The Audacity of Knowing Best
Power, Morality, Ego and Love
Helping begins with compassion, but when we are convinced we are right, it can slip into control.
Generosity and arrogance make a mean pair on the dance floor. Society rewards the helpers, the leaders, the political preachers. Authority is built on being seen to have the answers.
Is it truly love, or a need to assert competence?
When helping becomes about our urge to fix rather than their need to heal, we risk crossing the line. People have a right to struggle, to fail, to find their own path.
There were plenty of attempts to help me before and after my collapse. But I had to hit bottom to bounce back. My instinct to help others can spring from love, fascination, curiosity, or simply the desire to do good.
When a colleague told me to ‘fake my way out of depression’, they thought they were offering a solution. To me, it felt like erasure: my pain repackaged as yet more performance. That moment helped me see the difference between being helped and being managed to suit their own agenda. A breakdown and job loss quickly followed.
But perhaps that’s just my conceit. Often my desire to help others is about understanding myself, however indulgent.
Society’s blurring of help and control leaves us with addictive drugs, restricted movement, and workplace wellbeing: bandages on broken structures that only deepen the wounds.
Recognising our limits in deciding what is best for someone else must keep in step with guiding love, without sliding into coercive control that crushes your dance partner’s toes.
More and more, I have been practising being a reflective surface for other people’s stories, dispersing judgement to make room for my own enquiry. That enquiry, in turn, seems to spark responsive self-insight.
Like a therapist in training, I avoid providing answers. Instead, we engage in deeper reflection together.
Because of this, I have often found myself gravitating towards, or perhaps attracting, people in need of an ear. My younger self would try to impress with accumulated insights and sharp solutions. My older self, however, sees all too clearly the state of my own affairs, and takes a gentler, more philosophical approach.
It is not easy when you can so clearly see the web someone is tangled in and wish them the best. Yet taking too strong a stance can strain the relationship. People do not want answers; they want understanding, and the freedom to feel as they do and live through their struggles.
While love may try to ease suffering, real love honours the other’s right to choices and mistakes.
Sometimes the best partner is the one who steps back and lets the other dance alone.
