You Can Still Harm The Poor Even When It Feels Good To Serve

(Source: Period. Inc. Facebook)

Many people at UT-Tyler have hailed the recent push to supply feminine hygiene products in bathrooms throughout the university. They herald it as generous, bold and compassionate. Many people cannot see what could possibly be wrong with giving away an endless amount of free tampons to students.

But here’s the thing: Just because what you are doing feels good, does not mean what you are doing is good in the long run. In the long run, all your service and all your giving, while it feels great to service and to give, might actually be doing the poor harm.

As Michael Fairbanks of Harvard University put it, "Having a heart for the poor isn't hard, we all have that. But having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge.” (emphasis mine)

If we care about the poor, then we have a responsibility to make sure our serving and our giving do not go beyond helping individuals overcome into making their situation harder. That is, each of us has a responsibility to watch out that our helping does not turn into what is called enabling.

It is through partnering with individuals, not by destroying their incentives through endless handouts, that we can help motivated individuals get out of poverty. It is this strategy that ought to guide UT-Tyler students' efforts to help the poor among them.

WHAT IS ENABLING?

First, what is enabling? Enabling is the process by which we “do good” for other people in a way translates into empowering the other person to live a destructive lifestyle.

By enabling others, we put up the resources--whether financial, emotional or otherwise--to prolong their time in unhealthy habits and in putting off a rendezvous with responsibility.

STORY OF A BROTHER

Let us examine this through a story.

There was once a brother in a family who refused to do things for himself. He wouldn’t talk to people in his household to resolve his problems with them. He refused to talk about his problems with others or to come clean on his feelings to his parents and siblings.

As a result, the brother grew isolated from other family members. He didn’t talk to them about anything meaningful. His conversations reduced to the shallow topics of “How’s the weather?” and “How’s the truck running?”

Aside from this, the brother's cantankerous and intractable manner made other members of the family withdraw from him because they found him too hard to deal with.

However, the brother still wanted to know about what was going on with the family, so he would phone friends and cousins close to his family and ask for gossip. Though some people refused to engage in in gossip talk with him, the brother would find someone who would.

Some of the people felt bad for him. The person would tell him this or that.”Jeff bought a new car” or “Susan broke up with Aaron” and so on. This is how he stayed connected.

ENABLERS

Yet, by giving information that emotionally healthy people are able to obtain through open and honest relationship, these “helpers” and “friends” reinforced the brother’s unhealthy beliefs that gossip and isolation were actually sustainable ways to live. It built his hope and in effect fueled his time in his maladjusted lifestyle. He carried on with it that much longer.

I imagine that those friends thought that they were helping the brother by giving him information. They may have thought they were “doing him a favor” or having compassion on the guy. In reality, their “help” made them feel better, while the brother remained in an unhealthy state.

Yet, this is the thing with enablers: they don't give people help to make the person’s situation better. They give help to make themselves feel better.

Thus, through their surface-level approach to intervention, enablers keep up the brother’s unhealthy and irrational expectations, and so prolong his time within a destructive and unproductive lifestyle.

PARTNERSHIP VERSUS SUPERIORITY

Rather than a relationship built upon dependence, what the brother needs is a healthy partnership with someone who will treat him not as a powerless inferior who needs a handout but as an empowered equal who can overcome his problems.

This kind of safety and support can provide the brother with the emotional security to face his problems and overcome his fears. Without this, he will likely put off his problems and continue his cycle of dependence.

Enablers cannot provide this because they are helping the individual avoid his problems by intervening to save him from the consequences of his chosen lifestyle. Enablers have no interest in the deep dive of helping a person along the long road. There is not enough reward in it for them.

However, a person who cares about developing people, not just using them to feel better about themselves, will find ways to come alongside hurting individuals and help them in a relationship as equals, not through damaging bail outs. This is a positive way to help people heal, overcome life’s circumstances and move into healthy, self-sustaining lifestyles.

As Fairbanks said, “Having a heart for the poor isn't hard, we all have that. But having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge.”

CONCLUSION

You can feel good about serving another person, even while you do them harm. Enablers teach us that it is not enough just to have a good feeling about what we do for other people but that we help in such way that empowers to overcome, rather empower them to maintain destructive unhealthy patterns.

I hope that students who support the effort to provide handouts of free menstrual hygiene products at UT-Tyler will evaluate whether they are treating low-income students as empowered equals or as powerless inferiors.

Twitter: @jhescock