An Investment in a Person Does Not Come Back as a Person

When we help someone, we start to value the relationship more.

Time, money, care and part of our own biography have already gone into it. Walking away is hard not only because of love but because the investment would then seem to lose its point.

Past costs, however, create no future obligation to continue.

This applies to relationships, jobs, projects, and to supporting someone who will not or cannot change destructive behaviour.

It is worth asking:

• is my help helping;
• is the person becoming more self-sufficient;
• what does he expect;
• what damage is it doing to me;
• is there a limit;
• what happens if the help stops;
• am I sustaining the problem itself.

A threat to refuse your help can be a manipulation:

If you won’t do it my way, I won’t take anything from you again.

At first sight that is a strange threat. But it works if the helper has already tied his own worth to the role of rescuer.

Help can be stopped not out of cruelty but because its form has stopped being useful or acceptable.

Spent resources do not come back through further spending. Nor do they become meaningless. It may be that the help was right earlier and has stopped being right now.

A decision is judged by the information available when it was made; continuing is judged by present conditions.

This is most visible with money. Having lent a sum and not got it back, a person faces a strange choice: lend more, because otherwise “the first lot is gone too”, or stop and accept the first lot as lost. The second loan is almost always issued against the old sum rather than the new situation. Without money the mechanism is the same: the longer you have been pulling someone out, the harder it is to say that the pulling has stopped working — because then all the past years have to be counted as spent as well.

But what is spent is spent — that is the one part of the story you cannot influence. The decision concerns only the next step, and the past years have no vote in it. They are merely present, very loudly.