Serve Don't Save: How to avoid being a grandiose asshole.
In which I explore a TTE axiom that applies to teaching and living in general
I recently re-listened to a popular TTE podcast episode called The Meowing Student: Understanding weird behavior in the classroom. In this episode, my friend and co-host, Joe Johnson, came up with a really great axiom: Serve Don’t Save. It’s relevant to teachers, but it’s totally relevant to everybody else.
Here’s what he meant:
Lots of us go about our days looking to help people out. Right? We care. We want to reduce suffering. We want to make a difference in people’s lives. We want to serve.
Which is a worthy goal.
As long as it is implemented from inside your own Garden, with strong Garden Walls that separate your responsibilities and competencies from others’.
If you help someone by leaping out of your Garden into their Garden and then begin weeding and edging and chasing down groundhogs, their groundhogs, then you are not serving. You are saving.
You are fixing them or their lives by doing their work for them. Those weeds? Theirs to pull. That edging? Theirs to do (and they might not even want the sharp cuts you make in their lawn.) Those groundhogs? Theirs to eradicate or co-exist with. In short: That’s their Garden. You need to get the hell out of it.
Saving, in my view, is an assholic move. I mean, if you’re a nurse or doctor or CPR-trained bystander, by all means save lives! That’s a kind of saving we want more of! But psychic saving is a major boundary violation.
That is, not only can I not fix you, but even trying ends up robbing you of the opportunity to fix yourself. And, of course, at bottom you’re the only person who can fix yourself.
Just as I am the only person who can fix myself.
I can support you in doing your work. I can treat you with respect and honor. I can mirror back to you what I see from my Garden. I can cheer you on.
But I can’t save you.
People who revel in saving others are actually doing the complete opposite: They are serving themselves. First, they are protecting themselves from the anxiety (and sadness and anger and whatever) they feel when they look at you and empathize with your situation. They are acting on their own emotions (many of which arise through the very act of empathizing) in order to expunge them.
Second, on top of ridding themselves of unwanted emotions, Saviors get to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Because they are so helpful! And competent! And kind and caring and thoughtful! This is the self-aggrandizing part, what I call Grandiosity.
Meanwhile, the person they saved looks better on the surface but, because they didn’t do their work themselves, they haven’t learned anything (except maybe that their Savior thinks they’re incompetent and definitely that their Savior will do their work for them). They haven’t changed. In fact, they’re going to need saving again eventually. Which might suit the Savior, because Saviors love being needed, but it doesn’t help anybody else in any lasting way.
I know this because I have been a massive Grandiose Savior in my time. (If my next book ever gets published, you can read how that came about — and how I pulled my head out of my grandiose ass. Fingers crossed.)
All these facts about the futility of saving does not mean Saviors can’t serve. It doesn’t mean Saviors can’t care. Or love. It means, if you’re a Savior, you have to get to know and honor your boundaries. And others’ boundaries. And you have to wrestle with the undergirding beliefs you have about yourself and your fundamental value. And about other people’s ability to help themselves. And their right not to help themselves if they don’t want to. And it means accepting realities that are different from yours and might get your fingers itching because fixing those realities would feel so good….
Serve. Don’t Save.