Are you OVERLY helpful aka NOT helpful?
Overly helpful people feel the need to constantly help where their help is unwanted. This type of help, although comes from a good place – is often not helpful at all! I have discovered these people fall into 3 basic categories.
1) The Martyr who wants to be trendy and pay it forward, mostly so they can have a charitable Facebook update like “Wow just helped the Philippines disaster, thank god for people like me!!”
2) The people pleaser who feels like they need to buy people’s friendship and acceptance by constantly offering unwanted help like helping you move something easy and light and simply getting in the way of your moving path (small chair across room).
3) The control freak. They can’t bear to see a mess, so they will force their tidyness on you. (personally, I love these types, because their visits come with perks!).
Let’s see if you qualify as an OVERLY helpful person shall we? (You need to score 6 or more)
- Do you often try to stack your dishes to help the waitress collect them? Unless you are a server this is very unhelpful, she has a balancing system of her own.
- Do you open the door of an already opened door to a metro or mall? This is awkward, the person has already opened the door simply enjoy the fact you do not.
- During a move, are you helping the mover? They know how to move things better than you, get out of the way and hello didn’t you pay for this?!
- When you are at a dinner party do you do dishes and put their dishes and kitchenware away? Unless you know EXACTLY where everything goes – stick to dishes only.
- Being overly helpful at work not only looks job insecure, it makes you look not busy enough. “i’ll go make more coffee!”
- Other dog owners tossing a ball to your dog at the run so they don’t feel left out. If you have a Springer spaniel this could mean hours of you chasing your dog to get it back.
- Kitchen help. You are making a simple dinner like perrogies and someone is in the kitchen with you getting out the sour cream but mostly just squeezing past you.
- Microsoft Word help. You asked someone to review your resume and they changed the font, format and bullet point icons. Now you can no longer adjust things like you wanted.
- Cleaning lady help. Your cleaning lady thinks underneath your sink needs a different order. Your toilet paper is now very far from reach!
- Garden help. You notice someone’s plant earth looks a little dry while visiting so you give it water. Turns out it was a cactus variety way to go..
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Some people are overly helpful to infantize you. My relative wants to help me all the time, is staying with my family and ends up working against my sanity, she is driving me crazy, and my gut feeling is on high alert about her, she wants to keep me helpless, she knows I have fibro, you know I have to do things on my own or go insane. Overly helpful with ulterior motives. She wants control, bossy, I hate her but she won’t leave, she can’t afford it she says, not true. Nothing would make her happier than if she got the house, her personality is oppressive, I’m exhausted from her mere presence. She has a fake laugh, that is a sign of a disorder.