The Over-Giver

Vinutha Mohan | 6 min read · Jan 23, 2023

If you studied Bollywood cinema, you will see that it goes through various eras during which a particular theme is popular — perhaps channeled from the collective unconscious of that culture. One such popular theme was aging parents being betrayed and abandoned by their children. This particular theme goes like this: a couple make their children their top priority and strive and sacrifice to give them everything. Dad works at a job that is oppressive, perhaps a career that he never wanted to pick in the first place but was forced to, due to family circumstances, puts in long hours in the sweltering heat of the office with no air conditioning, and often returns home late at night after having changed two buses or trains. Mom is toiling at home, doing all the manual labor of the housework, living in cramped quarters with multiple children, catering to the ever complaining mother-in-law, demanding children, often selling her jewelry to educate the children, especially the sons so that they can help the family rise out of poverty. As it happens, the sacrifices pay off, the children thrive and flourish, the sons are very highly placed in society, and attracts the attention of wealthier families who want to arrange their daughter’s marriage with them. Soon the son is hobnobbing in elite circles and finds the parents as either embarrassing, burdensome, or plain annoying. Eventually, the parents are abandoned and with no money, no retirement benefits, empty pension accounts, they are rendered homeless. Of course, then the hero who is a good Samaritan swoops in and saves the day and teaches the ungrateful children a lesson. But the moral of the story was this — “do not be an over-giver to your ungrateful children. You will end up feeling betrayed, abandoned, and heart-broken hoping to be rescued by a mythical hero”. 😊

I remember my grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts watching such movies, salivating, cursing, crying, and totally identifying with the martyring characters in the movie. It was quite hilarious to watch and observe the level of heightened emotions in the room and the heated discussions that followed. But sadly, often I hear some version of this story from my clients. A stay at home mom who sacrifices everything for her children, devoid of hobbies, friends, intimacy with the spouse; a man/woman who sacrificed his/her own family in order to take care of aging parents or in-laws; grandparents who are sacrificing their golden years to take care of grandchildren; workaholics who sacrifice their health for the sake of their careers; women who believe in the myth that you can have it all and end up losing their health because of trying to achieve perfection in every aspect of their life. The stories are endless. The point is that over-givers will never feel fully repaid for their sacrifices. They will only feel disappointed, resentful, unappreciated, and betrayed — especially by the people they love the most.

So, why do we over-give? Often there is a narcissistic component to over-giving. It is because a wounded child part in us is looking for connection and belonging. Every human has the innate need to feel seen and be heard. And depending on our early formative experiences, we tend to develop certain survival adaptation strategies to get our need for connection and belonging met. Some do this by becoming heroes/heroines who swoop in and save the day. Others do it through people-pleasing, martyring, excessive care-giving, becoming an obsessive activist, shadow rescuing, and sometimes developing a god-complex. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with giving to others. It is such a beautiful altruistic trait that we all must develop in order for us to live fulfilling lives. It only becomes a problem when it is done in excess and with unhealthy intention of trying to find a sense of belonging through excessive giving.

Giving must always be balanced with receiving. However, I find that many humans have a great deal of discomfort with receiving. The paradoxical truth here is that while we are constantly striving so hard to receive, when we do receive something, we get so uncomfortable with accepting it. For example, I have very rarely seen someone who can accept a compliment with grace — especially women. They are so uncomfortable, often downplay it, give back the compliment, dismiss it, counter it with another compliment back to the giver, or downright reject it. When you are striving so hard to be seen, why are you so uncomfortable when you are actually seen? What a perplexing dilemma! Early on in my training as a psychotherapist, one of my mentors told me that when a client gives you a compliment, they are giving you a gift. Don’t take the gift and throw it back at them. Learn to just simply and gracefully accept it. Over the years, after studying with many teachers, I have added a further layer to this. Often, it is our wounded ego that has a problem with receiving. If instead I looked at it as a compliment to the gifts that are flowing through me from the “One Source”, then I am able to gracefully accept the compliment and send it back to the universe. This is what it means to develop “soul esteem”. As the teacher Carolyn Myss would say, there is nothing special about you, but something special flows through you. Almost every week, for the past fifteen years, working as a psychotherapist, I have received gratitude and appreciation from my clients. I simply accept and send it to source as I am only a channel for the divine healing to flow. I don’t pretend to be holier than thou here because as a human, it definitely strokes my ego to receive compliments. And it’s important to embrace our humanness.

In one of my groups that I run we did an exercise in receiving that spanned over the course of a year. We had a ritual in which each member would be at the center of the circle, while all the other members took turns in truly seeing them in their essence and appreciating the many gifts that they radiated through their being. The ritual lasted about 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes of being seen so clearly, intensely, and kindly, brings out a lot of vulnerability. When I explained this ritual to my colleagues, many of them were aghast. They couldn’t possibly handle that level of being seen and for that long, they confessed. And yet again, everything we do in life, in our workplace, on social media, support groups, beauty products, spiritual retreats, and almost every human action is for the purpose of being seen and heard. Isn’t it sad that we have such a problem then with receiving?

This dual issue of over-giving and inability to adequately receive causes a giving-receiving imbalance in us. This imbalance very often leads to both physical and psychological problems. In order for giving to be healthy and unconditional, it has to be balanced with healthy receiving. Only when giving is balanced with receiving will the giving be truly unconditional and altruistic. One of the most powerful ways to check this, is to ask yourself “what is my true intention behind this act of giving right now?” If it comes from wanting to fulfill the unmet needs of a wounded child archetype within, that takes the form of buying love and connection in anyway, then you might possibly want to pause, reflect, and take actions to heal. This sometimes may require you to do some psychotherapy to heal those wounded parts. Another question to ask is, “can I give without expectations and wanting nothing in return?” If the answer is yes, then go ahead and do it. But if you are doing the act of giving from a place of fear — fear that you will lose the relationship, fear that you will not be needed, not be seen, overlooked for promotion, out of a sense of duty, guilt, shame, regret, overcompensation, then you may want to re-calibrate so you can give from a sense of wholeness, love, spontaneous right action, presence, compassion, and soul esteem. This is when as the Bhagavad Gita says you become a “Karma Yogi” — one who gives without expecting nothing in return. This is how you set both you and the other free. When you can both give and receive with grace, then you become a sacred channel for the universe to flow through you for the benefit of all sentient beings.