You Are Not the Savior of the World. Only Your Higher Power Is.

Actually, through Recovery, I’ve learned you can’t save anyone from themselves. I am one of those people who grew up feeling overly responsible for everyone and everything. My Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) complicated matters. That obsession/compulsion was complicated by the codependent care-taking skills I learned from my mother.

Inside my head, and thus my gut, I became responsible for making everyone happy, for solving everyone’s problems and for taking the blame when others refused to help themselves (no matter how hard I had tried to fix them or their problems).

I know now that I can’t fix anyone but me; nor can I solve anyone’s problems, aside from my own. But that doesn’t keep me from still feeling overly responsible for others, or from feeling like a bad person when I’m unable to help someone.

Still, in my head, I know I’m not responsible for other people or the mess they may have made out of their lives. They are the ones who are responsible for their lives, choices and the consequences of those choices. I am only responsible for the life God gave me to live (I can’t be living other people’s lives for them), and for the consequences of my own choices.

Knowing this doesn’t always translate into FEELING like I’m only responsible for me. I have great compassion for people who either don’t know how, or simply refuse to help themselves. I don’t like having to stand on the sidelines and watch them suffer, but I also know that I can’t make them help themselves. Nor can I help anyone who refuses to help him/herself first.

There are those people who will destroy themselves no matter how hard we try to fix them or bail them out of their problems. All we can really do for them is offer them a sincere listening ear and surrender them to our Higher Power through prayer.

Sometimes simply praying for another feels like a cop out. But it isn’t. No one can do a better job of helping us or others than God. Prayer is never a cop out. It’s really the best thing we can do for someone who refuses to help themselves. God will always do whatever we are incapable of doing for us and others.