If you’re like most people I know, you either fantasize about being rescued- or you identify with being the rescuer. If you look at the history of movies, in traditional heteronormative gender dynamics, the rescuer is the heroic man, rescuing the damsel-in-distress. But as women rise in power and as LGBTQIA+ relationships become more mainstream, the gender of the rescuer and the rescued can go either way.
It was very obvious to me during my online dating experiment that most of the men I dated fell into one of those categories. I met rich older men who approached me with this paternalistic energy, appeared to be looking for a trophy wife, and overlaid this “rescuer” energy onto me that was both alluring and insulting to different parts of me. Others were very attractive men who were my age or younger but were unemployed, in transition, going through a period of intense vulnerability, and clearly looking for a stable, financially solvent mother figure who would rescue them.
I didn’t bite on either hook. I was looking for an equal partner who was interested in sharing power with me, someone already accomplished in their career, already doing their therapy work, already capable of handling adult responsibilities on their own.
But I didn’t meet anyone who met those criteria in my online dating experiment, although I did wind up finding someone interested in trying to share power with me through my long-standing friendship with Jeff, who I’ve now been partnered with for 3 ½ years. We’ve had to deal with some degree of the rescuer/ rescued dynamic, since both of us have had a tendency to play out more of the rescuer role- and neither of us is a wounded bird here. But it’s something we’re conscious of and discuss frequently.
The Rescuer/ Rescued Dynamic
One woman in our community wrote to me and asked if I’d address this issue. With her consent, here’s her letter:
Dear Lissa,
I’m currently going through a painful breakup from an 11 year relationship with a man I deeply loved and cared about. I really thought our relationship was a healthy one, but I painfully found we were co-creating some very unhealthy dynamics, namely that he acted as the rescuer and I was the rescued.
When we first met, I was divorced with a child and a narcissistic ex-husband and he was the generous giver/ helper. But over time, he started expressing that he was not receiving enough from me, that I wasn’t giving enough, which I interpreted as “I am not enough.” This triggered my abandonment fear. So I clung to the relationship for dear life and tried to compensate for what I was not giving to him by being more like what I thought he wanted me to be- always the good girl, as I had learned as a child. “Maybe if I try harder,” I thought, “if I’m more like this or less like that, I will finally get to be loved.”
I realize now he was reenacting his familiar dynamic. He was parentified as a child and felt that he had to help everyone around him. He was always the listener, the one who knew what everybody around him had to do to “get better.” He was always helping his friends and used to be surrounded by people with health problems, money problems, and such. He was amazingly helpful for all these people, but then always complaining about not feeling valued or cared for. He was crossing his own boundaries and getting resentful as a result.
I know that I put him on a pedestal. I contributed to a power dynamic in which I was the powerless and he was the one with all the power. I abandoned my opinions and my views of the relationship to maintain the relationship and did not trust myself or listen to my own inner voice. I struggled to set boundaries because my fear of losing him typically won the battle. I ended up losing him anyway, because pretending to be someone I was not backfired.
I had so many things I was trying to sort out- being a single mom, dealing with a narcissistic ex, changing careers, chronic pain, mental health issues, caring for a son with ADHD- and I think I overwhelmed him with my issues and relied on him for validation, because I struggle to validate myself.
I’m writing to you because I would love to read about the rescuer/rescued dynamic. I think that it’s so common, especially for women of a certain age, to rely on a damsel-in-distress fantasy that we will find a good rescuing partner who loves us right and all our issues will be solved- happily ever after.
-Dumped Damsel
Power & Rescuing
I felt so much tenderness reading Dumped Damsel’s letter. My own rescuer part wanted to jump in and help and my own parts that sometimes fantasize about the rescue empathized in solidarity. I’ve been that person who married the father of my daughter from my rescuer part. I’ve also been the down-on-her-luck damsel who someone else swooped in to rescue. Both can be survival strategies, rooted in developmental trauma from childhood, as Dumped Damsel so astutely pointed out.
The damsel-in-distress archetype is rooted in powerlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, which are traits that can activate the rescuer archetype to jump into hero mode as a way to feel useful, helpful, strong, and powerful. Underneath the rescuer usually lies a damsel or dude in distress that didn’t have a rescuer back when they were little. So in a way, they’re trying to show up for others the way nobody showed up for them. They don’t realize they’re eroticizing this wound.
Most people prefer one role over the other, because of power dynamics inherited from childhood. Usually, the rescuer is in a “one up” power role, while the rescued is “one down.” As we can see from Terry Real’s Relationship Grid, which he adapted from the falsely empowered/ disempowered work of Pia Mellody, health in relationships lies in the middle of the grid, where nobody is too much “one up” and nobody is too much “one down.”
We’ll be unpacking these power dynamics and how they relate to childhood trauma in more detail and emotional depth in Monday’s LOVE SCHOOL. Join our IFS-informed LOVE SCHOOL community here. But let me respond to Dumped Damsel’s letter with a quote from my mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. Rachel is talking about helping, fixing, and service from the perspective of being a doctor who rescues versus serves a patient. But people who love each other can also help, fix, rescue, or serve each other. Rescuing is not the same thing as serving. Rescuers burn out. Rescuers quit rescuing when their own needs go unmet. Serving someone you love is a very different thing than overpowering, going “one up,” and rescuing someone you deem weaker or less competent than you are.
Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul. Service rests on the premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is
like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing. Serving is different from helping. Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. The danger in helping is that we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity or even wholeness.
When we help, we become aware of our own strength. But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve. My pain is the source of my compassion; my woundedness is the key to my empathy.
Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals: our service strengthens us as well as others. Fixing and helping are draining, and over time we may burn out, but service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping we may find a sense of satisfaction; in serving we find a sense of gratitude…
Fixing and helping create a distance between people, an experience of difference. We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch. Fixing and helping are strategies to repair life. We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
Serving requires us to know that our humanity is more powerful than our expertise. In forty-five years of chronic illness I have been helped by a great number of people, and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals. Service is not an experience of strength or expertise; service is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. Helpers and fixers feel causal. Servers may experience from time to time a sense of being used by larger unknown forces. Those who serve have traded a sense of mastery for an experience of mystery, and in doing so have transformed their work and their lives into practice.
I’ll get into it more in LOVE SCHOOL, but that’s my short answer to Dumped Damsel. My heart goes out to you in your heartbreak, and I’m so sorry you lost this relationship I can relate to being on his end of the dynamic with my ex. When we started our relationship, he had just been fired from his job, declared bankruptcy, and was taking antidepressants. I was at a good place in my life and had a lot to give. I thought I was serving him from a place of altruistic generosity, but I didn’t see the stealth bid for control one of my power-hungry parts was angling for.
Our dynamic worked out just fine until my life fell apart. When I gave birth to my daughter, my father died two weeks later, my dog died the same week, my healthy young brother wound up in full blown liver failure as a side effect of an antibiotic he was taking for a sinus infection, the guy I was rescuing cut two fingers off his hand, and then I quit my job when I was the only financial provider for our family. I became the damsel-in-distress, but there was no rescuer to rescue me. I had put myself in the “Strong Mommy” role and my partner didn’t want to rescue a damsel. Strong Mommy wasn’t allowed to be weak, needy, despairing, sick, heartbroken, grieving, or broke. But I couldn’t be Strong Mommy to my dude-in-distress, to myself, and to my newborn. I just wasn’t that strong, and it made me feel suicidal.
I’m not saying your rescuer felt like I did. But I know from working with a lot of rescuer clients (we doctors are famous for this!) that rescuing is not sustainable. The rescuer always needs to be rescued at some point, but if our pride won’t let us be rescued, sometimes we just leave…
You don’t need another rescuer who burns out and gets overwhelmed because their own needs are going unmet, dear Damsel. Sure, it’s lovely to find someone generous, capable, competent, and giving who wants to serve you by honoring the wholeness in you. But it’s also lovely to serve the needs of your partner, to attune to what they can handle and when they get overwhelmed or are white knuckling their way through unmet needs.
I don’t know if you use Internal Family Systems, but one thing I love about IFS is that you rescue yourself. YOU are the fantasy rescuer your young hurting, overwhelmed, lonely, burdened parts have been waiting for. This puts the power squarely back in your own heart and protects you from winding up in an unbalanced one up/ one down power dynamic, which is usually unsustainable. When you become the rescuer to your own damsel-in-distress parts, you can show up in your relationships with less desperation and need and more of a shared power dynamic.
That doesn’t mean you can’t yearn for someone who will help serve you. Of course you deserve that! We all do, when we’re going through rough patches. But you also need to be willing to serve them back. And if someone won’t talk about these issues- because they’re conflict avoidant, they’ve been indoctrinated to suppress their feelings, or they’re afraid of feeling like a failure if they can’t keep rescuing you, you might need a couples therapist to help you break through.
It’s absolutely okay to need others, to reach out, to rely on others. But sometimes, when we’re at a real low, we’re better off letting our friends and family help us instead of letting someone come swoop in with rescuer energy. Those dynamics don’t usually end up well, because the rescuer has needs too. We’re so vulnerable when we’re down in the dumps, and there are people who are looking for vulnerable damsels they can rescue so they can get a hit off feeling powerful, generous. But you don’t need to be overpowered to be served.
Love,
Lissa, the overburdened rescuer-in-recovery
May we all be the heroes and heroines to our own damsels and dudes in distress on the inside.
Want to dive deeper in the rescuer/ rescued dynamic?
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