“Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”– C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Some time ago, a beloved animal died, and a good friend drove hours through the dark morning to appear suddenly at the farmhouse to support me. She brought food and flowers.  The script called for me to me to be grateful, for her to be a selfless hero.

This seemed a noble thing to do, but it made me uneasy.

I was uncomfortable. I remember wishing she had called and asked about coming.

And she didn’t need to bring me gifts, although I remember taking them and liking them. I thought I needed to recognize her sacrifice and concern, I took her to lunch, let her comfort me.

I told her she didn’t need to have come all that way, and she stiffened. Don’t be a recluse, she said, as if I were ungrateful. I wanted to come. But what, I thought to myself, if I didn’t want you to come?

What if I didn’t want to have lunch?  To be honest, I didn’t want company that day, I wanted to be alone, and with Maria. And why didn’t she ask, just to be sure? Wouldn’t she have asked, if she wanted to know?

Animals come and go here, all the time, it is part of our lives. We handle it well. It is not, for us, drama. Of course, there are times to help. And there are times not to help.

Some time later, when we were suddenly no longer friends, I thought back to that morning, and I wondered again about the boundaries of help when it comes to friendship. And i remembered feeling uneasy, an emotion I have learned to recognize as a warning sign. I have had those warning signs many times before but they were often overwhelmed by impulse and need. I lost many friends in their wake.

Helping is a personal choice, and an individual one. I can’t tell others how to help. The answers lie, I think, in trusting ourselves, in protecting ourselves.

But I have learned the hard way and from personal experience that helping others is not always a selfless act, nor it is always a noble and healthy impulse. For some years, I was nearly obsessed with helping others, I gave every penny I had to a young man – who didn’t ask for it, not at first   – in the belief that I was helping him and his family and saving his life.

I was not either helping him or saving his life, I came to realize in therapy. We nearly ruined one another.

I was sacrificing my own needs and welfare in the search for love and approval from others. It was a case, the therapist said, of co-dependence, not nobility or generosity. I had lost perspective, she said. I was being badly used and using others.

At the time of this struggle, I was alone and deeply troubled, needy and frightened. The therapist saw right away that I was giving pieces of me away to others in the delusion that I was saving or helping them or rushing to their rescue.

I must say I see this in the animal world all of the time, animal rescue is a truly noble thing to do most of the time, but it can be the ultimate form of co-dependence, I see that all of the time as well.

I run a creative group online and this notion of the boundaries of helping others nearly tore it apart.

As people on the group began to know one another, they  began to seek out ways to help one another – to send flowers when people were sick, or personalized works of art when people were in trouble, to look for ways to save and help other people. A noble thing to do, for sure, but sometimes, also, something else.

One very gifted member of the group, someone I thought of as a good friend,  explored the death of a family member for many months – close to two years – on the group and her writing prompted people to love her lost relative as well, send her cards, flowers, gifts. I supported this, the writing was often beautiful and piercing, but I also remember that feeling of unease – was this our purpose, really to extend this process of grieving, to enter the most personal parts of people’s lives, to presume to know how to help? People seemed to love it more than any other thing, much more than me and the idea of my group. In some ways, this kind of idea of helping others came to define the group.

I benefited from this as well, I should say. After my open heart surgery, people on the group came together to send me to Disney World. They assumed that was where I most wanted to go. It cost a lot of money. It made me uncomfortable. I did not feel I could say so. And that is the thing about giving, isn’t it?

Do you see the pattern dear reader, friendship after friendship crumbling in this way? The friendships I have kept are not about helping, they are about loyalty and trust. I do not give things or take things. We split the checks.

One day, this talented member left the group, never said goodbye. I understand that I will never speak to her again, its just the way friendships end that are not friendships. A number friends left with her, they never said goodbye either. They all just left. I will never hear from them again, either, and is that how real friendships end?

It was hurtful to me, I blame myself in many ways.  But that, too, is a kind of illness. In truth, I was just struggling to build the boundaries I knew were missing, and I was late to do it.

These are not clear things or simple decisions with easy answers.

I can’t say I have the answer to this question of how to help others, I can only say that feeling of unease grew and deepened with me. I remember therapist telling me quite forcefully, when you feel uncomfortable, listen and be aware. Something is wrong. Don’t look the other way.  At the height of my own co-dependency I equated my generosity with the mission of Jesus Christ, and no one slapped me upside the head, as they should have.

As a result, I did great harm. Perhaps the truth is that other people can handle these issues of help more easily than I can.

Co-dependence helped destroy my first marriage, and nearly cost me my life.

Co-dependence is not just something Dr. Phil talks about. It is a life-killer. I take it seriously.

So the boundaries of the group have returned, and it is, in my mind thriving and creative.  The people who had a helping vision are out there helping. I could be wrong, of course, and misreading things in my own self serving way. I can only say boundaries are important to me, I believe they are the building blocks of health, and my feelings of unease and discomfort are gone.

My time in therapy taught me that I cannot have healthy relationships with unhealthy people, I have too often been unhealthy myself, and am too vulnerable to this call to help or be helped. I used to fantasize all of the time that some wealthy person would rise up out of the mist and bail me out of all the money troubles I was experiencing after my divorce and the recession. Now, such a thing is horrifying to me.

I need to do it myself. I need to be my own savior, my own guru, my own helper.

Nobody can save me, help me, if I can’t save or help myself.

I have a close and dear friend now, he also has suffered from abuse and this virulent kind of co-dependence, he sometimes calls me up on a near panic and wonders why relationship after relationship in his life has blown up. I am careful not to try to save him or help him or ever rush into the dramas that dog his life. I would not ever go to his house without calling, or raise money online to get him a much-needed rest, and he could use a vacation.

We value and respect one another, this one is a keeper.

I can only help you by urging you to get help, I said. And to assure you that I love you and will always be your friend, will always listen to you. But our friendship is not about help, it is about connection. So I have learned much about helping. Boundaries are essential. I do not help unless asked to help, and even then, I cannot help in ways that threaten or harm me or the other people in my life.

This is something of a Biblical problem sometimes.  I made no real effort to help my friend Paul Moshimer, who I knew was in distress, and he took his own life. I will never, of course, know if I could have mattered in that decision. Paul had a strong sense of boundaries, that did not help him when he most needed help.

My friend asked me once if I thought our friendship would ever end in the drama and conflict that ended so many of his friendships, and I said no, we have been friends a long time now. If I have learned nothing else in my hero journey, I have learned about the sanctity of boundaries and helping. Our friendship feels good, it is nourishing, as real friendships are. I never walk away wondering what just happened. I know he would never walk away from without saying goodbye.

Animals are symbols of truth to me, and I think of all those dogs and cats living their whole lives in crates in no-kill shelters, suffering the most unnatural kind of lives so people can feel good about helping them. I don’t want to ever be in anyone’s crate, I would prefer to leave the world.

Help that is blind, that is about impulse and need is not love, it is not friendship. Too often, that is selfish need. We do it for ourselves, not for others, and those are the friendships that are doomed.  I am learning to listen to myself, to trust myself. If it doesn’t feel right, it most often is not.