A short excerpt from a Gupta Program YouTube talk in which Ashok Gupta explains how people develop a 'helper' personality—frequently rooted in childhood experiences like parental addiction, illness, abuse, or cultural/religious messages—and how this identity can produce guilt, shame, and over-responsibility. He emphasizes learning to set boundaries and to say no as part of retraining and conserving energy.
So our friend Anita loves saying yes to everybody because she wants to also be approved of and feels that actually her sense of self relies on being helpful to those around her. Now, for those of you who grew up in environments where one or more parents or caregivers suffered from an addiction, maybe alcoholism, drug addiction, or perhaps where a parent was very ill and you had to step up and grow up very quickly, or it may have been where your parents engaged in. There may have been domestic violence. There may have been verbal or physical abuse. Sometimes, then a child grows up in those types of environments where they've had to grow up quite quickly and support their parents or be the parents, know, be the adults in the room sometimes, and their sense of self becomes deeply identified with being a caregiver. Otherwise, they don't know who they are or they don't feel that they're good enough because that becomes a role. And so sometimes we can become the helper without even realizing just from some of the childhood patterns. And it's recognizing that actually this can also be combined with a, you know, a kind of work ethic or a. A sense of moral duty that I'm only good enough. That can be a result of our religion or something else where we're told that we are bad people unless we are helping others. So it creates a huge amount of guilt and shame if I'm not the helper in the family of supporting others. And that can be from. That can be from a religion, or that can even be potentially from the people around us, the caregivers, the parents who made us feel shamed or guilty for not being there for other people or being selfish if we ever took care of our own needs. So just recognizing if any of those traits or patterns are there and then recognizing that it's okay to say no. It's okay to have boundaries with the people around you or even, you know, in work situations in whatever practical way that's possible. And those boundaries are incredibly important to conserve your energy, especially when you're retraining.
