I recently had a game-changing insight:
I've been trying to rescue people who continually refuse, dismiss or don't value my help.
I'm the eldest of three children, and until my friend, who is a highly skilled therapist, pointed out to me just how much I had been parentified, I had no clue that I was still trying to:
- help my mother
- help my father
- help my 'little' sister
- help my 'little' brother
- help all my friends who remind me of any of these people
even though they're all mature adults, who no longer need 'parenting'.
I'm all for helping people who want my help and are also willing to help themselves. But trying to protect people I cannot protect (and never should have needed to as a child in the family) is a game I could never win.
Trying to help people improve their physical and mental health when they refuse to even look beyond the very system that made them sick in the first place is a game I could never win.
And trying to help people who prefer to whinge, complain and criticise, while they spend most of their days stuck in their powerless, helpless, hopeless emotional states, is not only infuriating, it's exhausting.
Don't get me wrong: I love my family. I really do. So very much. There are many, many wonderful things about these people. I could list out wonderful traits about all of them.
But when my friend pointed out this pattern of me trying so much to help them, when most of them rarely ever reach out to me? Well, it was painful.
It was painful because it was true.
I travel the hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of kilometres to see them. I text them, and some of them don't even reply, or reply days or weeks later with an excuse as to why they're too busy, too sick, too hard-done-by to get back to me. I initiate phone calls to 'catch up', and often they're too busy for that. I try to offer genuine solutions to reduce their pain and suffering but have them gently or strongly dismissed or just flat out ignored.
I sound like a whinging, complaining, critical person here, just like the people I'm struggling with. But this is all to say that I'm now RECOGNISING that I have been making so much effort, for such a long time, and I have to realise that:
- They haven't asked for my help
- They don't want my help
- They're not committing to growing/changing/healing
- They take me for granted
- I'm freakin' done being in unbalanced relationships
None of these people are toxic or harmful. I don't need to cut them out of my life. I have no plan to. But what I do need to do is CHANGE the way I relate to them. (Because, let's face it, it's probably also extremely frustrating for them to have me constantly trying to help them if they don't want my help.)
In Human Design (a personality profiling system that uses time, date and location of birth, like Astrology), I'm what's known as a "Projector". This group of people are supposed to "wait for invitations". And, despite working with this system for more than a decade, I have always struggled to do that with my family.
I now see that I had been programmed so deeply to take care of my family members that I couldn't even SEE how much I was initiating. I've been trying to help when they haven't invited me to help. I've been trying to spend time with them when they haven't invited me to call or hang out.
My friend went as far as saying, "They don't care about you." But I don't think that's true. I think they love me but they don't know what to do with me. I have healed SO many of the unhelpful beliefs and patterns that I learned in my childhood and I now view the world very, very differently to most of my family.
They care about me, but they don't want me to be the fullest and most authentic me; they want me to be the person they think I should be.
I tried being this person. It made me sick. I had to let her go. I had to become the world I'm here to be in this life.
And to become the woman I know I'm capable of becoming, I have to stop trying to change them. I have to stop trying to help them. I have to stop trying to rescue them from the depths of pain and suffering they're all experiencing.
It's excruciating, watching the people I love the most, in pain, every day, because they're not open to learning about the things that we know (scientifically) can and do help people heal.
I have to leave them be.
I have to withdraw my energy and focus on my own future.
I have to step into becoming the very best version of me, the most authentic, alive, awesome version of me.
Not to inspire them to change (though I secretly hope it will have this effect), but to create more success, joy and peace in my life.
This week, Galen posed the following questions in the Weekend Experiences Community:
1. What thing from your own past would you change if you could and why?
2. What annoyed you the most in 2025 and what made you the happiest? Explain.
3. Do you have a strong work ethic or do you find yourself procrastinating and seeking to avoid working? Explain.
4. List three things you're going to do better in 2026 that will improve the year over what you achieved in 2025 and explain.
5. What percentage of the time are you your best version - explain what that looks like - and when you are not, why not?
While I usually pick one of his questions to answer, this post was inspired by all of these. But to answer them more directly, and weave them into one whole contemplative paragraph (or three), let me say this:
If I could change something from my own past, it would be to have spotted this pattern of trying to fix/change/heal my own family much, much sooner. I feel like I've wasted decades trying to help people who never wanted my help in the first place, and I could have been using that time, energy and attention sorting out my own life and helping more of the people who have asked for my help.
What annoyed me the most in 2025 was how little real progress I made in my own business. I can see that's in part due to how much energy I've wasted worrying about people who don't want my help. And because I love helping people so much, the things that made me the happiest this year were the times when I helped clients and students, and followers of my work - people who had asked for my help and who valued what I gave them - and who had breakthroughs because of my support.
I've realised I have an incredibly strong work ethic when I'm clear on my direction, it's aligned with my values, and I'm doing something that allows me to be creative and I know it's going to help people and somehow pay me with energy, money or other resources. But I procrastinate and seek to avoid doing the work when one of those elements is missing.
When I reflect on the things I've just mentioned from my 2025, it helps me see quite clearly the things I want to do differently in 2026. The three biggest things, related to the themes in this post, are:
- Valuing myself, my gifts and my knowledge,
- Sharing these things with those who ask for them and value them (i.e. don't take them or me for granted), and
- Be more intentional in how I build my business this year, focusing more on value creation and delivery while simultaneously valuing those things by charging appropriately and/or holding appropriate boundaries.
It seems unlikely that there is any way to know the percentage of time that I am being the best version of me. But what I do know for sure is that every time I find and heal another layer of 'stuff' - another unprocessed traumatic event, another dysfunctional pattern, another limiting belief - the more and more I become the best version of me.
I'm not totally sure what she looks like. But I know that every time I find a painful layer like the one I shared in this post and am brave enough to do the work to let it go I take one step closer to becoming that woman.
Who is she? I'm not sure, but I'm excited to find out.
All photos are mine; taken on my phone over the last month or so.