This chapter is from The Road to Clear, Level One

Help is a basic necessity to life and to every person. Yet, if it goes wrong it can be dynamite. In other words it's a hot subject. Help means basically to assist or aid somebody else and is of course an important element in life and living.

Let us first look at some Key definitions related to the subject of Help:

Help 1. to assist, to aid, to give a hand. 2. to contribute in some way; to further; to promote. 
Help implies doing something for somebody else to assist them in whatever they want to accomplish. In other words the helper aligns his efforts to the purposes and needs of the person receiving the Help. 

Identify 1.  To establish the identity of something.  2. In psychological sense it means:  associating oneself closely with a person or group up to a point of being unable to see oneself as separate from it. 

Identification 1.  (R. Hubbard's use) Is the inability to perceive or evaluate differences in time, location, form, composition, etc.   2. the lowest level of reasoning is complete inability to differentiate, which is to say, identification. (This is of course closely related to  'misidentification' in the dictionary, but 'identification' in R. Hubbard's use is derived from (2) above).

Valence 1.  what is usually meant by valence is somebody else's identity assumed by a person unknowingly.  2. the valence mechanism produces whole people for the preclear to be and will include habits and mannerisms and are a result of the preclear's reactive compulsion to copy certain people.  3. a valence is a synthetic beingness, at best, or it is a beingness which the pc is not, but is pretending to be or thinks he is. That beingness could have been created for him by a duplication of an existing beingness, or a synthetic beingness built up by the descriptions of somebody else (like a fictional role model).

Auditing and Help
There are a number of reasons why Help has to be addressed in auditing at an early stage. As auditing is a Help activity, the pc has to be willing to accept help. The auditor has to be willing to give honest help freely. Any Help aberration in the auditor or the pc will reflect directly upon the effectiveness and success of the activity. Thus the subject of Help has to be cleared in the pc as well as in the auditor.

All too often failed help has led to betrayal. Take psychiatry. They were dealing with the psychotic - the real tough cases. These cases are not easy to help. The result was - and this is well documented - that psychiatry took up practices that made the patients worse. Brain operations, use of harmful drugs like LSD and electro-chock.

This is just an illustration of how failed help turn into a harmful activity that mainly deal with doing away with the patient's complaints by doing away with the patient.

Practices like that are found in many variations and at many points in history and thus there is a reactive fear in any human being of being let down in a help situation.

Help, Identification and Upsets
Help is the basis of all association. Of friendships, family relations and work relations. Help is very basic - almost as basic as communication. Association with the 'glue' of Help leads to identification. You help or receive help from somebody extensively and you start to identify yourself with that person or terminal. This identification leads sooner or later to situations of upset. After all, two persons are different and not identical. So a too close identification contains a lie and it will blow up in one situation or another.

As an example we could take troubles in marriages. The man and the woman got attracted to each other because they needed one and another. They supplemented each other and had a lot in common and fell in love. They started out being the ultimate in help towards each other. In some cases it stays that way. In far too many cases it doesn't. Instead we see time after time how this close association and identification leading to upsets and sometimes bitter fights. Due to this close relationship and identification they "can't understand why you react that way. After all - we are one!" 

Another human tangle related to Help can be observed in typical teenagers. Growing up the child has been helped extensively by his or her parents. This has lead to an identification on the part of the child with one or both parents.  It often goes both ways, meaning parents identify themselves with the child. "Peter would never do that! After all he is just like me." At some point a fairly normal teenager wants to establish his or her own identity. They want to separate themselves out from the 'shadow' of their parents. This is the motivation you find  in rebellious teenagers.

So many conflicts have a lot to do with help and association leading to an identification and  to valences. A valence is an artificial beingness that a person slips in, such as a spouse, a parent, a child, a boss or whatever. The person reactively 'believes' he is that person and acts that way.

As the examples illustrate, the Help lead to identification and this is one basis of mental upsets. If you clear the subject of Help you clear up this identification as well.

"Help is the button, when run, settles all difficulties with association and identification and all problems of beingness", according to one statement of R. Hubbard.

 How Help Became Betrayal
There is another button related with Help. It is: Help = Betrayal.
You could say, the psychiatry example above is an illustration of that. But this is much broader.

Time and again pretended help has been used to lure somebody as a calculated act. The pretended help is put out as a bait on a hook.

This button of Help = Betrayal has a history on the track of mankind and thetans.

Back on the track there was not the same concern about hurting others. After all, you can't really hurt a thetan as he is a Static and not part of the physical universe. He has to agree to being 'hurt' for any damage to take effect.

At some point the injured part decided, that was exactly what he was going to do: become a victim and agree to, that he was being hurt.

The aggressor would start to feel sorry for his victims. He would seek to make up the damage by helping the victim. Some victims became 'Help sponges'. They would provoke this aggressor/victim situation and suck up all the help they could get this way.

However, these types of incidents established a cycle of events: You would have injure-victim-help taking place over and over. Since injury and unconsciousness often was involved it would form a Chain of Engrams. That means painful incidents that are part of the Reactive Bank. Due to the Bank's A=A=A=A type of 'thinking' this association of injury and help became a complete identification: Injury = Help. This was the first step.

As things gets worse and more reactive they slide down the scales and a 'complete flip' or inversion will take place at some point. From association and identification we suddenly get a disassociation. This is a complete reversal of logic you could say. So "How-to-injure" becomes Help. In other words, we now suddenly get: Help = Betrayal.

R. Hubbard explains what then happens:

" With the intention to injure, one offers help to create a dependence on something disguised, which on use becomes injurious. It is this psychotic action which finalized the trap as a trap. "Don't dare accept any help because it is only an effort to betray", is the fixed idea which has become prevalent. One can have neither games nor life with that idea."

And:
"The majority in the world evidently believe that help is only an intention to injure. This is more than help-can-injure. This is "all-help-is-dangerous-because-anyone-offering-to-help-intends only-to-injure".

Examples of this are not hard to find. You can find it in any newspaper or magazine, novel, etc. If you start to investigate ads you will find plenty of examples.

But Help is just Help. Honest and sincere help is an intricate part of life and relationships and needs to be cleaned up and restored to good use.

Fear of Dependency
Another Button connected with Help is a 'Fear of dependency'. You will see individuals afraid of accepting any help for that reason. They will often eagerly offer to give honest help, but will refuse to receive any. It is of course always better to be at Cause than Effect of anything. But the Game of Life requires that we can be both cause and effect or we end up alone and without a game.

You will often see small children's attempts to help being squashed. From the adult viewpoint it seems no help when a child clumsily wants to wash the dishes and smashes a few in the attempt. But if the adult doesn't handle it with understanding and care, the child's whole outlook on Help gets aberrated right there.

So there are a number of reasons to clear Help as a button in auditing. Here is a final quote on the subject from R. Hubbard:

Since a pc in-session is influenced by his Bank a lot, you can see this kind of reaction even in higher toned pc's.

© Clearbird Publishing 2003, 2004