Why People We Help Sometimes Turn Against Us
Dr. Hussein H. Rifai is a global business leader, investor, and company chairman with more than four decades of experience across 85 countries. He writes on leadership, corporate governance, private equity, artificial intelligence, and international business.
“Beware the harm of the person to whom you have done good.” It is a harsh Arabic proverb, but anyone who has helped someone and later been hurt by them will understand it. You give your time, money, or reputation because you want someone to get through a difficult period. Later, the same person treats you as an obstacle, an enemy, or a bank that should never close.
Most people appreciate kindness. This article is about the others and why their response can be so painful. The hurt is seldom about getting the money back. It is discovering that what you thought was a relationship meant something quite different to them.
Why we help
In business, I help people because I see potential, want them to succeed, or remember what it was like to need a chance myself. There is a business reason too: good people make a business stronger. When a colleague faces illness or a personal crisis, the reason may simply be compassion.
Family help is often less voluntary. We help because we love our family, but also because we were brought up to believe we must. The older brother or sister becomes the person everyone calls. Their own bills, children, and difficulties somehow become less urgent than the next family emergency.
Research distinguishes between helping freely and helping through guilt, pressure, or the need for approval. Weinstein and Ryan examined the effects on both parties.[1] Related experiments found more gratitude and closeness when recipients believed the help was freely given.[2] How we give matters, but so does what the other person thinks we are doing.
Duty can keep a family afloat. It can also leave one person exhausted while everyone else gets used to receiving. What began as an emergency becomes an arrangement. Eventually, the person giving is the only one who still notices its cost.
Why receiving help can cause resentment
A mentor has something the other person needs: experience, authority, or contacts. They recommend a promotion, explain a difficult decision, or defend someone whose ability others doubt. The aim is to help that person stand on their own. Yet the recipient may worry that their success will always be attributed to the mentor.
Nadler and Fisher’s work describes how receiving help can threaten self-esteem and a sense of control.[3] It helps explain a possibility, not establish anyone’s motive. Someone may appreciate the opportunity while resenting the reminder that they needed it.
The same applies when a manager protects a colleague’s job during a personal crisis. Once the crisis passes, the employee may want to forget it. The manager remains a witness to a vulnerable period. Even ordinary feedback can feel like a reminder of dependence.
A mature response is to acknowledge the support and move forward. Another response is to rewrite the story: the help was insignificant, the helper had selfish motives, or the opportunity was owed anyway. Once someone accepts that version, turning against the helper becomes easier to justify.
When ambition takes over
Business brings another complication. A person may have to choose between supporting someone who helped them and gaining favour with a more powerful group. If joining the helper’s adversaries offers a better position or more influence, gratitude can disappear quickly.
One experience stays with me. A former chief executive of a large multinational had lost his position. My impression was that his career had relied too heavily on corporate politics and managing perceptions. Still, he was going through a difficult period, and I wanted to help.
His family had suffered terribly. He and his wife had lost siblings to cancer at young ages, his wife had faced cancer, and their children had additional needs. I felt for him. Those circumstances explain my compassion, they do not excuse what followed.
I gave him a job at a portfolio company, then helped him into a better position with a higher income. I also gave him a role at the investment bank. I wanted him to rebuild his career and remain professionally relevant. I expected honesty and goodwill, not agreement with everything I said.
Instead, I felt he resented my success, my life, and my professional reach. I cannot know his private thoughts, but that was how his conduct struck me. He returned to corporate politics and eventually persuaded enough people to turn against me. From my perspective, he was building his position by damaging mine.
His subsequent results did not, in my assessment, match his confidence. I came to see ego and political skill taking the place of sound judgement. Time has a way of exposing the difference between talking a good game and delivering.
I would like to believe time always punishes manipulation and rewards those who play with a straight bat. It does not always happen, and it can take years. But politics cannot replace performance forever. At least when you play with a straight bat, you have a record you can stand behind.
I have also seen years of corporate cooperation give way to public allegations and litigation, which I dispute. Those matters belong in the documentary record and the courts. Psychology cannot determine the truth of a legal claim.
What concerns me more broadly is how a shared history gets rewritten. Support becomes interference. Collective decisions become one person’s responsibility. Former allies tell the version that serves their position today. That is why records of decisions and approvals matter.
Nobody owes a former supporter blind loyalty. Disagreement and genuine scrutiny are legitimate. Rewriting events or concealing your own part in them is something else. A favour does not buy silence, and ambition does not excuse dishonesty.
When family duty falls on one person
In the culture in which I grew up, the eldest often takes responsibility when a parent dies. Earning more or living abroad strengthens the expectation. You become the person who must find an answer, regardless of what is happening in your own life.
When my father died in 1987, I became the main source of financial support for my mother. That continued until she died in 2013. Her monthly payment was expected whether I was employed, short of money, or dealing with difficulties myself. My circumstances changed. The obligation did not. I wanted her to live with dignity.
But my sister was only a year younger than me and my brother only two years younger. We were close in age, yet the responsibilities were very different. Being the eldest had effectively made me the provider.
My mother passed money to my sister in the earlier years, including after she married, and continued helping my brother until her death. The support I gave her was therefore supporting more than her own living expenses.
My brother repeatedly ran out of money. Often, my mother would call and ask me to send more. I knew the pressure she was under and wanted to give her peace. Refusing him through her was much harder than refusing him directly. I became his unofficial bank. Each payment settled the immediate problem until the next one arrived.
After my mother died, I discovered that she had been selling the land my father left and the apartment I had helped her buy, and dividing the proceeds between herself and my siblings without my knowledge. While I kept meeting my obligation, decisions about those assets were being made behind my back.
The money mattered, but the secrecy hurt more. I had been making sacrifices based on an incomplete understanding of the family’s needs. How could I decide what help was reasonable when important facts were withheld from me?
My siblings may have regarded our mother’s assistance as her decision, separate from what I provided. To me, the arrangements were connected. My money helped sustain them, while my own circumstances received little consideration. I remembered what it cost. They may simply have remembered that help was available.
Family duty should not mean one person keeps paying while others decide what that person is allowed to know. Affection made me slow to question the arrangement. By the time I understood more of it, those years could not be recovered.
Helping someone who will not help themselves
Two experiences helping refugees taught me a different lesson. Neither was the same kind of betrayal as the corporate story, but both made me question how easily compassion can turn into an expectation of continuing support. These were individual experiences, not a judgement about refugees generally.
We paid university fees for a young Assyrian refugee from Iraq. We welcomed him into our family life, introduced him to our children, and took him to lunches and dinners. He was around the same age as the four children in our family. We wanted him to feel included and have a chance to build a future.
Our children earned spending money through ordinary work. Jena worked in a bakery, Max pulled beers at an RSL, and Hani built inexpensive websites. The young man refused that sort of job. My impression was that he considered it beneath him, although his family had very little money.
That bothered me. Our children were prepared to do modest work, while someone whose education we were paying for would not. After finishing the university course we had funded, he stopped contacting us. It left me feeling that our place in his life had ended when the financial support was no longer needed.
I did not expect lifelong devotion. But disappearing after we had paid his fees and welcomed him into the family was hurtful. A simple continuing interest would have meant a great deal. Paying for an education could give him an opportunity, it could not make him value the relationship behind it.
In another case, a prominent and dear friend asked me to help a 37-year-old Palestinian refugee. He had a master’s degree in data management from Monash University and was said to be desperate enough to consider work at McDonald’s. I gave him a well-paid job despite his lack of experience. We also bought him groceries.
He arrived late, left early, and spent much of the day going back and forth to the kitchen for coffee. When we raised concerns, I felt he became more entitled rather than making an effort to improve. He obtained medical certificates in circumstances I questioned, although I could not establish misconduct by him or the doctor.
We kept telling ourselves he might be traumatised by the war. That deserved consideration, but we did not know whether it explained his behaviour. I was using a possible explanation to excuse a pattern I could see. The basic expectations of the job remained unmet.
I had assumed that someone who needed help would make the most of a chance. That assumption was wrong in these cases. Money can remove an obstacle. It cannot supply effort, judgement, or consideration for others. Giving more does not necessarily improve the outcome.
When support becomes a habit
Repeated rescue can keep a bad arrangement going. Someone’s debt is paid, the consequences disappear, and the same choices become possible again. The helper sees the pattern but continues because someone else, often a parent or child, will suffer if they stop.
That is why “just say no” can be too simple. Refusal may hurt someone who did not create the problem. Even so, protecting that person and financing another adult’s repeated choices cannot remain the same thing indefinitely.
Others may encourage the recipient to see the helper as controlling. Sometimes that criticism is justified. Sometimes it is a convenient excuse for accepting the benefits and attacking the person providing them. We need to look at what actually happened, including our own behaviour.
What I would do differently
Do I see myself as a victim? No. I was hurt, and some of these experiences cost me dearly, but I do not want victimhood to become my identity. I made choices, sometimes under pressure, and I have to learn from them.
Was the harm victimless? No. Money, trust, and relationships were damaged. My refusal to call myself a victim does not erase those consequences or excuse the people responsible.
Would I help these people again? Yes. My moral and ethical code is stronger than the disappointment. We meet hundreds of thousands of people in a lifetime. Those who behave this way are a minority, a sizeable minority perhaps, but still a minority.
If I listed the people I have helped who were grateful, and those who helped me and whose kindness I still appreciate, that list would be many times longer than the list of people described here. I will not let the minority make me forget the others.
I would still help, but I would ask more questions, set limits earlier, and stop assuming that need automatically brings gratitude or effort. In my family, I would insist on knowing the financial position I was helping to support. At work, I would assess performance rather than keep extending the benefit of the doubt.
Should being stabbed in the back change my whole approach to life? No. I will not let a few people decide how I treat everyone else. I have benefited from kindness myself. I still want to help people who need a chance.
What changes is how I help. A gift should be understood as a gift, a loan as a loan, and a job as a job with responsibilities. Help should give someone a way forward, not make me permanently responsible for their next crisis. I also need to be honest about my own motives and any expectations I have left unspoken.
Gratitude does not mean obedience. Equally, generosity does not require unlimited access to my money, time, or reputation. I can care about someone and still refuse an arrangement that keeps harming me.
The proverb reminds me that kindness cannot determine another person’s character. I can open a door, pay a fee, or help someone through a bad year. What they do afterward is their choice. I still believe in helping. I have learned to watch the response and to act on what it tells me.
Read more from Dr. Hussein H. Rifai
Dr. Hussein H. Rifai, Thought Leader & Chairman
Dr. Hussein H. Rifai is a global business leader, investor, company chairman, and thought leader with more than four decades of experience across 85 countries. His career spans multinational corporations, entrepreneurship, investment banking, private equity, and corporate governance, advising boards and business leaders on strategy, mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, business transformation, and international growth. Holding a PhD in Business Administration, Hussein writes on leadership, corporate governance, artificial intelligence, international business and global competitiveness, combining academic insight with practical experience gained at the highest levels of global business.
Research notes:
These studies inform the general discussion. They do not establish the motives of anyone in my personal accounts.
[1] Weinstein N and Ryan RM 2010. When helping helps. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(2), 222–244.
[2] Weinstein N, DeHaan CR and Ryan RM 2010. Attributing autonomous versus introjected motivation to helpers and the recipient experience. Motivation and Emotion 34, 418–431.
[3] Nadler A and Fisher JD 1986. The role of threat to self-esteem and perceived control in recipient reaction to help. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 19, 81–122.
