The Day I Realized Most Helpers Need the Most Help

There is a memory I return to whenever someone asks for the realest lesson I have learned in the helping professions.

It was not on a mountaintop or a polished conference stage. It was at a beat-up community center: plastic folding chairs, fluorescent lights that could not decide if they were alive, and a buffet table of vegan snacks that tasted like regret.

I had been invited to a mastermind for practitioners. If you have never been to one, picture a circle that wants to be therapy, a pitch deck that wants to be church, and a calendar that wants your credit card, with extra patchouli.

The highlight reel

Everyone took a turn naming their offering. The Reiki teacher. The trauma-release coach. The ancestral channel who, I swear once, tried to invoice me in Bitcoin for karmic cleansing.

What nobody was doing, at least not out loud, was talking about their actual life. Just the reel. *My practice is expanding.

My clients are having breakthroughs. I have never felt so aligned.*

Then it got to Lila, not her real name, close enough. She smiled, a little glassy, and delivered the script: holding space, transforming pain, the usual clean language. But something was off.

The twitch at her jaw when the group laughed. The phone checks, like she was waiting for a message that would prove she still existed.

Outside, in the cold

Afterward I found her chain-smoking a clove cigarette beside the building.

“You good?” I asked.

She exhaled, looked at the ground, and said, “I spend all day fixing other people. Nobody ever asks how I’m doing.”

The mask dropped.

She was burnt out, lonely, and, her words hung in the winter air, addicted to the motion of other people’s crises. Their problems were a welcome distraction from the quiet in her own apartment.

I did not say anything wise. I listened.

Helping as a hiding place

It hit me in the ribs: a lot of people in that room, and a lot of people I have met since, were not only called to help. They were running. Helping can be noble. It can also be a hideout, a way to stay indispensable so you never have to sit in your own chair without an audience.

She asked how I stayed okay. I laughed, too loud.

“Who said I’m okay? I stopped pretending helping other people would save me from myself.”

Sometimes the hardest truth is not about your clients. It is about the secret addiction to being needed, because it is easier to mop someone else’s tears than admit you have not cried for yourself in years.

Moves

1. Name your “savior buzz.” Where do you feel most alive, being needed, being right, being the one who fixes? Write it down without flattering yourself.

2. Schedule ungoverned time where no one is allowed to need you, not as reward, as audit. 3.

One relationship where you receive at parity: therapy, supervision, friendship, not fandom. 4. Track resentment like data.

Chronic resentment in helping work is often unpaid truth knocking. 5. Say no once this week on principle, not overload, practice non-performance.

Safeguards

• Consent and scope. Clients deserve a practitioner who is not using them as grief laundering. - Do not confess your chaos into someone else’s paid hour; that is what your own support is for. - Industry glamor is a hazard. Beautiful language can conceal extractive schedules. Rest is not a branding problem.

Last word

If you spend your energy fixing, saving, guiding, or holding space, while your own life stays in limbo, pause. You are not here to save the world from pain. You are here to face your own, and maybe, if you are lucky, help someone else do the same, but not instead of yourself.

If this reads a little close to home, good. Me too. Let’s quit pretending.

When you are ready to look at what is actually running, in your practice and your private life, the assessment is where we begin.

In plain words

A cautionary story about burnout, the addiction to being needed, and the way helping can become a hiding place.