Do you suffer from any first-chakra, chronic health problems with your blood, immune system,  bones, joints, or skin; and do you tend to have Pseudo–Social Worker issues? If so, fear not, for there is hope.

In addition to considering a number of nutritional and herbal supplements and changing your diet, an important step of the Pseudo–Social Workers’ mind-body makeover is to address the emotional, intuitive right brain.

What follows is my seven-part program to rehabilitate Pseudo–Social Workers’ compulsive rescuing of people in need so that they can protect their own interests as much as they safeguard everyone else around them:

1. Identify how when someone near you has a problem, you intuitively pick up on his pain and distress. Was it through a sense of dread? Anxiety? A dream or image? A gut feeling or a tightness in your chest? Or was it some other sensation in your mind and body?
2. Recognize that the person in need has other resources, including a higher power, which he can access for protection. Acknowledge that you are not his higher power (a sobering thought indeed). Join Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA), where you’ll get support from compulsive rescuers who are also learning to resist the impulse to chronically attract and defend dependent people.
3. Discern whether helping this individual in the past has either strengthened or weakened him, making him more dependent. If your previous rescue missions have helped him learn to support himself, choose to intervene. However, if past efforts have done little to help him gain insight into the crises in his life (or worse yet, fostered more dependence), then sit on your hands. Learn to tolerate your anxiety as you watch the other person’s life unravel, and learn to soothe the guilt you experience when he gets angry with you for refusing to play the rescuer yet again.
4. Restrict the amount of time you spend around people who depend on you. This doesn’t refer to any young children, if you have them, but to that adult relative who’s always calling you about his loser relationship and the friend who keeps asking for your advice on one emotional crisis after another. In the past, this may have helped you feel loved and needed, but now you can see that what it’s really doing for you is draining your first-chakra health. As the saying goes, “Out of sight, out of mind” (and, I might add, out of intuitive field). Begin to develop relationships with more independent people who can love you even if they don’t need you.
5. Know that you can be safe, even if certain loved ones’ lives are in peril.
6. Change the unhealthy thought: If I am needed, I feel loved, appreciated, and accepted . . . to the healthy affirmation: I am lovable even when I am not needed.
7. Follow the first rule for intuitive health—All for one, and one for all—by emphasizing that your individual need for support and survival is as important as all the rest of the needs of all the other people in your life.