Compulsive helping, and the negative outcomes it often creates, can make it difficult at times to know if helping is the most appropriate thing to do. These questions serve as a self-protection measure to help you enforce internal and external boundaries.

Because codependents are usually the first to help, put themselves into harm’s way, and give up their comfort or boundaries to please someone, these rules are geared towards the virtue of inaction.

As Lao Tzu suggests in the Tao Te Ching, non-action is sometimes the highest virtue. Do you have the strength to do nothing?

Is Someone At Serious Risk of Injury Or Death?

If this is the case, there will be no time to think and you won’t be able to stop yourself. You will run to save the baby wandering into the street, or rush to keep your Chihuahua from being eaten by a larger, more socially competent animal. No thoughts required. If you do have time to think, ask yourself, “Who is in danger and why?” If there is no answer, there is nothing for you to do.

Did They Ask?

It can be uncomfortable to watch someone struggle with something you could easily do for them. It can be uncomfortable to watch someone do anything at all without your assistance.

But just because someone appears to be struggling doesn’t mean they want or need your help. On the contrary, people often choose difficult tasks because they want the satisfaction of having completed them.

If a very old woman takes four hours to get vegetables from the market, walking an inch at a time, it may seem like the only right thing to do is grab her grocery list, run to buy her items, and drop her off at home with everything she needs.

Maybe she is poor and has no assistance. Maybe she has foot pain that she ignores because she has to. Maybe she would be grateful to have someone finish her chores in five minutes so she can enjoy the midday Soaps. All of these may be true, but they are also thoughts that enforce codependent bias. Until you know better, they are fantasy.

Maybe walking that path every day is her only excuse to get out of the house. Maybe she likes the birds, being around people, or the exercise that keeps her on her feet. Grocery shopping could be the last expression of independence and self-worth that she can give herself. It’s the one thing that makes her feel worthwhile before her body betrays her and she goes to hospice care.

There is one lesson all old people have learned that will serve everyone well. Nobody gets old by themselves. Old people know when and how to ask for help. When they need it, they will ask.

Asking for help might be the codependent’s second-greatest fear, besides being abandoned, and so it is natural to assume that everyone else would rather die than request assistance, also. But this is not the case.

Did They Ask You?

Did someone ask another person for help, but you insisted on doing it instead? Does it make you super uncomfortable to watch someone get all that people-pleasing credit while you sit there feeling like a lump?

If they asked someone, and it was not you, challenge yourself to observe your feelings, and see what you can learn by watching. Is the helper gritting their teeth trying to get everything perfect? Are they exhausting themselves, afraid to ask for a replacement?

It’s not you this time, because you learned the lesson that they are currently battling through. How does that feel?

Are They Always Asking?

We all know one. Graced with high self-esteem no matter how off-putting their sense of entitlement.

Maybe they are the mousy type, constantly juggling innumerable anxieties and always at your door asking if you can help them with this or give them advice on that. It’s fine to be a good, supportive neighbor, but it’s better to have emotional balance and comfort in saying, “I’m busy today.”

Is It Something They Could Do Themselves?

The old lady walking to get her groceries is perfectly capable of accomplishing her goal. If you disturb this capability by helping, her ability to walk and get groceries will vanish. She will become dependent on you. While that may fulfill your sense of purpose, you fulfill it at the expense of her freedom. You wouldn’t want to be a slave, and neither does she.

If someone needs assistance you are going to give it to them. But if they are capable of doing it themselves, whether they are two years old or one hundred, it is always in that person’s best interest to develop and maintain that competence on their own.

Can you bring yourself to encourage them to keep it up? To praise their efforts and not intervene as they struggle for balance, competence, or achievement? Now you are thinking like a coach!

Can you leave them alone and let them live life by their own design? Now you are thinking with wisdom.

Is This Something That Would Be More Appropriate For A Friend Or Family Member?

If a long-lost friend ever contacts you and asks you for a place to stay, what are you going to do? Keep in mind they are “long-lost” and have appeared out of the blue with their hand out.

They aren’t really a friend anymore, more of an old acquaintance. Maybe you are the last person they know to ask, or they remember you as a pushover who can’t refuse a request. But there they are.

After screening for the first 5 questions, this one can be difficult. It is very, very hard to refuse a familiar person who is down on their luck and, for example, asking for a place to stay.

This is a huge request, especially from someone who is apparently homeless. But something about these circumstances just aren’t quite right. You should be asking yourself what happened so that none of their family members or friends are willing to help them anymore.

Their story may be perfect. Maybe really they are legitimate victims of circumstance, repeated bad luck, and mental health issues. Is this something you want to occupy your couch?

Big, personal requests are inappropriate to ask of someone you don’t know extremely well, and it is all the more inappropriate to target someone because you know they are, or were, codependent. Don’t get taken for a ride by people with no scruples; their despair will become your own.

Is This Something A Reasonable Person Could Have Avoided?

Your kid was playing football in the house like you told them not to, and now they are looking down at your broken lamp. A responsible person would clean it up, apologize, and offer to replace it, and that is what the child should be taught to do.

You calmly watch as they get out the broom and dustpan, spreading the dust around the floor, occasionally giving you that sad, injured look to bring out your pity.

Helping them will cheapen the lesson they are learning, and ultimately make them less responsible. They could have avoided it by following the house rules (ie. boundaries), and they are more likely to do so after accepting the consequences of their actions. Don’t steal this from them.

We steal from adults in the same way when they make avoidable mistakes and we rescue them from the consequences. If someone is asking you to help them because they don’t want to deal with the consequences of their actions, the right thing to do is offer a few encouraging words and ensure their learning by doing nothing.

Review “HALT-BS”

Are you Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Bored, or Stressed?

If you feel the impulse to please someone or sideline your priorities to curb physical or emotional discomfort, take a moment to review exactly what that discomfort is. Many people naturally confuse thirst with hunger, yet all of them know that eating more does not result in hydration.

If you are confusing your hunger with the need to feed someone else, what good is it going to do? Is there any component of HALT-BS that you are trying to satisfy or relieve?

Will Helping Alter A Previous Engagement?

You are on your way out the door to meet a friend who is waiting for you, but your soft codependent mother calls and “needs” you to walk her through the steps of basting a thawed ham.

It just finished thawing and she must get to basting it right away. Everything will be ruined if you don’t help her immediately and for the next forty-five minutes.

Tough one. That is why this question exists. Your mother may have asked you for help, but there is no emergency, they are always doing this to you, they could do it by themselves, a reasonable person could have avoided needing a basting expert at the last second, and the only reason you would help is to surrender to codependent tendencies.

But you don’t have to go through all that because you have a prior engagement. Since you value honesty, and you told someone you would meet them at a certain time, that is all you should need to say. Cap it with “you can do this” instead of “sorry.”

Is Someone Else Already Helping?

This was touched on in question 2, but makes room for a different situation. If someone is trying to back up a trailer into a tight space, what they need more than anything is for one person to help them. If two people are helping them, it’s utter chaos, and only gets worse when more people join in.

If you come across a situation that involves an emergency, but someone is already applying CPR and you can hear the ambulance getting close, there is nothing you can do but make matters worse.

If there is a disaster a few towns over, but the government and every NGO in the state have already showed up to help, the only thing your involvement can do is complicate the already chaotic need for resources and safety.

Would Helping Serve You In Any Way?

This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker. If you like to volunteer at the soup kitchen because it makes you feel good, then do it. The same goes for most volunteer service that does not inappropriately tax your physical, emotional, or financial resources.

However, if you continue heaping food onto the plate of a person who has told you they are full because watching them eat satisfies you, then you are really serving yourself.

The alcoholic who keeps serving his already drunk friend is doing so to validate his own behavior. The woman who continues to buy her girlfriend candy in full knowledge that she is trying to quit sugar is committing a compulsion that benefits nobody but herself.

Are We Helping To Get Our Own Needs Met?

Sometimes parents put aside their dreams so they can provide “the best” for their children. As soon as their child is able, maybe even a few weeks prior, the parents will shove a piano under their kid’s fingers and never let them stand up.

They will help by taking care of everything that isn’t piano. They will hire the most expensive tutor in the state and provide world-class private lessons. They will pay for exclusive camps, enter them in all the recitals, display their medals proudly in the front room, and invite rich friends over to hear them play.

They help their kids achieve their lost dream of being a concert pianist. They spared nothing to make it happen, and they are certain their child is just as satisfied as they are.

Are You Being Taken Advantage Of?

Is someone at work notorious for not wanting to do their fair share? Is your boss saving money on a janitor by having you take out the garbage and then praises you for being a team player? Are your friends content to always let you host the parties and pay for the food and drinks?

When people ask you for something, especially family, friends, and coworkers, it can be difficult to say no, especially if you have trained them for years to consider you as one of their personal conveniences.

This is a good time to employ Write it, Read it, Speak it, Do it. Prepare and rehearse, and never waste your time being upset. “It’s not my turn to do that.” “That’s not what I get paid to do.” “Let’s have it at your house next time. Or, if you like, you can provide the food.”

What Is Your Gut Telling You?

This is a tricky one since our gut feelings can wear shape-shifting masks sometimes.

Anyone with an anxiety disorder has stopped trusting their gut feeling because it so often errs on the side of irrational fear. If thinking about doing something is taking your energy away, or slowing your pace a bit, that’s a sign to reconsider.

Hesitation is there for a reason. You don’t want to rush into a burning building and have it collapse on you.

Have Your Own Needs Been Met?

If you have ever flown in an airplane, you were given a riveting presentation about what to do in case of emergency. Smiling flight attendants told you that if air cabin pressure is lost, oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling, and to put on your own mask before helping anyone else.

This is a great approach to a healthy life. If you cannot breathe, if you are asphyxiated by work, obligations, financial stress, parenting, school, or life in general, there isn’t much you can do for anyone else without compromising the values that rehabilitated you into the healthy, fully functioning person you have become.

If you are breathing easily and helping won’t change that, then go ahead.