Are you failing people right now?
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No but at the moment no one needs me and I’m at school. But the second someone needs me I help.
Then you need to be the strongest, healthiest pillar or loading bearing post you can be!
Which can only happen when you take care of yourself, and put yourself first.
Trust me on this, self-care is vital, taking care of yourself is NOT selfish, it’s preservation.
Otherwise you will always be running on empty while you try to help others! So re-frame it if that makes it easier for you: I’m taking care of me, so I can continue to help others. The same way I love on people and make sure they’re taking the day minute by minute, I too shall take care of myself like this.
You’re your first friend, you’re your first person to be assisted. Further, if you need more convincing, look at this way. If you take time for yourself, and give yourself all the care and attention you need, this will give you even MORE TOOLS to help someone else!! Then you can say for sure, hey i struggled with x and y, and I did a and b and got really good results.
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This is spot on advice and support. Well said and It made me think too. I love this wall and everyone here.
I hope you take this post to heart and absorb it, Paladin.
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I… I don’t know what to say. I know I need to take time for myself but I don’t have time to do it. I only have time for sleep, eating, school and others. I guess I could stop helping others for a bit but what if I hurt them because I wan’t there?
Fuck I’m resisting again. Ugh. Brain stop.
If you don’t have time for your own needs, how can you help others? That’s what Sita is trying to point out. Read the post again.
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I… I see that now. I don’t have time for myself. I don’t want to let them down but I need to take time for myself. Ugh internal fighting. I want to take time for my self but I also don’t want to let others down. Stop fighting. Just choice something. Please stop. Brain. Please stop. Stop fighting. Stop please. Please. Just let me be fine and choice myself. I can’t function like this. Please brain let me choose me. Please just let me function.
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You need to take time for yourself to be able to help others. Also if you put time and care into yourself you’ll find schooling better. If your emotional needs are being met properly your brain takes in and processes more information, which may free up some time to help others too 
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I want to take care of myself. I do. I really do. I can’t function like this and I know it. I know I can’t. I want to take time for myself but my brain is fighting with itself and it hurts. I don’t know what is right to do. Is it rigt to stay like this so others are okay or is it better to function and not be in pain.
** Dramatic whisper ** here’s another secret: It’s always easier to give the best advice, and so hard to follow it for ourselves!
So its easier to help others, it makes us feel good to see someone else grow and blossom and thrive. But when it comes to us, it’s WORK, and it’s hard, and it can be painful to go through the steps to grow. That’s why we fight it so hard. But it is useful, we will be better for it.
Again if you need to re-frame it to make it easier:
I like helping others. But those people would want me to be healthy and able to help them
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Okay I’ll try that. I want to help others but I can’t if I’m not being health. How can I help others if at one word I fall into a loop.
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exactly
You got this friend!
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I’m trying and that’s enough.
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Hey everyone I’m doing okay. I talked with lizzy and got out of the loop thank you guys.
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Hi Paladin.
First of all I want to say you have lasted for 12 days!!! That is something. You did good. Dont blame yourself on being on sqare one again. It is a new beggining and a new chance. You did not dissapoint anybody in fact I am pround of you for lasting 12 days. You can do even better now. I believe it. 
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We are surrounded by people who need help. No single human being can help them all. Of course feeling worthless isn’t the same as being worthless. It is 100% impossible for you to be worthless. Feeling worthless is belief in something that is not real. Unfortunately, such feelings often become deeply embedded in our nature. Amazingly, such feelings seem to arise out of instinct. Still, the feelings are based on a mistaken perception.
Feeling worthless creates cognitive dissonance, because it suggests to the mind that you have no inner resources with which you could help anyone. It also interferes with your ability to help others. The dissonance comes in because you already know that you have helped a lot of people. Therefore, you need to rewrite some neural pathways in your brain that will acknowledge the truth of your value. If you are aware of your value, you know that you are sharing that value with others. People actually receive more benefit from the assistance given by someone who knows their own value. So, acknowledging the good within is a very unselfish act. I see your value. With all my years of experience, is it likely that I’m wrong about you?
Meditation, affirmations, introspection, and letting people like us care about you can be very instrumental in rewriting those neural pathways.
Here’s a bit of info regarding it:
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No. I’ve just been having trust issues. I haven’t really admit that to myself until recently.
This is true. Just by the nature of how I exist from matter makes me worth something. Just that but I’m also so much more.
I appearate that a lot. Thank you.
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How do I even only focus on myself when so many others need help to. That’s not rhetorical. Really how you focus on yourself and only yourself? How do you do it?
Little by little, by intentionally giving yourself time and focus. It can start by simply doing something you enjoy at some point, but not just doing it for doing it. Really to set the explicit intention before you start: I do this for me. When we are used to help others and put our needs aside, we tend to do things automatically. Being with ourselves has nothing special. Unlearning that is also about learning to appreciate the time you spend with yourself, to acknowledge your needs and to respond to them too.
You can practice little exercises such as checking on yourself at regular times everyday. You stop what you’re doing and you ask yourself: how am I feeling right now? How does it feel in my body? What do I need and what can I do to respond to this need? Most of the time it will be as simple as “I’m thirsty”. But other times it will be also “I feel vulnerable - I need to feel safe”, or “I feel angry - I need to release this emotion”, etc. Learning to take care of yourself starts by reconnecting with who you are, what are your limits, how you change, what are your needs, and to actively respond to them when you can.
Another aspect, in my opinion, that you could certainly develop with your therapist, is understanding why you have this urge to help others. Yes, there is suffering everywhere. But when we help someone we also do it because it makes sense to us. It’s not selfish at all to admit that helping someone is personal first and foremost. It doesn’t just have an effect on the person we try to encourage, it also has an effect on us. To me, for example, helping others is something I’ve been kind of forced to when I was little, and it has become a way to exist. I genuinely care about the person I’d try to help, but I know it can be unhealthy for me if I don’t balance that with time dedicated to myself, because in the long run I’d feel like helping is my only way to exist, which is not true and pretty damaging.
Being honest with yourself, being honest with why you feel this urge to help others, adcknowledging how it makes you feel, is also part of taking some distance with it - and as a result to help others in a better way, because you wouldn’t sacrifice yourself. You would meet your own needs in a different way.
There is something in social work that is called the frame of reference. It’s basically all the things that are part of our story and have impacted us, but also all our values, beliefs systems and so on that make us who we are in the present and make sense regarding why we are motivated to help. Acknowledging that frame of reference is a good exercise to try. Basically sitting down with yourself and trying to establish this panorama of your own life/journey, with all the events that impacted you and make you the person who believes in helping others as being fundamental. It’s in this personal story that the urge you feel today stems from. Once you recognize it and are more aware of it, you can learn once again to meet these needs in a more balanced and healthy way, because you would distinguish what is about you and what is about the other person when you are trying to help someone.
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