12 Unfortunate Signs You're Giving Too Much Of Yourself To Others
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock If you're a nice person, you get joy out of making others happy. Maybe it's assisting your neighbor with taking their trash to the curb every Monday or stepping in to help a mother struggling with her baby. Whatever the act of kindness is, helping and giving are character strengths. Unfortunately, sometimes our helpful intentions give way to dysfunctional helping and giving.
It may not be obvious at first, but there are some unfortunate signs you're giving too much of yourself to others. And while it's certainly tempting to stop helping altogether, it's better to set boundaries when these indicators of unhealthy helping appear.
Here are 12 unfortunate signs you're giving too much of yourself to others
1. Your help is fostering dependence and irresponsibility in others
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Sometimes, we have to face the fact that our good intentions have gone bad. Continuing to help and give under these conditions is a waste of our resources and isn't really helpful.
Remember: healthy helping promotes other people's growth, independence, and the development of their positive potential. Unhealthy (dysfunctional) helping does the opposite. Use your helping energies and resources to help people and causes that will truly benefit from your help.
2. People violate agreements you've made
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At this point, it's time to stop believing people who have taken your kindness for granted and stop giving them chances, at least for now. Once you get strong evidence that they are ready to use your help to progress in life, you might try helping them again.
When people use your help to escape responsibility over and over again, it's best to summon the strength to terminate your help. Continuing to give to people who don't uphold their end of the deal is a waste of your time and resources. If you continue, you'll become increasingly angry and resentful.
3. Your giving nature is causing others to stagnate
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One of the unfortunate signs you're giving too much of yourself to others is when you notice other people's progress in their personal growth has stopped completely. They're becoming stuck in an age-inappropriate earlier stage of development, and it prevents them from developing needed life or professional skills.
You can be too helpful and, in the process, create people that can't take care of themselves or do their jobs well. Unhealthy helping can doom others to be less than they're capable of, while healthy helping promotes others' independence and life progress.
4. You're compromising your integrity
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When your giving requires your dishonesty or somehow compromises your integrity, it's a sign you're giving too much of yourself to others. For example, making bogus excuses for another or covering for another are almost never forms of healthy helping and giving.
Healthy helping doesn't typically involve deception or secrets, nor does it require that we violate our moral code. As NLP Master Practitioner E.B. Johnson explained, "Our core values are everything. They make up who we are and they help us define our boundaries and limitations. Giving those up for anyone, no matter what they might promise, is a sure-fire way to lose touch with who you are and find yourself in a world of trouble."
5. You're being manipulated into helping or giving
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Sometimes it's obvious when you're being manipulated, such as when the other person says things to trigger your guilt, and then conveniently offers a giving opportunity that will reduce that guilt. Sometimes it's only a feeling in your gut warning you that someone and their requests for your assistance are "off."
Manipulation is a sign of someone who is willing to be deceitful and take advantage of others, and you should pay attention to your early warning system (your gut). The odds of your giving being short-term and having a positive outcome are probably close to zero.
6. Your resources are unsustainable
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When you're helping others, you're depleting your resources (i.e., your energy, time, money, and so on). And when you give too much of yourself, the reality is increasingly unsustainable.
Look for that positive helping sweet spot where you can help without sacrificing your own physical or mental health, your self-respect, or your financial well-being. Be willing to back out of negative helping arrangements that sap your resources. Decline to rescue and take opportunities you really can't afford. Healthy helping means helping within your means.
7. Your personal relationships are deteriorating
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One of the most unfortunate signs you're giving too much of yourself to others is when your relationships suffer as a result of your giving nature. Since helping or giving to someone, your relationship with them has deteriorated due to bad feelings having to do with the helping or giving relationship.
Healthy helping and giving have long-lasting positive effects on a relationship. Unlike unhealthy helping and giving, it strengthens a relationship and isn't fraught with relationship imbalance, conflict, hurt, and resentment.
8. Your accommodations make it easy for someone to remain unhealthy
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Whether they're putting off getting professional help, avoiding taking their medication, or working their program, it's important to admit when someone's problems or challenges are bigger than you and require professional assistance. Withdrawing help and giving makes it easier for someone to avoid empowering themselves and managing their own condition.
Recognize when your help sands down another's discomfort just enough that they're unmotivated to seek the professional help they really need. Instead, help by connecting them to relevant resources and appropriate professionals. But also accept that they might not manage their condition as you think they should, and that this is their choice and their life.
9. There's a lack of cooperative group culture where everyone helps one another
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While your intentions are in the right place, when a group of people has stopped helping themselves and others like them, it leads them to slack and leaves you feeling taken advantage of.
When you see this, pleasantly announce that you are pulling back and making room for others to step up, assist with skill development by showing them how to do things they may not have learned due to your helpfulness, and then get out of the way.
10. You feel resentful for creating long-term obligations
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Perhaps what you intended as a one-time, modest offer has morphed into an unintended long-term obligation that you find burdensome. But this is yet another of the unfortunate signs you're giving too much of yourself to others and have found yourself entrapped.
Remind yourself that your past helping does not serve as a commitment to help forever. You didn't commit to this. Had you known it was going to go this way, you would not have agreed, so you are not violating your commitment or being a bad person if you back out.
11. You're in a self-sacrificing, codependent relationship
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When you're giving too much of yourself, it can become a one-sided arrangement. The closeness is based on one person being a giver and the other an under-functioning taker.
Much of the love in the relationship is experienced in the context of one person's distress or poor functioning, and the other's rescuing or enabling. Or the relationship is mostly about one person's excessive giving and the other person's excessive taking.
12. You overlook the impact of your actions to make yourself feel better
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When you ignore the ill effects of your helping and giving because it makes you feel or look like a good person, it indicates that you're no longer helping others for the right reasons.
You should pull back from helping that isn't truly helpful to the recipient and is more about proving to yourself or others what a good person or family member you are, how selfless you are, or how nice you are.
Shawn M. Burn, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, and the author of "Unhealthy Helping: A Psychological Guide to Overcoming Codependence, Enabling, and Other Dysfunctional Giving."
