Offensive Help
Everyone could use some help. Not everyone feels like they need help, but there is always something that someone else could do that would make their life better.
However, it is not uncommon for offers of help to do more harm than good.
When I was a teenager we were planning to repaint our house. Some friends from church knew this and decided to whip up a group of volunteers to paint the house for us. They did bad job of it job, resulting paint that bubbled and peeled within weeks of being applied; we spent many hours scraping the paint they put on our house off again and then applying a proper coat, resulting in significantly more time and cost than if they had not helped.
There are many variations of this kind of not-actually-helpful help. Sometimes they are poorly executed, sometimes poorly integrated with other factors, and sometime they require more work from the recipient to receive from the helpers than they save.
When I was in the last few years of my PhD program in computer science I had a well-meaning friend with no background in computers try to explain to me how computer security worked. He gave me advice about how to pick passwords which were trivial compared to what I had taught in classes I had TAed and then gave lengthy and dubious advice on how to avoid getting caught engaging in online piracy, which was something I did not engage in. My take away was that he either didn’t know me at all or thought I was so incompetent at what I did that after a decade of university studies I still needed someone to explain the basics to me.
There are many variation on personally insulting help. The two most common varieties I’ve seen is help that by being offered reveals an assumption that the recipient is incompetent and help that is so unrelated to the recipient’s needs and wants that it implies the helper has paid no attention to them.
Not long ago I had someone offer to pay me $30 if I would agree to take up a specific hobby. This offer was explicitly contextualized as somethin I was being offered because I am not married, and the hobby in question selected because it involved speaking with strangers on a regular basis. The implication was clear: all unmarried men are in need of more social interaction and unable to manage their own finances. Also, the person who made the offer looked at me and saw my lack of a spouse as my defining characteristic. I was both being reduced to a category of people and having that category insulted at the same time.
There are many variations on categorically insulting help, but the common pattern is implying that those who belong to some group are both deficient in something and unable to resolve that on their own. It also generally involves treating the one being helped not as an full individual but as an instance from some group.
Most if not all examples of offensive offers of help that I have seen have been motivated by a genuine desire to be kind, to help. I suppose there are some people who intentionally use offensive help as a subtle way of insulting others, but generally the offense is both unintended and something the helper is unaware is even happening.
Because the offense of these forms of help is the opposite of the helper’s intent, it is quite difficult to handle. Pointing out the insult or harm generally requires significant effort and makes the insulted person seem stuck-up, overly sensitive, or ungrateful. When the event is a one-off accident they can be endured without much lasting harm, but when they are persistent and pervasive, as the categorical insults tend to be, enduring them can create an internal sense of inferiority or hostility.
As a recipient of offensive help, I have found some success forgiving the offender and reminding myself that the offense came out of ignorance and ineptitude, making the offender more to be pitied than censured. There’s still harm being done, but it’s well-intentioned harm caused by the failings of those around me.
As a giver of offensive help, I have found some success in asking individuals what they want before I try to give it. It does help to propose ideas, as many people feel bad about volunteering needs, but it seems to work best when I based those ideas off of my experience with them individually, not off of my expectations from past interactions with others who share one or more characteristics with them, and to pose them as a question more than a suggestion.
That said, I think this is a fundamentally hard problem on both sides, and not something I expect any advice or tricks will make go away. And so I strive to go through life giving as little offense in help as I may and taking as little offense in help as I can.