“Sit down, shut up, and do what you’re told.”

We all slumped in our seats, a little deflated by the loud guy at the front of the room. I was a 15-year-old punk kid, and this was a summertime youth leadership program. The other youth sitting around me were there for the same reasons I was: someone saw our potential and thought we should go. For the next three weeks we sat through 2.5 hours every night, listening to speakers, doing activities and learning the basics of leading our communities.

That loud guy came from outside our community to insist we learn his way of being, and for more than 37 hours we had to do as we were told, learn what he wanted us to, and perform accordingly. From my own experience and research, I’ve found this was the basis for a lot of youth leadership programs in the 1990s. There are a lot of problems with this, including the basic lesson taught by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

If you’re reading this, you want to see communities thrive. But I’ve found that inside many charities and government programs, there are two hidden forces getting in the way. These forces stop people from lifting each other up, and instead, they cause people to fight against each other. The first one is called the helper trap, and the other one is hurt turned inward.

The helper trap is when workers from the outside an organization or community come in thinking they need to “save” or “fix” people. They think and act like poor communities or struggling people just lack good habits, the right skills, or basic rules. Instead of changing the big, unfair systems, these helpers try to change the people. They hand out aid, but only if people act the way the helpers want them to. It creates a dynamic where one side has all the power, and the other side must sit still, be grateful, and perform as expected.

Hurt turned inward happens when a person has taken demoralizing, painful, and otherwise hurtful lessons inside of themselves, and instead of needing someone else to enforce those lessons they force themselves to remember them. When the reality of hurt turned inward shows, it happens after a group of people is pushed down for a long time and start to believe the bad things the world says about them. Because of that, they adopt the unfair rules of the system as their own.

This shows up in a lot of ways that are sad, ugly, or mean. You might hear a poor person talk down about “those bad poor people” who do not work hard enough, or you might see community elders call young people “weak” or “needy” when those youth try to stand up for their rights.

Why does this happen?

First, it is a way to feel safe. By judging others, a person is trying to say, “Look, I am one of the good ones. Do not hurt me.” Second, it is about scarce resources. When a program only gives out a little bit of help, people start to fight over the crumbs. They become guards for the system, deciding who is worth helping and who isn’t. Lastly, it comes from fear. Older people who survived tough times by keeping their heads down might get scared when young people make noise. Their harsh words are often just fear wearing a mask.

When these two forces meet, they can trap people. Outside helpers point to the fighting and say, “See? They cannot even get along. They still need us to run things.” The system wins, and the community stays stuck. People who are hurt inside of themselves might say the same thing about themselves: “See, we can’t even get along. We still need them to run things.”

A lot of people a lot smarter than me have written about this reality in a lot of ways, including Franz Fannon, Paulo Freire, and the authors of one of my favorite books, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. The moral of a lot of these stories is that we have to heal and be healed before we can help others effectively, so, as Australian aboriginal activist Lilla Watson implored, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” That’s to say, our individual destinies are tied together by our collective efforts. We have to work together.

To break this loop, we have to change how we help. True help isn’t about being saviors; it’s about standing with people as equals. Outside groups must stop trying to manage people and start engaging them, sincerely and wholly. At the same time, communities need space to heal from wounds of all sorts.

When we stop judging each other by the rules of the system, we can finally work together to change it.