From Overhelping to Underhelping
The rendering of unwanted aid and withdrawal of needed assistance.
It is hard to see through the deception of an abusive person or institution when you are targeted with tactics you cannot anticipate or control. The insight you needed at the time are often only available to you in retrospect, as a sort of shadow that still remains to give you some revelation of what was done to you. To look back on that experience with increasing clarity is to witness a kaleidoscope of moving patterns, shape-shifting, swirling, spinning, all moving without your knowledge and consent, presenting a different image any time someone got close to making sense of what was happening.
In this post, I introduce how overhelping and the rendering of unwanted or unnecessary aid can be a tactic used to control others, and how overhelping can transform into underhelping and the withdrawal of needed assistance as a form of retaliation to any resistance.
An insidious form of deception is when good things - compliments, gifts, and helps - are used as a tactic to manipulate and control. A needed and perhaps longed for niceness reveals itself to you and sells you its authenticity and trustworthiness, then before you know what is happening, it withdraws its favor, revealing it had never really existed. Abuse under the cover of charm is a cunning theft that inflicts betrayal and loss.
Years ago I worked at a church making a small salary while studying to earn my master’s degree. Benefits such as help with tuition and affordable rent at a church-owned home seemed to make for a fair arrangement. But as our young family grew in size and it became necessary to ask for a raise, the proposed solution to my request was to offer assistance with other bills. We declined that help because we were already concerned with how much our livelihood was dependent upon the church and wanted to maintain what boundaries we could.
The help seemed well-meaning, and perhaps it was initially, but everything changed after I resisted unethical leadership decisions and actions. Not only was I made to feel as if I was being disloyal and ungrateful for all the help I had previously received, but when I actually needed help for an issue at the house that only the church could provide, that assistance was seemingly withheld without explanation. It was disorienting to go from one extreme of receiving too many offers of help to the other extreme of not receiving any help when it was most needed.
What is Overhelping?
The terms overhelping and underhelping were used in an experimental study that observed how individuals use these tactics to shape the impressions others form of a person they wish to undermine.1 The researchers, Gilbert and Silvera, noted that the more one intervenes to help another person achieve their goals, the more an observer of that person’s accomplishments will attribute their success to the overhelper. The overhelper then gets credit from others for the success of the person they helped. And the more the helped person comes to suspect and believe their success was engineered by another, the less confident they will be about their own skills. There can therefore be a cost to the helped person’s credibility, confidence, and self-efficacy.
This dynamic of overhelping can be seen across many different types of relational contexts. Parenting, teaching, coaching, business, spiritual direction, marriages, dating relationships, and friendships can all contain interactions in which the person with greater power might use overhelping to rob the less powerful person of the fruits of their own accomplishments.
As a sidenote, I’m not writing about those who tend to try to help too many or who want the best for another but struggle to know when they are helping too much. I’m writing about those who use help as a manipulative strategy to control. Most people who help mean well even when their help is superfluous (which can cause unintended harm), so it’s important to distinguish between those who overhelp with good intentions and those who overhelp as a strategy of deception. Gilbert and Silvera make this same point:
It would be a serious misreading of our work to conclude that people are ruthless misanthropes bent on destroying the reputations of their competitors, that they typically do so in the guise of providing aid, or that the kindness of strangers is generally ill-intended. None of these implications can or should be drawn. Our point is simply that help can harm, that people recognize this, and that when they want to, they can press that recognition into service.
How Overhelping is Used to Control
Overhelping as a tactic tends to occur when the improvement to the coercive person’s image is seen as more important than the improvement of the targeted person’s circumstances. It can be a form of manipulation in which you and others are made to believe that the only way you succeeded and can continue to succeed is with their help. The manipulative person may only speak of your success in light of their own contribution to those achievements, or they may make remarks that create the impression you’d be a failure without them.
One way to recognize when overhelping is being used as a control tactic is if you are asked for favors in return and feel as if you have no other choice but to comply. It is normal to respond to overhelping with thankful appreciation and a willingness to comply as a show of gratitude. The trick might only come later, when the overhelper asks for something in return: the bank that contains all the helps you received might cause you to feel as if you have no other choice but to oblige. This robbing of meaningful choice is a common denominator across many abusive situations.
Overhelping can also occur when the help is viewed as a strategy for manufacturing trust and dependency which is then used to isolate a victim and test boundaries. For example, in my work and research I’ve come across multiple cases of perpetrators who used the cover of coaching, tutoring, or mentoring to hide abusive intentions. The help ends up being offered in ways that increasingly cross boundaries in isolated settings. The testing and crossing of boundaries can be an indicator of whether helping is being used as a grooming tactic. Awareness of appropriate boundaries is an important safeguard against abuse that’s perpetrated in the context of receiving help. (For example, this paper consists of an extensive checklist, the purpose of which is to alert you to boundary issues that occur in poor or abusive therapy treatments or healthcare settings.)
Fear and Disorientation
Gilbert and Silvera describe the insidious nature of overhelping when it is used a tactic to undermine another person:
One of these strategies–the provision of useless aid–is especially insidious in that it may undermine the performer's apparent competence while appearing to be driven by the most benevolent of motives.
The abusive person who uses help as a grooming tactic will smuggle fear in packages marked “Love.” Deep below the layers of flattery, gifts, and helps lie messages of coercive power, whispering that noncompliance could result in harm instead of charm. Beneath all the niceties lies an unspoken expectation to do whatever is asked of you. A sense of dread can emerge as those messages reveal themselves.
When you are on the receiving end of coercive charm, truth and lies and love and fear become strangely interwoven. You’re not sure what’s reality and what’s fantasy. And you can never be quite certain if it’s safe to dispense with the anxious caution you feel, an ever-present force in abusive interactions that is at once a gift and a burden.
If there is an abusive agenda, it is often only revealed with time as purposes reveal themselves when, for instance, you attempt to establish a boundary. The abusive person might then remind you of all they’ve done for you as a means of guilting you into compliance and making you feel irrational for not trusting them. They might accuse you of betraying them, being unappreciative, or taking advantage of their help, and perhaps try to reinforce the message that you can only succeed with their ongoing intervention in your life. These gaslighting and shaming responses reveal that what they did for you was not for you at all but for their own need to control you. Their generosity was just a contract with hidden terms of compliance.
From Overhelping to Underhelping
Overhelping tactics can transform into underhelping tactics, in which prior support is suddenly withdrawn and withheld from you. When you go for help that is appropriate and another’s responsibility to provide, perhaps because they still hold power in your life, they might respond by withholding assistance from you as a form of punishment for your non-compliance or dissension.
They might also see your enforcement of boundaries, agency, and independence as a threat to their claims over you and about you - and then seek to use underhelping as a means of spoiling your credibility in the eyes of others. Gilbert and Silvera write how underhelping can be used to tarnish another’s reputation:
Some research suggests that when people wish to tarnish another's image to protect their own sense of self-worth, they tend to use an underhelping strategy that involves the provision of inadequate assistance rather than an overhelping strategy that involves the provision of superfluous assistance.
It’s a silly illustration, but imagine you are running a race and the person who trained you for the race decides to attach a rope to you and run with you - and throughout the race they keep pulling you toward the finish line in hopes you’ll win the race so they’ll get credit for pulling you to victory. But when you decide to cut the rope and finish the race yourself, the overhelper tries to undermine your chances of success by slowing you down and taking your legs out from under you. If they can’t get credit for your success, then they’d rather you not succeed at all. They pull you to success then push you to failure.
Underhelping can also be a form of dismantling your interior and exterior worlds, which I discuss in greater detail in my book and will address in future newsletters. Dismantling is not just retaliatory or an attempt to discredit, but an active process of removing supports from your life in order to render you increasingly vulnerable. There is much more that can be said about underhelping when it is used to dismantle you, but for this post I wanted to show how and why there can be an unexplained transition from overhelping to underhelping.
Conclusion
Like charming flattery, overhelping behaviors might appear innocent and harmless but can wound when they are used as a strategy to control you. The important thing is to be able to recognize when something good is being turned into a tactic to deceive and control. I hope this post will help you to recognize when these two tactics - overhelping and underhelping - can harm, and that when you need to, you “can press that recognition into service.” As Dr. Judith Herman said, “When people are sensitized to the dynamics of exploitation, they are able to say, ‘I don’t want this in my life.’ And they often become very courageous about speaking truth to power.”
Gilbert, D. T., & Silvera, D. H. (1996). Overhelping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(4), 678–690. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.4.678 “Both underhelping and overhelping are strategies for undermining a performer in the eyes of an observer, and there is some empirical evidence for each.”