When Helping Hurts
Rethinking Therapeutic Communication
Mental health spaces are built around the idea of help. Helping is what we are trained to do, praised for doing, and often judged by. And yet, many people who enter these spaces leave feeling unseen.
Recently, while teaching a session on therapeutic communication, we began not with techniques or skills, but by asking a deceptively simple question. What does helping mean? The answers came easily. Advice. Fixing. Guidance. Reassurance. Care.
But when we stayed with the question longer, something else surfaced. Many people could name experiences where they had received help and yet felt erased in the process.
Medication without listening.
Discipline framed as care.
Protection that came with silence.
Help was present. Sometimes even effective. But it came at the cost of being known. Which raises an uncomfortable question. Is that help at all?
Across mental health systems, an unspoken binary often operates. You can be helped, or you can be seen. Rarely both.
We are taught to justify this. Systems are stretched. Professionals are overworked. Time is limited. These realities are not untrue. But when help consistently requires people to shrink, comply, or disappear parts of themselves, we have to ask who this version of care is actually serving.
Helping, as it is commonly practiced, is rarely neutral. It often moves downward, from one who has to one who lacks. This produces hierarchy. The helper becomes the benefactor. The helped becomes grateful, indebted, and restrained.
In the Indian context, this hierarchy is inseparable from caste. Brahmanical and patriarchal logics frame help as something bestowed upon those deemed less capable or less deserving, while ensuring they do not surpass the helper materially, intellectually, or emotionally. Under these conditions, help does not disrupt power. It stabilizes it.
This makes asking for help risky. It also makes refusing help dangerous.
These dynamics do not stop at institutions. They enter therapy rooms as well. When clinicians describe people as “resistant,” explain that resistance through diagnostic labels such as “BPD traits,” or frame distress as something that must be regulated to fit ideals of regularity, structure, and 50-minute sessions in order for therapy to be considered effective, it raises the question of whether Brahmanical patriarchy is being reproduced under the language of care.
An ethical orientation in mental health work asks us to shift from the question, What should I do? to a more demanding one. How am I being with this person?
An ethical stance is concerned with how we stay with another person in ways that reduce harm and do not increase risk. It asks practitioners to consider what a response makes possible, and what it forecloses, especially for those whose speaking already carries social or structural consequences.
Early in this work, I invite mental health practitioners into two deceptively simple practices that they are asked to hold throughout their professional lives.
The first is listening without responding. No advice. No reassurance. No fixing. Just presence.
For many, this brings immediate discomfort. The urge to help rises quickly, often accompanied by anxiety, restlessness, or self-consciousness. For others, there is relief. A sense of not having to perform care in familiar ways.
What this practice makes visible is not whether someone is competent or incompetent, ethical or unethical. It reveals how quickly helping can become a way of managing one’s own discomfort. The impulse to respond is not wrong. But it is information. An ethical stance asks practitioners to notice that impulse before acting on it, and to consider what acting on it might do to the person in front of them.
The second practice involves slowing interpretation. Practitioners learn to distinguish between observation and meaning, between what can be seen or heard and the stories we quickly tell about it. This is not about eliminating interpretation, which is neither possible nor desirable. It is about creating a pause before meaning hardens into certainty.
That pause has ethical consequences. When interpretation moves too quickly, it often reproduces dominant frames of pathology, compliance, and regulation. When observation is given more space, practitioners are more likely to notice how their own social locations, expectations, and professional training shape what they assume they are seeing.
Both practices return attention to the body. Not as something to explain or regulate, but as a source of information. Tension, urgency, settling, and withdrawal often register before words do. Including the body in awareness allows practitioners to notice when an impulse to help is emerging from anxiety, impatience, or a need to restore order, rather than from attunement to the other person’s context.
As we stayed with these practices, another question began to take shape.
If helping is no longer about appearing competent, benevolent, or good, then what is it actually asking of us?
Letting go of a charity model of helping is not only a professional shift. It is a life shift. If helping is not about my goodness, my expertise, or my ability to fix, then it demands something far more difficult. Staying with the pain of others without turning away. Being led by them into possibilities rather than deciding those possibilities in advance. Unshackling oneself from dominant ways of being in the world that privilege speed, control, coherence, and certainty shapes.
Seen this way, helping cannot remain confined to therapy rooms.
It shapes how we sit with a child whose distress cannot be solved.
How we stay with a friend without rushing to make things better.
How we accompany a community member without positioning ourselves as the one who knows.
Helping becomes less about intervention and more about accompaniment. Less about direction and more about attention. Less about outcome and more about relationship.
This does not make helping easier. It makes it heavier.
It demands patience, humility, and a willingness to be changed by what we witness. It demands that we tolerate uncertainty and resist the urge to restore order too quickly. It demands that we recognize how often our desire to help is entangled with our desire to feel useful, righteous, or in control.
At the same time, an ethical framework cannot flatten all forms of resistance into virtue. Power shapes behavior differently depending on where one stands in relation to it. For marginalized clients, irregularity, silence, withdrawal, or refusal often emerge from risk, constraint, and histories of harm. Their bodies may be responding to danger, surveillance, or prior erasure. For upper-caste or otherwise privileged clients, similar behaviors can emerge from entitlement. From an expectation of exemption from consequence. From a belief that systems should adapt around them without requiring reciprocal commitment.A client who misses sessions repeatedly and demands fixing without sustained engagement is not necessarily expressing resistance born of oppression. They may be enacting exemption.
Our ethics asks us to distinguish between these conditions rather than collapsing them into a single narrative. Without this discernment, care risks becoming punitive toward the oppressed or permissive toward the privileged. This is not a call for rigidity or moral judgment. It is a call for accountability. To notice who is being asked to adapt and who is being protected from adaptation. To refuse to pathologize constraint as noncompliance, and to refuse to excuse entitlement as distress and to embrace the greys of it all.
In the Indian mental health context, this discernment is inseparable from accountability. Norms of order, regularity, emotional regulation, and coherence are often treated as neutral therapeutic goals, when they reflect upper-caste, middle-class expectations of how distress should appear and how care should proceed.
Within this frame, resistance is easily pathologized. Silence becomes avoidance. Irregularity becomes lack of motivation. Anger becomes dysregulation. A refusal to conform becomes a diagnosis. Accountability asks us to pause here. It asks us to examine how quickly difference becomes deficit, and how often our ideas of effective care require others to adapt themselves to systems that were never built with them in mind.
From this perspective, restraint is not a lack of care. It can be a refusal to reproduce harm. Staying is not passivity. It can be an ethical and political commitment.
Mental health work, held this way, does not abandon care. It deepens it. It moves us away from hierarchy and toward responsibility. Away from charity and toward presence. Away from urgency and toward discernment.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that humility in helping is not about doing less.
It is about doing less carelessly, and living differently because of it.
-Aarathi Selvan