There is always that “friend”, family member, or otherwise woven in our lives person, that triggers something every time you see them, some old pattern that bubbles up and rut that drags you down in an instant, overriding all you’ve built and refined in your person as you matured. You may be miles away from the vortex, fully stable and well put together advancing individual and one phone call, one sentence, gesture or eye roll turns you into a raving lunatic, unable to control emotions, rage, anger, resentment… one call from an old friend and you’re waking up tomorrow afternoon with your head twice its size, although you had better plans for the weekend than bar crawling, one look from your family member turns you into an insecure child, although you’ve been adulating for a while now and handling it quite well.

We all have those danger zones, places where for some reason there is a time capsule and almost a visceral response that spirals out of control if the right button is pushed. No matter how many miles or time you put in between you and the situation, it can all come flooding back in an instant and it’s like you never left at all. For all intents and purposes, you regress to the point where your whole chemistry reacts as if you’re still stuck. Some people are just not good for us and this pattern will keep repeating itself as long as we don’t consciously make an effort to understand why. Knowing yourself is also knowing your triggers and risk factors, as well and seeing if you’re repeating the pattern with new people in your life. Yes, that can happen. Freud called it the repetition compulsion  meaning we try to relive the thing to grasp it better, find some solace in “fixing it this time” or just choose the devil we know rather than something new but unfamiliar. We get attached to the suffering we know and tend to repeat it. The reasons why we would do that are personal and vary from refusing responsibility for our lives, unwillingness to grow up, low opinions of ourselves, believing we don’t deserve better or laziness to learn to do better, avoidance of the difficulty in changing one self, unwillingness to learn from experience, lack in capabilities or introspection, enjoying the role of a victim and the attention it gets, the addiction to negative emotions due to their intensity (shame, anger, loathing, self-loathing, pity, fear…)… it can be any number of things.

One part of us will also be oriented towards helping others in their own battles and misfortunes. That’s a worthy and noble goal but a dangerous one as well, if we haven’t cleaned up in our own back yard first. The motivations for helping can also be selfish and skewed and do more harm than good, just as the person we wish to help may or may not be willing to be helped. Sometimes they should be helped despite of it if there is pending serious damage, and sometimes they shouldn’t be despite pretending they need it because it may be a cruel and maiming favour to do for someone what they can learn to do by themselves. Helpless and dependant is not a good place to wish upon someone you care for.

Beware of saving others, since you mostly have a limited grasp of their circumstance, heart and psyche. There are things that they cannot yet explain to themselves (just as you can’t explain some to yourself) so how could they explain them to you. The reasons, past and factors that leading something may have very well been bad but they might have been neutral with a string of repeated bad decisions on them. Not all who wander are lost and maybe they need to figure some things out before they can really be helped. Maybe they need their daemons and maybe you’re not allowed to try and banish yours by rescuing someone in order to feel better about yourself, as a self-indulging feat. Maybe you like the idea of “saving someone” more than the actual help and you need the public acknowledgement of it, maybe you’re naive, maybe you’ve chosen to be blind or like to flaunt virtue. It may very well also be that your failed attempts to help are caused by people being bitter and using their predicament to enforce, justify and perpetuate the belief that the world is cruel and unfair and that there are hapless or impotent. Maybe your help is tyranny, maybe you enjoy it to as it means you have greater control over someone, maybe you’re being exploited ore are exploiting someone’s weakness for your own gain, maybe the one helped likes to be excused by pretending to try as long as it allows him/her to keep everything the same, maybe you just bask in vanity and narcissism by broadcasting you’re helping…

Not all failing are in need of help all the time. Not all helping are doing it from an unselfish place. Not all patterns are redeemable by just getting away from them, All things are contextual and come as separate instances that should be thought through and analysed, as on the outside so with our own internal reasons. Simple rule of thumb here is: If something is not good, useful, uplifting and truthful, if it brings no joy, solves nothing and has no real effect – don’t do it. Clean your messes first, understand them, accept them and release. Then help with an opened heart and mind to those who truly need and want to be helped. Life sometimes gets difficult and complicated by its own accord of leaning towards entropy and it’s far worse if we don’t think and just go by inertia. Anything can change, if you’re willing to do the work and commit. It may be slow but you already know the temporally arduous and lengthy proverb of building Rome. Do it anyway.