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Beware lovers who need you, who see you as their salvation!
Most of us seem to go through life wanting to feel needed. It makes us feel valued and important. Somehow, the words I need you seem to be the emotional gut-punch equivalent of you complete me. We’re moved by it. Empathic individuals, in particular, seem to be drawn to this type of energy. We feel so much, and with that feeling comes a need to heal. Oftentimes, we fall for the dark energy of another’s hurting soul. Mostly, to our detriment.
The problem isn’t just that we have a rescue complex. We tend to fall in love with other people’s potential. And the thing about potential is that it’s just that: potential. It’s not the current reality. There’s no guarantee that they will ever fulfill those possibilities, or that they even want to. We fall in love with what they could be when we need to be seeing them as they are.
It’s not even because we want to change them. It’s more that we see them as their best selves. Maybe sometimes it’s because we bring out their best selves. It’s how we often see what others don’t—because they are only that person to us. So when our friends and family try to caution us, we think they just don’t get it. We can see their value; why can’t they? It’s because they aren’t seeing through the rose-colored glasses of the empath who has more love than good common sense.
Please don’t feel judged: I’m saying this to no one more than me. I have stayed in relationships because I believed in the other person’s potential. I have loved and tried to heal, even though it’s not our job to heal others. I have stayed because I knew that I was needed—even if my own needs had fallen by the wayside. When I say that we have more love than common sense, I mean that we tend to think the best of others when we would do better to observe the reality instead.
This isn’t a failing. On the contrary, it’s a superpower. It’s what makes us such fierce friends and lovers. We’re loyal, kind, and often go so far above and beyond what’s expected of us. We have big hearts and so much compassion for others. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. But it can also be our downfall if we don’t keep it in check.
Because the lover who needs us? They often circumvent our needs to get their own needs met. They even make us responsible for their happiness. When they’re unhappy, it’s because of something we’re not doing or doing all wrong.
I almost believed that once. I was in a relationship where my significant other listed all the things I was failing at, all of my many shortcomings, and how it added up to his unhappiness. For a minute there, I almost believed it. After all, I’m the first to admit that I’m not the tidiest person on the planet when it comes to keeping a clean house and not letting the laundry get out of control.
When he would get insecure, I actually questioned if my own actions were causing it. Was I not showing enough love and affection? Seeing that I am uber-affectionate, the fact that I questioned if I could be the cause of this should have been a waving red flag that got my attention.
I had started to believe that I was responsible for his happiness—and his unhappiness, too. That isn’t what a healthy relationship looks like. I began to feel smothered, and my needs were going unmet. I couldn’t ask for what I needed because it turned into a competition of whose needs mattered more. I believed in his potential and felt so much love, but it was not my job to save him. He had put me in the driver’s seat and absolved himself of that responsibility. And it was draining me.
It’s not our job to save the ones we love. It’s their job to save themselves.
When someone puts their happiness or unhappiness in our hands, what they’re really doing is telling us that there are red flags present. Codependence. Low self-esteem. Lack of personal responsibility/agency. It’s not that we can’t love someone with these issues. God knows many of us share these traits! But we can make sure that we’re seeing the reality of the situation and not the potential of it in order to maintain healthy boundaries and communicate effectively about our own needs.
I once had a man tell me that he sees it as his responsibility to heal his partners. He believed he should be the one to fix their brokenness. Not only is this hugely codependent, but it also raised other red flags. He saw potential partners through their vulnerabilities and scars, and he also had a rescue complex that told him he was meant to heal them. Then, when a lover would leave and decide to fix themselves or pursue other relationships, he was left wondering why he’d failed—when it was never his job in the first place to try to save them. Or to assume that they needed to be saved.
Our rescue complexes can come in different forms. Sometimes, we just seem like eternal optimists, always willing to see the best in others. At other times, it seems like we’re in total denial of any problems, willing only to remember the good parts while whitewashing the bad. Other times, we feel like it’s our responsibility to help heal the person who needs us so much.
But we’re not here to fix other people. Change has to be internally motivated. We can’t make someone want to work on their problems. We can’t make other people want to live up to the potential we see simply because we think they should. At a certain point, we need to stop looking at their potential and ask ourselves this: Why is it so important to us that we try to save them? Why have we put ourselves in this role? And why can’t we enforce the healthy boundaries that would protect us and help us get our own needs met?
When we’re so busy focusing on other people’s problems, we can sometimes avoid working on our own. While being an empath is a superpower, it can also lead to dysfunction in our lives when we don’t practice self-care and healthy boundaries. We’ve told ourselves it’s our job to save them, when it never is—and never was.
Our job? It’s to save ourselves. It’s to work on our own issues. We should love people, but we’re not here to save them. When we find ourselves in that role, whether we asked for it or not, we need to take a serious look at why we keep accepting it and what we’re avoiding when we do.
Until we do this, we’ll keep finding ourselves in the same relationship patterns. Not just with lovers either. With friends, family members, colleagues, and anyone else who might just have a problem they can dump on us to fix. We’ll keep feeling exhausted and depleted and watching our own needs go unmet.
When we finally embrace that we’re not here to be the salvation of the ones we love, we can finally develop healthy relationships. We can start with the one we have with ourselves.
After that? We can start putting into place the necessary boundaries that keep us from the relationships that would drown us to save themselves.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Milan Popovic on Unsplash