Any relationship between two people is a two-way exchange, from which, as a rule, both people gain in one way or another. But what happens when one of the two gives much more than they get back? What about when one of the two feels it is their duty to save the other?

What happens is that we’re dealing with savior complex, a behavioural disorder that leads to unhealthy or even toxic relationships.

What is the savior complex?

It means that if you are selfless and want to help someone else you suffer from the savior complex. No, you only suffer from this complex if you not only want to help another but feel the need to help another, as if you can’t feel good if you don’t.

It’s very noble to want to help another person, but what if that person doesn’t want your help? Do you accept the refusal with serenity, or do you stubbornly help them against their will, because it seems to you that you know best what is good for them?

Other names for this disorder are: rescuer complex, hero syndrome, white knight syndrome, messiah complex. With the caveat that the latter is more commonly present in people who suffer from schizophrenia and who believe themselves to be, effectively, an incarnation of the Savior.

People who achieve positions of power (intentionally or accidentally) may develop such ideas about themselves, believe that the employees they lead, citizens in the case of politicians, or other family members all depend and rely on their competence for survival. This extreme empowerment can lead to the development of delusions of grandeur and is in fact the scientific name for the phenomenon popularly known as “it has gone to his head” (power). Theoretically the delusion of grandiosity is not a diagnosable condition, but it is a symptom that frequently occurs in the delusions of schizophrenics and in the inner dialogue of grandiose narcissists.

Perhaps the most famous example of a leader with a saviour complex was Adolf Hitler, who considered himself the saviour of the entire German nation. The horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were the product of these grandiose ideas.

Of course Hitler is an extreme example and most people who suffer from the saviour complex do not end up killing millions of people, but it shows how far you can go if you do not control and resolve these tendencies.

What are the symptoms of the saviour complex?

In a nutshell, you could be suffering from the saviour complex if:

• You believe that helping others is your purpose in the world
• You only feel good about yourself when you help others
• You consume so much energy helping others that you become exhausted

In fact, those who suffer from the rescuer complex try to feel in control by fixing other people’s lives, often to distract themselves from their own problems, such as anxiety or feelings of lack of power or control over their own lives.

In addition, when you help someone else, it provides validation, which makes you feel better about yourself, which can relatively easily turn into an addiction that will cause you to obsessively seek out someone to help, just to get that feeling of validation again.

If you grew up in a family with a dysfunctional dynamic, chances are higher that you developed a rescuer complex in response to the difficult situations you experienced.

The saviour complex is often accompanied by fantasies of omnipotence. Which means you may believe that there is someone capable of making everything okay, and that person is you. It’s a childhood fantasy, when the child looks up to the parent with hope and bestows this supernatural power to fix everything.

The saviour complex is also accompanied by feelings of moral superiority, the sufferer of this complex ends up thinking he is better than others because he spends his time always helping you. This perception is often shared by those around them, who see them as good people.

However, the truth is that a person with a saviour complex can often do more harm than good, one reason being that they lack the skills to solve the problem.

The rescuer complex can interfere with personal development and lead to codependency, because the person being helped is not allowed to take responsibility for their own situation, and develop the skills needed to solve the problem themselves.

Other symptoms include the following:

• Trying to change people: believing you know what is best for others and being convinced you have the ability to bring about change in another person.
• You make extreme personal sacrifices to help others: these sacrifices consist of time, money, emotional availability, personal needs and personal space. All of these you consume without any problem, just to help another.
• You are attracted to people in vulnerable situations: you are attracted to people who have had a hard life. Perhaps because you have had a hard life yourself and want to spare others from suffering as you have.
• You think you always have a solution: some things don’t have a quick fix, situations like depression, trauma, grief or chronic illness. A rescuer will still try to resolve these situations, often in an inappropriate and even brutal way.
• You feel that only you can help: this idea is closely linked to fantasies of omnipotence.
• How does the rescuer complex affect your life?

As well as the fact that attempts to help can go wrong and do more harm than good, the rescuer complex also has a negative effect on the rescuer’s life.

These effects include:

• Burnout, i.e. exhaustion, mental and physical.
• Strained relationships with others: no one likes to be treated as a project to be improved and rescue attempts make others feel anger or frustration.
• Emotional imbalance: when you fail to rescue another, it can trigger a whole range of negative states, such as resentment towards the person who doesn’t appreciate your help, frustration with yourself or the other person, depression or a sense of losing control of the situation.
• Low self-esteem: the belief that you can solve other people’s problems is irrational, in reality you can’t. But as long as you believe this, you will continue to get yourself into all sorts of situations that will only bring you disappointment. All these disappointments will eventually damage your self-esteem, and you will start to believe that you are a failure, because you didn’t achieve what you set out to achieve (even though what you set out to achieve wasn’t even possible).
• How can you cure yourself of the saviour complex?

There are a few things you can do, on your own or under the guidance of a psychotherapist:

• Try listening without doing anything: when someone tells you about a problem they have, they may just need to be listened to, not necessarily have their problem solved.
• Offer help without insisting: if you feel the person might want help, you can say something like “if you need anything, please let me know” without insisting and without getting too involved in the other person’s life.
• Remember that you have no responsibility for someone else’s life, nor for the decisions someone else makes about their life.
• Go to therapy: The rescuer complex often originates in childhood, and identifying this origin and healing often requires professional help. Remember what I said about sometimes not having the skills to solve a problem?

What can you do if someone tries to save you?

Maybe you don’t suffer from the savior complex, but someone else around you has these ideas, and you feel frustrated by their behavior. What can you do in this case? A few things:

• Explain that this approach isn’t helping you, that you need to be left to deal with the situation on your own so you can learn the lessons you need to learn.
• Set clear boundaries and defend them.
• If nothing works, try to find someone else to share your problems with.
• In conclusion

A relationship, of any kind but especially a couple relationship, should be an opportunity for joy and growth together, not a social project. When you enter into a relationship to change the other, then you no longer have a partner, but a learner. And the other person will most likely not be happy with this role you have assigned them.

The saviour complex introduces a toxic element into relationships and strains relationships, eventually leading to their breakdown.

If it seems to you that you might have a savior complex, what you can do is instead of dealing with everyone else’s problems, deal with this problem of yours, because once you solve it, you will feel better, have more freedom, be more rested and more satisfied with the life you have.