A Helping Hand

How do you help someone you feel you should help, you want to help, but whom you fear has a problem only they can solve? What are the limits of emotional support? Of financial support? When are you helping and when are you enabling poor choices?

Joe Manchin doesn’t want us to become an entitlement society. Maybe that’s a sincere conservative belief of his, or maybe it’s an excuse to look away from people in need. 

When I know someone who is obviously in trouble with addiction, am I just making excuses for doing nothing when I say they are the only one who can help themselves? “They have to hit bottom” we say. The bottom of what? Their graves?

Two very close members of my family struggled with alcohol and drugs. I rushed to the rescue of both of them, taking them to rehab, helping them find better doctors. Maybe I helped them in the moment, but both continued to struggle for years longer. Other people did what they could. A friend sponsored one in AA. A spouse said they were leaving if things didn’t change.

We want to fix things for people who need help. We want to give them money and tell them to spend it wisely and get back on the right track. When they don’t, we’re disappointed. Often we give up. We gave them a chance to get better, we say to ourselves. It’s out of our hands if they didn’t want to take it.

What makes people change? The conventional wisdom, a term coined a half century ago by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is that people don’t change until they have to. Until the need for change hits them in the face. 

Galbraith was right. Our foot-dragging on dealing with climate change is a good example. In the business world, where change often comes fast, company after company has doggedly clung to its comfortable old ways until the last one out of the plant turned out the lights forever.

What was the tipping point for my family members who needed to change or die? They did get pretty low, so maybe they proved Galbraith’s point. But along the way, help from friends and family kept hope alive until they were able to save themselves. Many aren’t so lucky. They have no support systems to sustain hope. They die of alcoholism. They die of drug overdoses. They die of poverty.

Poverty? That isn’t the same as addiction, you say. No one is addicted to being poor. But is it that different? Addiction traps you. Poverty traps you in a different way, but just as mercilessly. People need help to get out of traps. Someone to loosen the steel jaws so they can limp away and recover.

One of my family members told me that even when they were sinking lower and lower, words of encouragement stayed with them. They helped them get through the darkest times. They helped them make it to the point when they could help themselves. 

That’s what Joe Manchin is not giving enough credit to. It’s tough for people to change, tough to break out of debilitating behaviors or circumstances. It’s not a lack of character holding them back, as he believes, it’s just everything. The booze. The drugs. The poverty. 

Overcoming addiction and poverty—sometimes just surviving—is hard work. We need all the help we can give one another.