Why it's easy to help everyone else first and hard to accept help in return

In this episode we dive into several lessons on why you feel responsible for how other people feel and make it your job to fix it. We also get into why expanding your capacity is a myth and what to do instead, what happens when you ignore intuition, and how to create emotional boundaries with people you care about. 

This episode will help you with family, relationships, clients, and other connections you have. Also cheers to the first video format episode on the podcast. Now let's get into the show. 

What you'll learn: 

-Why it's hard to ask for you to help, but you're the first person everyone calls

-How to create deeper connections with people without solving their problems and feeling responsible for how they feel 

-The real reason you take on everything for everyone (it isn't because you're capable) 

-Why you keep saying yes to things when your whole body says no 

-What capacity really is, and why expanding it isn't possible 

-The 4 categories of needs that have to be met before anything else you build will hold 

-Why constantly helping someone with their problems makes the rest of their life harder and takes you away from the lessons you're supposed to be learning 

-Why certain people avoid how they feel and how it backfires in every area of life 

-The real reason people get instantly overwhelmed by others emotions/feelings 

-Why some people try to prove their value with what they DO instead of WHO they are 

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Kayla's instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/energeticallyher

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Energetically Herb Podcast. I'm Kayla Langhoff, your host. We have an exciting video for you today. This is a new format we are testing out. I love it so far. You'll have to let me know what you think through Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We're going to go ahead and get started. Today, what I'm going to talk about is the reason why it is so easy for you to help other people, but it's hard for you to get help in return. It's hard for you to receive help, to lean on people with having the fear of being disappointed or being let down. And we're going to talk about how that looks like, where that shows up in your life and the different areas and what we can do about it to shift it. So the first thing that I want to cover is when we think of, oh, I'm strong, I have it all together, I am independent. We think we're being hyper-independent. We think it's an independence problem. It's not. It's about capacity instead. It's about having your needs not met for so long, especially growing up, that now you would rather just carry it all by yourself than have the risk of someone disappointing you, of the risk of someone letting you down, of someone not following through, of not having a solid foundation and not knowing what's gonna happen next. So the only way for you to control that is to control everything, is to manage everything, is to put your vest on and grab your gear and do everyone's jobs for them, basically. Like doing the absolute most, overextending yourself in the name of safety. It's really what it comes down to. And I know what you're thinking, you're like safety. I feel safe, Kayla. What do you mean? I get it, I understand. No one wakes up and is like, you know what I want to do today? I want to feel safe. Like, do you know what I want to do this weekend? Let's go practice emotional safety. No one's thinking that. It doesn't sound fun, it doesn't sound cool. I understand, but that is the found like that's the foundation of anything that builds off of. And your needs have to come before anything else. Um, these are different categories. There's four of them. There are spiritual needs, physical, mental, and emotional. Okay, those four. Those all have to go together, they all have to be met in order for you to build off of that. So, an example of this could be if you don't want to be disappointed by someone, say that when you were growing up, you grew up really fast, and now you're so good at reading a room, you're good at reading people, you anticipate things before they happen, you're the one planning everything, you're the one doing all these things, caring the most. Why? Because you don't want to be left down, but also because you've trained everyone around you that you're gonna do it. You've made yourself so capable that they're, oh, they're standing back because they don't want to get in your way because you're gonna do it anyways, and you're gonna do it the way you want to do it. And the way that they're doing it probably isn't up to your standards. So that way you just kind of cut them out completely and you do it the way you want it, that way it gets done. Okay, so that that need underneath is if I'm doing everything, if I'm doing everything for you, you can't leave me because there's value in me. I'm proving my value, I'm showing up in a way where there's belonging, there is connection here because I'm holding all the cards on my side. You see how that works? So that need underneath is not wanting to be abandoned, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to be outside of the group. So that way we take on the most and we are like, oh, look at how much I'm doing. I'm so valuable, I'm proving myself, look at how strong I am, look at how capable I can do all these things, and I can do my stuff. And then at some point we start to resent all the things that we agreed to. That the moments where you said yes when your body was screaming no. Okay, whether it's going to an event, going to a birthday, taking on something for someone else, someone's pushing on something under your plate, them emotionally dumping on you. This can be so many different things, and it shows up in every single area of our life. So those needs have to be met in order for our emotions and our actions to be in line with who we actually are and what we are wanting to create. Otherwise, those unmet needs will drive our actions before anything else. No amount of motivation or discipline can prevent this from happening. You can take it from me first. I've learned this the hard way so many times in my life, and I've heard no one ever talk about this before. No one ever offers tools or solutions or what this actually is and why this happens. So when those needs go unmet, especially ones from childhood, and a lot of that's what this is. When they're unmet, they get bigger. They get bigger as if you were hungry for an hour and then you're hungry for five hours. You're really hungry when it's five hours past when you were supposed to eat, right? You were like starving, you are seeing red. If you're like me, it's five minutes and I'm I'm I'm seeing red. Like I need a someone throw me goldfish or I'm gonna freak out. It's a blood sugar thing. I'm still working on that. And um, and it gets bigger and it gets stronger and it overpowers you and it overpowers what you would naturally do, who you naturally are at the core, how you were supposed to show up. You don't show up like that anymore. Suddenly you're shrinking yourself, suddenly you're overextending yourself, suddenly you're begging for crumbs for someone's attention, or you're doing things that you know are not in your boundaries, but you're doing them for someone else because, like, oh, they're nice, or oh, I feel bad for them, or I can help them with this, or it's not that big of a deal. I can just do this for them over here. We keep doing that because there's an unmet need underneath. We have such low prices in our business. It's like, oh, people can't afford that. If I raise my prices, how is that person gonna get help? You're taking on that responsibility and the control because of your unmet needs underneath. Okay. It can drive us to do some really wild things, to be in some really interesting relationships. You look back and you're like, well, I'll be damned. I would not have done that if the needs I had were being met. And that's all up to us. It isn't it, that's not something that we get to push blame on with our childhood or her parents because there are so many rabbit holes we could dive into about how you choose your parents when you're born here. There's lessons that you hand selected for you to learn. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it means that you picked them specifically, so you can't blame anyone else. And there's a lot we can do with energetic communication to shift the energy between you and someone else without even saying a word. No conflict. It really shifts so much just based on language and words and thoughts that we have, which is really cool. You can learn about that more in the energetic communication space. It's gonna be coming out here in a couple months. Okay, so going back to needs. So they drive us to do things that we normally wouldn't do, and we don't see them until later. You don't see them until you're actually meeting that need yourself, or you're like, oh, I actually don't want to be with this person anymore. Oh, I actually don't need this job anymore. I want to go do this over here. Oh, I don't want to keep saying yes when I mean no. I don't want to feel resentful that I'm taking on all these things in my family, taking care of people when they're expecting me to now and they're not appreciative and I'm not getting anything in return. It's just I'm I'm going on empty here, and everyone's watching me go unempty, no one's saying anything or doing anything about it. They're just expecting that because I keep doing it. So it can really drive and snowball into these really big problems in our life. Take my word for it. Every single area of life I've experienced this, a lot of times multiple things at the same time, which just makes it real fun. A lot of this comes back to how we value ourselves too. If we don't value ourselves based on who we are, but what we do, you bet your bottom dollar, we are gonna have a full stacked to-do list, a full calendar. You're always gonna be doing the most for people. You're gonna be regulating their emotions for them because you don't want to feel uncomfortable, because you're absorbing it from them. So you're like, okay, in my mind, if I make them feel better, then I feel better. It's good in theory. It's good in theory. Why doesn't that work though? Let's let's pause for a moment. Why do you think that wouldn't work? I'm gonna take up a sip of my tea while you think about that. And yes, I'm rocking my Halloween mug right now, which is very funny considering my personal style is not killer clowns from outer space, but I love that movie. Why doesn't it work for us to make someone else feel better in order to feel better for ourselves? Why doesn't that work? It doesn't work because you're still doing everything for everyone else. Do you see that? You are carrying versus carrying, carrying the most, carrying them, carrying their emotions, the responsibility, the ancestral trauma that's been passed down from all the different generations. You're carrying all of it. And you're one person. A family tree is spread out, right? It's not just one person that's like got all these things stacked up. It is spread out collectively over that group of people. And so by you not feeling safe, you are taking that on so that you do feel safe, but then you end up processing things that aren't even yours to begin with. You end up learning lessons, not really, but you're like you're learning lessons for them that you don't need to be learning. That's not your job. It's not actually helping you and your sole purpose of what you're here to do and what you're here to learn. And then this lovely person over here that you just helped, okay, you just helped them. They don't learn the lesson. So then what happens for them? They create this same experience again because nothing in them has shifted. You've shifted a thousand percent. They haven't shifted at all. They're like, oh my gosh, I can go call Kayla and she'll take care of this for me, and then I can just go back to living my same life about how I normally live my life, and that's it. They don't learn the lesson. So what's the problem with it even repeating? It gets worse. Oh my goodness. Who here has experienced something where your intuition was, hey, you shouldn't do that, or hey, that's you know, warning sign you don't listen. It kind of gives you like a little flick. You're like, okay, ow, that kind of hurt, but that's whatever. And then time goes by and it comes up again. It's more of a like a slap. It's a harder hit, and you're like, oh geez, I definitely thought at that time, maybe you still don't listen. Maybe you're still really stubborn and you're like, yeah, whatever, okay. You forget about it, you get busy. And then pretty soon it's like you get hit by a train and you're like, oh my gosh, okay, I'm listening, I understand, all eyes on front, full attention. You're like, what is my intuition telling me to do? Because I keep not listening and it keeps getting worse. What do you think is happening for that lovely person that you just helped earlier with the lessons that they keep avoiding and they're pushing onto you? What do you think is happening in their life? It's getting worse. It's getting worse. Not just in the area that you helped them with, but what's funny is because we have multiple areas of life, we have about eight. Things can go, they can zigzag, they can go diagonal, they can go vertical, they can, you can ping on several of them at the same time. Suddenly they have more problems than when they started. Oh my gosh, we went from thinking, oh, look at me, I'm helping you. This is so wonderful. I have this badge of honor, to, oh my gosh, it just made your life worse. I'm so sorry. I mean, we're not sorry here. That's not a word that we use either. That's a whole different thing of why I don't say the word sorry. If you ever hear me say that, very rare. We don't say the word sorry here, and that's an energetic communication, and you can learn all about that. So when we think that we're helping, we are momentarily. We give someone relief, we we make them feel seen, they feel heard, they have an emotional release. But ultimately, it makes their life harder and it makes the lessons in their life more difficult. We don't realize it, we don't mean to. I understand everyone that is watching this, listening to this, I know that you're not meaning to do that, but that's what's happening. And same thing vice versa. If someone in your life is that overly generous person where they're like overextending themselves to help you, maybe you have like a friend or someone in like your family that you call and they are solving it for you. There's also things that you're bypassing, lessons that are really important, that's gonna make things in your life harder as well. And it may not show up in the same area, it might be somewhere totally different. And it can take a minute to pinpoint, or it can take years for some people to pinpoint what's actually happening, like what the root cause is, because it can show up in multiple areas at once. And the less we listen, the louder it gets and the more extreme things get. There was a point in my life when I believe I was about 20 where I didn't listen to my intuition several times, and I found myself in a really physically and mentally abusive relationship. I had just crashed my car that was only a year or two old uh from like the snowy weather on the roads, even though I wasn't driving crazy at all. It literally just slid and went off the road. It was crazy, okay? Because I got in that um that car wreck, I got a concussion, and then I ended up losing my job because I couldn't see or work for three weeks. So all those things happened, all those big life things happened, and then I was stuck with a person who's really abusive and toxic, had nowhere to go, no way to make money, and no car. All that happened because I didn't listen. I didn't listen to my intuition. That's what happens when we don't listen to the lessons. And so if you imagine what that's like in your life or someone else's life, it really can, it can do so much without us realizing it when we're just coming at it from a place of I'm trying to help you. I also want to talk about how we train people how to treat us. So as we are the strong ones, as we are someone who is a natural leader, we take on things, we plan things, we care for people, we're thinking 10 steps ahead. People begin to expect it from us. They begin to expect it from us. They begin to expect us to process their emotions, to overextend ourselves, to take care of other people, to make them feel more comfortable. And it also creates this interesting dynamic where I've seen so many times in my own life and with clients and people that I know is we begin to suppress our emotions. Because if we are looking for stability, if we're looking to be in control, it's difficult to be in control and maintain stability and like read the room and like predict things and plan ahead when our emotions are like a roller coaster. It's really difficult. And so we tend to be like, I'm fine. Someone asks how you're doing, I'm fine, I'm good. Even if you're not, like you just don't ever go into it because you already think that or you know that that person can't handle whatever contemplating thing is going on in your life, whatever deep thought of the universe of the world, something that you're having this realization about, they can't even begin to comprehend what that is. So you're like, oh, I'm just not gonna say anything. I'll just say I'm fine. So then what happens is you you build these walls, this barrier between you and the people that you want to be closest to. They're still expecting the most from you, and yet you're trying to isolate yourself because you can't lean on them, you can't rely on them, there's no emotional safety, there's no depth in that connection because they're thinking you're fine, because they they're thinking like, oh, she's she can handle it. They've got it all together, they look fine, they're capable. So when we find ourselves in the situations where we're feeling resentful, when we would like something to shift, we realize how much we've been taking on for other people, how much we've been overdoing it for ourselves, and how little help we've been allowing ourselves to receive. You get to a point in a moment in time where you say, okay, and you throw your hands up and you know something has to change in order to have this pace be sustainable and have you not wake up one day and just want to burn everything to the ground. Because I've also felt like that multiple times, where you just reach a point and you can't do it anymore. And that's okay too. If you let yourself get to that point, totally okay. If you catch yourself before you get there, fantastic too. Neither is good or bad, or better or worse. They're just different paths. It's interesting to me when people talk about capacity, they talk about expanding your capacity. That couldn't be further from the truth. What capacity actually is, is imagine it is like a cup. You are a cup and you are full of water almost at the very top. Okay. In that, if you are going to put more water in that cup under a faucet and the cup's already full, what happens to the water? It flows over because it's already full. What does that create for people automatically? They are so easy to get overwhelmed. They are so easy to freeze up, to pretend they don't know what to be focusing on, to get all these ideas and never take anything and actually do anything with them, to want to never have their phone on because people are always needing something or asking for something, they're already at max capacity. We are never getting a bigger cup with our capacity. That's not the way this works. We are simply making room in the cup for what we actually want. And a lot of times I see this show up in business and career, where people's family and their own commitments and their own responsibilities are taking so much energy and time and focus from this person that they have barely any energy and focus and time to put towards the one thing that's just for them, that's for their own business, for their own career, for their own sole purpose. They don't have the ability to do that or they don't know how to while managing everything else because their cup is literally full. People keep pouring things into this person's cup, like their own emotions, trauma dumping, emotional dumping, asking for help with stuff. Even people that just lean on you too hard, that aren't even Googling something and they're coming to you and asking for it first. Well, that's annoying. That's every little bit of that really adds up and it takes, it takes away from your capacity. And then we're training people how to treat us. So then that person gets used to being like, oh, I'll just call Kayla. No. Mm-mm. That is not, that is not helping them. That's not helping us either. We don't want to train people to not have a brain. Okay. We don't want to train people to not think for themselves. Everyone needs to be independent. That is like the healthiest structure for everyone involved. You can be so connected and you can care so deeply about people with your life, family, friends, your partner, your clients. You can be so close to people that you care about and that you love without having to carry anything on their plate. And they'll actually love you more for it. They'll love you more for it because they're gonna learn the lessons that they're supposed to learn. They're gonna love you more for it because they're gonna see how much brighter you shine, how much happier you are. And it's gonna make them want to do the same thing in their life too. They're gonna want to take charge of what they want to focus on and what patterns are coming up for them in their life for them to be able to heal and work through. You're gonna set an example for that person. It's not about you caring less, it's about you not carrying them. This is so important when we learn how to care and not carry. You're one person, you're not a hundred people. You're just one. And in that, I know that we can get so strong, so capable, so on top of all of it. It could be so hard for us to receive and ask for help from other people because we're so used to being in charge. We're so used to having it together. You're not supposed to just be hard-headed, stubborn, isolated by yourself, not close to anyone in your life, pointing fingers at everyone that of what you've experienced. It can be really easy to blame people. I get that. It can be really easy to sit in resentment of like, oh, it's their problem, or it's my parents' problem, or it's because of this person or this ex or that person over there, it's their fault. I get it. It's not though. It's our responsibility. We have so much control over what we experience and the people around us and how those connections feel. And I didn't I didn't know that for the longest time. And I totally get it. I'm someone who has 22 years of therapy experience because I didn't want to have the same patterns as when I grew up, continue on into adulthood. What I found though is that things like therapy don't work, especially when you're very self-aware, because all you're doing is reiterating the same storyline, the same problem, the same pattern. You're actually really deeply engraving it into your brain to where it makes it more challenging and it takes longer to rewire. The better way of doing this is using energetic communication. And that's the modality that I've created over the last nine years. It went from being no contact with my mom to us being like best friends. I also went from being someone who felt very alone in life most of the time in all areas of my life, in school, when I was in real estate, when I had a small business, even on social media, it never really felt like home. I never really felt safe. I never really felt like I could connect with people and be vulnerable and know how to process my emotions and connect with people on like a really deep level. Like I was always, I always had people out to hear. And I didn't even realize it for the longest time because that need, coming back to the very beginning of what we were talking about, those needs have to come first. And so when they're not being met, it's so hard to build off of and get what we want when that foundation is not being set. It's like trying to have a plane take off with no runway. You can't. It's literally gonna drop and crash because there's nothing to launch off of. There's no, there's no foundation to it. And so there's so many different types of things that we can get into in energetic communication. Like I said, there's the four categories. A lot of what I see missing in people right now is safety. And it's not anything that you have done wrong. It's not anything that your parents have done wrong or that someone intentionally didn't give this to you on purpose. What I'm gonna show you how to do, though, is how to create and fulfill those for yourself. That way you're in full control of what you experience in this life, how your relationships feel, how your connections feel, how people respond to you, how influential you can really become without having to push harder, without having to be more disciplined, to do the absolute most, you really can shift so much the energetic communication. I could talk about this for days, I swear. That concludes today's episode of why it's easy for you to help everyone else and it's hard for you to accept help in return. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to know your thoughts. If you can leave those on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, I will see you all in the next episode. Until then, bye bye.