“Look for the Helpers” as a Spiritual Practice

Photo by Mpho Mojapelo on Unsplash

This past year- hell, this past decade, has come with a ton of turmoil.

I often find myself sitting with clients who are devastated by the world's events- the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the latest mass shooting (we never seem to quit with those...), the War in Ukraine- this is a fucked up world we're in.

And, to paraphrase Dr. McCoy, I'm a therapist, not a clergyperson. My role is to challenge, build skills, and offer accompaniment. Yes, that involves helping clients self-soothe and soothe in relationship, but soothing is an inadequate piece of therapy. As a person without any direct link to a worldview larger than the one I've got (i.e. god or spirit), I most certainly can't, in all honesty, tell clients "It's going to be okay." That's just not the reality.

But one thing that keeps me going, when the world seems to explode into a giant mass of cruelty and suffering, is the now-memeified quote from Mr. Rogers-

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

And he's absolutely right. There are always people helping. There's something profoundly comforting about the fact that the worst of the world tends to provoke the best in some of us. I don't think I can think of a single disaster that didn't bring forward some of our most heroic and creative individuals.

In preparation for this article, I came across this 2018 Atlantic Piece arguing that while this is part of a helpful way to address tragedy for three year olds, it's deeply irresponsible for adults: "Ironically, when adults cite “Look for the helpers,” they are saying something tragic, not hopeful: Grown-ups now feel so disenfranchised that they implicitly self-identify as young children."

I don't disagree. In fact, when tragedy strikes, I see myself and my clients go through phases of reaction, akin to the stages of grief. One of them is, for almost everyone, helplessness. These events remind us of how little influence any of us really has over the world, and carry echoes of all the times in our past that we've felt or been truly helpless. It's not inherently bad to feel this way, we just need to actually let ourselves *feel* it, and avoid disavowing it.

There's another step of this that isn't encapsulated by the meme very well- because like any platitude you may resonate with, it's not a complete prescription. We need to take the macro to the micro and find *the helper within ourselves*. It may not be sexy or heroic; it may not make a good Instagram post. For most of us, it'll look like almost nothing at all. We might check in on a friend who's a member of a group who's more affected by the news. We might go through our closet to donate clothes, or readjust our budget to donate money directly. Each action may be a drop in the bucket, but collectively they create an ocean of action.

I once attended a dinner fundraiser where the keynote speaker was an accomplished environmental activist. During the Q+A, someone referred to him as a hero. And it stuck with me that he really rejected that label. Not that it wasn't flattering, he said, except that it linguistically placed him in a different category than you. There are the heroes, he said, and the rest of us who can sit back and watch the heroes do what needs to be done. And we'll never make progress that way.

So maybe it's not really *look for the helpers* after all. Maybe it's more a process of acknowledging our own experiences of helplessness, then show up and look for the helper within.