I was talking with a girlfriend this weekend about a friend of hers with adult children they are still assisting financially.  Apparently, the adult children just bought an expensive new house that is seriously pushing the envelope of what they can afford (yes, in these days and times if you can believe it), the husband is in a low level position in a very cyclical, prone-to-layoffs industry, and the parents are helping with the tab of some things like child care.  In other words, they are playing with financial fire.

These are simple middle class people, not wealthy folks.  Nonetheless, I don’t think the parents feel burdened by this, but my friend and I were shaking our heads over it.

It got me thinking about a couple of valuable life lessons I’ve learned.  The first is we do not do our loved ones or our friends any favors by saving them from the consequences of their decisions and choices.  I remember reading The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck about 20 years ago and reading that sometimes the most loving thing we can do for people is the hardest thing:  to let them take the consequences of their choices.

Dr. Peck’s definition of love is something like the willingness to unselfishly extend one’s self for the purpose of promoting one’s own or another’s spiritual and personal growth.  He talks a lot about dependency and how negatively it can affect relationships and people’s lives.  I read that and took it to mean that when we ‘rescue’ someone from their choices, we make them dependent, unable to make their own way in life.  Instead of having helped them learn to make a better choice next time, we helped them learn to shift their responsibilities onto us or someone else. And, what happens then, if we get hit by a bus tomorrow and aren’t there to rescue them?

Obviously, Dr. Peck isn’t talking about not saving a toddler from toddling out into the street.  He isn’t necessarily talking about helping out an otherwise independent kid who has an emergency financial situation. But assisting 30 or 35 year old adults in maintaining a lifestyle that is too much for their income and their future prospects is not helping them become independent adults able to make their way through life.

This has been a hard lesson to learn for me, so I’ve thought a lot about it.  How many times have you found yourself pulled in emotionally to someone else’s drama?  You almost literally ‘feel their pain’ and you get upset, worked up, angry, or worried to match their emotional state.  You offer your best advice, or maybe you get actively involved to try to fix it for them.  Maybe that time it works.  But then you’re dismayed when something similar happens again, and again.  You find yourself being the rescuer over and over, and spending lots of  your valuable emotional energy on their stuff.

In effect, I’ve decided that what’s happening is that we identify too closely with their pain so that it almost literally becomes ours.  Then, we are unwilling to tolerate what’s become our own emotional pain with the situation long enough to allow them to figure out the right move.  It takes a while to learn to make good choices.  It’s hard to see someone floundering around making bad ones until they learn to make good ones.

But, I’ve learned that the most helpful and healthy place for me to be in these situations is to display the concern I feel, ask questions (NOT make suggestions or attempt to ‘fix’ it) to help them figure out what their options are, offer support and encouragement, but allow them to steer their own ship.  I don’t let myself get pulled in emotionally to the extent their pain becomes my pain.  If I do, I’ve just managed to get myself in an uproar without fundamentally changing anything.  The other party is likely to simply continue to get into messes.

It’s not always easy to do, and certainly not always easy to find the line between helping and hurting.  I’m not perfect at it by any means.  But I know that trying to find the line is the most loving thing to do. 

For them, and for myself.

Allison Allen is Founder of WomenBloom, a web community inspiring and supporting women to make the most of midlife.