for me, then I’ll get the same in return. If this works, great! But trouble comes when we finally ask for something we want. After priming the pump with this outward flow, we expect similar infrastructure to be in place for a reciprocal flow back to us. When this doesn’t happen, Oh, the injustice!
But can you see the deception at play? We start the flow, by giving what we most want with this string of expectation attached. I want to be clear here because we need other people. We need help and support. We can’t simply live our lives separate from each other. I’m not suggesting we live as islands, self sustained with no need for outside help. That doesn’t work. There’s a song about that!
Where I want to shine a light on is cleaning up this energy exchange, this flow. Uncover our needs disguised as kindness, thoughtfulness, caring, selflessness, etc. Let’s get more honest! The reason this is so important to me is that when I get into persecution (blaming others for how I am feeling, i.e. hurt, lonely, vulnerable, embarrassed, angry, or sad), I can’t see how I contributed to the dynamic. If I can’t see what my part is, I can’t do anything to change it. All I can do is convince myself that the person across from me is selfish, self absorbed, narcissistic, mean, uncaring, stupid, go ahead, fill in the blank. When we can take responsibility for how our actions have contributed to the problem, then we can choose a different way of engaging.
One of my proudest parenting moments happened when my son, 13 at the time, asked me how to explain the Rescue Triangle to someone his age. I could have happily died right then! I showed him the Rescue Triangle diagram in Access to Power: A Radial Approach for Changing Your Life. He recognized where he had over given (rescued) by listening longer than he wanted to in his relationship. Since then, we (my boys and I) talk often and openly about rescue and how we don’t want to do that to each other. This does not mean that we don’t cooperate (very different!) and negotiate for help or what we need. We take our power, ask for what we want and negotiate to resolution. It feels much more clean and less sticky than the Rescue Triangle paradigm. To learn more on the Rescue Triangle, watch this video.
A couple side notes on Rescue…
*Rescue is a form of a power play. Assumed in a rescue dynamic is that the person we are rescuing doesn’t have the ability to take care of themselves. This is true of small children and for people who truly are disempowered for varying reasons (could be drug abuse/addiction, trauma, socio-economic reasons, race, gender, etc). Hopefully our friendships, partners and eventually our children have more access to their personal power and can enter into a more power sharing relationship of cooperation and negotiating to resolution.
*Rescue can be helpful in life or death situations i.e. someone has fallen into water and can’t swim. My hope is that our lives are not a string of life or death situations one after the other.
I want to hear from you!
Do you struggle with doing more than your share? Are there relationships you want to work on rescuing less and cooperating more? Let me know your thoughts or questions!
I clearly remember when I went to massage school and was working full time. I thoughtlessly
expected you kids to pick up the slack. I expected you to understand and pitch in cause I always had done that out of love of course but guilt too of having divorced your dad and bringing a new man into our home.
I was frustrated and angry, until you Sarah said to me, ” mom you are wanting us to do everything you used to do and didn’t even tell us or teach us that we needed to step in. You assumed we would just do it.
Even in her mid teens she intuited what now is her life’s work.
I was Shocked by her clarity and my obtuse naive behavior.
It has taken me years to see how much rescue I have been involved in. It’s only now after Sarah teaching and coaching me that I am coming out of the fog of the rescue triangle.
I so deeply appreciate Sarah’s wisdom humor and integrity to this work. She has helped our whole family become more clear connected and deeply able to be more free of this life sapping cycle of the rescue triangle.
I’m rereading your words, Mom, and they are landing very sweetly inside for me. Thank you for your thoughtful comment, your loving appreciation and your willingness to look inside at dynamics that have been at play. That is courageous! I love and admire you deeply.