Wanting to help other people is a noble endeavor. Many individuals struggle a great deal, and being able to offer them support, or alleviate their pain in even a small way can mean the world to them.
That said, for many people, the help they offer is more about making themselves feel good, relevant, or important than about offering sincere assistance.
Take a look at the list below to determine whether your actions are more about martyring yourself to gain favor in other people’s eyes than they are a compassionate offer of help.
Consider these things to figure out if compassion or martyrdom is the reason you’re helping someone:
1. Your first thought is how impressed people will be with your action, rather than how much good this will do.
Analyze your underlying motivations for doing this act of kindness.
Are you more focused on the benefit to the individual you’re helping or on getting a good photo of yourself in action so you can post it on social media?
Documenting your action isn’t inherently bad, but consider: are you documenting this act of kindness to inspire others to do similar things? Or are you looking for recognition from people you want to impress?
If your primary motivation for helping someone is how well others will think of you, that tells you a great deal about whether you’re behaving out of benevolence or martyrdom.
Rather than giving of yourself freely and with no thought to your own gain, you’re aiming for a boost to your reputation instead.
2. You feel that if you do this thing now, you’re off the hook for something else later.
Some people believe that by making a big, important gesture that’s recognized by many, it gives them a “get out of jail free” card for something else that might unfold in the future.
For example, let’s say your community is holding a fundraiser to help the homeless, and you make a point of making a big donation or similar that’s witnessed by everyone.
By doing so, you may absolve yourself from similar duties for X amount of time. If someone asks you to support another endeavor, you can remind them of the big, generous thing you already did.
Similarly, if you’re invited to attend something you aren’t interested in, you bring their attention back to how much good you did for that other thing.
The gesture won’t protect you against other people’s requests forever, but it gives you a good few years of excuses for not participating in other endeavors.
3. You feel you’re the only person who can offer the “right” kind of help.
One of my friends is an immensely kind, generous person who’s always the first to offer assistance to someone who might be in need.
She’s also incapable of delegating tasks to others, because she feels that she’s the only one around who’s capable of doing those tasks correctly.
As a result, any time we talk, she complains bitterly about all the things she has to do and how much they wear her down, but she refuses to entertain the idea of letting anyone else handle anything. Ever.
She’d rather martyr herself and run herself ragged with tons of additional responsibility than allow anyone else to take over and do what she feels would be an inferior job.
4. You complain when your offer of help is accepted because you feel taken advantage of.
It may be that you’re eager to offer help when someone is going through a hard time, but when they do, you feel put upon and taken for granted.
It could even be a case that the other person told you repeatedly that they don’t need the help, but you insisted, and now you’re complaining about it. Or you’ll help without complaint now, but will hold it against them at some point in the future.
Situations like these often occur when people were raised to set their own priorities and wants aside in favor of anticipating others’ needs, and prioritizing others ahead of themselves.
If this sounds familiar, you may feel obligated to offer help when someone expresses a need, even when you’re already worn thin, and then feel upset and resentful when you have to step up and make good on your offer.
5. You’re worried about making others angry or disappointed if you say “no.”
Many people martyr themselves in service to others when they’re already past the point of exhaustion because they don’t want anyone to make them feel bad if they say “no.”
For example, a person who’s sensitive to rejection may not want to risk being ostracized from their social group if they turn down a help request, even if they’re already burnt out.
As such, they express that they’re more than happy to help out with the triplet birthday party or weekend cub scouts camping trip, all the while feeling miserable and even more drained.
The fear of letting someone else down, and the repercussions that might entail, overrules self-preservation here.
6. Your acts of service are driven by a feeling of atonement.
We can’t go back and fix things that we did wrong in the past. We’d like to, but that can’t happen.
As such, a lot of people try to fix past wrongdoings by balancing the scales with current acts of service.
It’s laudable and certainly understandable if this is what you’re doing, but if this is the case, try to recognize that these acts are geared more towards lessening your own guilt than showing true compassion for others.
The good news is that you can feed two birds with one scone, here, with some self-awareness.
For example, you can both help people sincerely and better yourself in the here and now.
They’ll benefit from your actions, and if you want to see this as a form of penance for past mistakes, that isn’t going to harm anyone in the process, so long as you are mindful of your intentions and limits.
If your motivation is to wear yourself down for others’ benefit as a punishment for past missteps, that’s only likely to create resentment that defeats the purpose.
7. You are doing things for acknowledgement and reward from a higher power.
I’ve travelled a lot over the years, and have observed a lot of people who have done good things in an attempt to avoid eternal punishment, rather than through sincere benevolence or because their faith itself drives them toward compassion.
These individuals have been of all different faiths, and although their behavior did benefit those they were being kind to, the underlying motivation was ultimately self-serving.
Behavior like this is rather like a person taking big gulps of water from a cup, while droplets fall from their lips to water the plants below.
Those plants aren’t being watered out of kindness: that side effect just happens to benefit them.
8. You are hoping for generosity in turn.
Generous behavior towards others is often used as a means of attaining personal benefit.
For example, a person who continually martyrs themselves for others’ benefit, pushing past their own exhaustion to benefit those around them, may hope that someday, the people they’re helping will recognize their sacrifices and show them the same generosity and kindness in turn.
It’s a form of unspoken social debt, and can happen between partners, friends, parents and children, or community members.
The one who’s martyring themselves does everything they can to be recognized as a loving, self-sacrificing hero, and is devastated if others don’t reciprocate.
Final thoughts…
Essentially, if the good you’re trying to do is genuinely based on a desire to do right by the other person, then you won’t care much about what other people think of you.
Your entire focus will be on how that individual benefits from your actions: your own reputation doesn’t matter.
If, however, you’re more caught up in what people are saying about your generosity and kindness than how the one you helped is doing, that’s usually a clear sign that you’re acting out of martyrdom rather than sincere compassion.
