When Helping Friends and Family Hurts and Boundaries Become Love

When Help Feels Like Love and Starts Feeling Like Control 

I have a confession that makes me sound like I think I am the main character in everyone else’s mess. When the people I love are walking straight towards a cliff, I do not just worry. I start organising.

And the question that keeps chasing me, even when I try to drown it out with noise, is this. Do the people I love actually want my help, or do they want me to quietly watch them burn.

The truth is, a situation did not arrive politely. It crashed into my phone in fragments. Late night calls. Half truths. Panic dressed up as jokes. The kind of chaos that makes your chest tighten before you even understand why.

It is strange, the way you can feel someone else’s crisis land in your body. Like it borrows space in your lungs.

One night I was sitting on the edge of my bed, pill organiser open like a tiny plastic altar. Morning tablets already stacked, evening ones still waiting. I could hear my own heart doing that familiar uneven dance, the one that reminds me I am not built for adrenaline anymore. I swallowed the meds anyway because that is what you do when you live with severe heart failure with left ventricular dysfunction and atrial fibrillation. You do the routine even when your mind is spiralling, because routine is how you stay alive.

My phone lit up again.

“she'“ was calling.

I stared at the screen for a second too long, like I was negotiating with myself. Answer and step into it, or ignore and let it keep burning without you.

I answered.

She was talking fast, words tripping over each other, and underneath it all I could hear fear. Not the neat kind of fear that asks for help clearly. The messy kind that wants comfort, wants permission, wants a way out, but also wants to stay exactly where it is because change is terrifying.

And I did what I always do.

I became a project manager.

The next morning, I woke up with that heavy fatigue that is not just tiredness. It is the weight of chronic illness that sits on your ribs like a wet towel. I checked my blood sugars. I measured out food like I was negotiating with my pancreas. Autoimmune pancreatitis does not care that your cousin is imploding. Type 2 diabetes does not pause because your heart is heavy. My body has its own bureaucracy, and every day I have to file the right paperwork just to exist.

I made something low sodium, something that would not punish me later. I drank what I could within the limits I have to respect. Then I opened my laptop and started searching. Clinics. Costs. Timeframes. Locations. The kind of research you do when you care so much you think caring harder will change the outcome.

Pages and pages.

I remember my eyes burning from the screen. The quiet rage of reading vague pricing, fine print, and the way health care becomes a maze the moment you are desperate. I made notes like I was studying for an exam I never asked to sit. Under a thousand dollars. No hidden extras. Brisbane. I felt like I was trying to solve a problem with a calculator while someone’s life was shaking in my hands.

I told myself it was love.

But if I am honest, it was also control. Because when I cannot control my own body, when my heart can decide to misbehave on a random Tuesday, when my energy can disappear without warning, I start trying to control what I can.

Someone else’s crisis becomes a place to pour my helplessness.

Sometimes helping is just standing close enough that someone knows they are not alone, without grabbing the steering wheel out of their hands.

Because here is what no one tells you when you are the fixer in the family. You can offer someone a map, a phone number, a plan, a way out. But if they are not ready to walk, all you have done is build a beautiful exit they will not use.

And then you are left holding resentment in one hand and grief in the other.

The hardest part with ‘she’ was not the chaos. It was the way she could take my energy, my time, my calm, and still stay exactly the same.

I would listen for months. Worries. Tears. The same circles. The same patterns. I would want to scream, not at her, but at the situation. At the way she kept choosing someone who was clearly not choosing her properly. At the way loyalty was being demanded from everyone except the people who were actually causing the damage.

And the more I tried to help, the more I felt my own body push back.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring while unwell. It is not just emotional. It is physical. It shows up in swollen feet after a stressful day. It shows up in heart palpitations after a tense conversation. It shows up when you lie in bed at night and your thoughts get loud, and you wonder how many more big feelings your body can tolerate before it reminds you, sharply, that you are not invincible.

One night, after another long exchange, I stood in my kitchen staring at the sink. The house was quiet. My phone was face down on the bench like it had done something wrong. I rinsed my coffee cup slowly, deliberately, as if the act of cleaning could cleanse the frustration out of me.

I thought about all the times I have begged people, in my own way, to choose themselves. To be loyal to themselves. To stop making homes inside storms.

And then I realised something that made my throat tighten.

Sometimes the person you are trying to save is not asking for a lifeboat.

They are asking for an audience.

They are asking for someone to sit with them in the burning house and tell them the flames look pretty.

That is when love starts to get dangerous. Not for them, for you.

Because you can slowly start believing that if you just explain it differently, if you just research harder, if you just push a little more, they will finally get it.

And when they do not, you start feeling rejected. As if your help was a gift they refused. As if their choices were a personal insult.

But it is not about you. It was never about you.

That is the humbling part.

I am learning, clumsily, that helping has to come with consent. Not formal consent, not paperwork. Emotional consent. The kind where someone actually wants change, not just sympathy. The kind where they are willing to feel uncomfortable to become different.

Without that, your help becomes pressure. Your love becomes a lecture. Your care becomes another thing they want to escape.

So now I am trying to do something that does not come naturally.

I am trying to offer, then step back.

I am trying to say, I am here, and I can help, but I cannot carry this for you.

I am trying to protect my health like it is sacred, because it is. Because I do not get unlimited energy. I do not get to run on stress and adrenaline like I did when I was younger. My life is measured in medication routines, careful food choices, medical appointments, and the constant invisible calculation of what I can afford emotionally without paying for it physically.

And I am trying to trust that my culture already taught me this, if I would just listen.

Saltwater teaches boundaries. The tide comes in and the tide goes out. It does not apologise. It does not over explain. It does not cling.

It returns, steady, when it is meant to.

That is what I want my love to be.

Present, steady, not self destructive.

So I come back to the question again, the one that threads through all of this like a quiet ache.

Do the people I love actually want my help, or do they want me to quietly watch them burn.

Maybe the answer is not one thing.

Maybe sometimes they want help, and sometimes they want comfort, and sometimes they want to stay exactly as they are because change feels like grief.

And maybe my job is not to decide for them.

Maybe my job is to decide for me.

To keep my heart safe, in every sense of the word.

To offer love without losing myself in it.

To remember that I can be a soft place to land without becoming the ground they refuse to stand on.

Final line.

Love without boundaries is not love, it is surrender.