GeistHaus

Defenses

Help-Rejecting Complaining

Help-rejecting complaining is asking for help in a way that makes sure the help won’t work. The person brings problem after problem, and each suggestion is met with “I tried that,” “That won’t work for me,” or a new complaint. Beneath the request sits a quiet reproach: nobody really helps.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person repeatedly complains while appearing to ask for help. “However, covert feelings of hostility or resentment toward others are expressed simultaneously by the subject’s rejection of the suggestions, advice, or whatever others offer” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The complaints may be about physical symptoms or about life problems. Either way, whatever is offered gets turned down.

According to the DMRS, the defense protects against the anger a person feels whenever they need to rely on others emotionally, anger rooted in the conviction, often learned from experience, that nobody will truly meet their needs. Instead of driving people away with open anger, the person keeps them close with requests for help, while rejecting each offer as “not good enough.” The cost is that problems stay unsolved, helpers end up frustrated or guilty, and the belief that no help is good enough seems confirmed. George Vaillant noted that hypochondriacal help-rejecting complaints can lead to anger and “unwitting retaliation” on the part of the clinician.

Where It Sits

Help-rejecting complaining belongs to Level 1, the Action Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. This is the lowest level of the DMRS hierarchy. Action defenses reflect a sense that the source of stress is outside oneself and that the experience is intolerable. These defenses “operate to engage, manipulate, or counterattack the apparent external source,” without anticipating the consequences. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also places help-rejecting complaining at its action level, alongside acting out, apathetic withdrawal, and passive aggression.

Among the immature defenses, help-rejecting complaining is grouped with the depressive defenses, a set that research has repeatedly linked with depression. The complaints carry a sense of powerlessness to get the right help, comfort, and attention.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify help-rejecting complaining:

Examples

The wrong medication

Anna, 32, a composite case in a paper on schema therapy, opens a session with a detailed account of a bad week: stomach problems, a doctor who gave her the “wrong” medication, doctors who don’t take her seriously, and the poor sleep and low mood that followed. When the therapist offers to look closely at what happened with the doctor and how she feels about it, Anna says it’s pointless to discuss, since she won’t be seeing that doctor again. The authors describe this “help-seeking-help-rejecting” stance as a “wall of complaints” that keeps painful emotions, and other people, at a distance. Offered solutions, they note, tend to be met with “I already tried that, it did not work.”

Susan G. Simpson and Limor Navot, Differentiating Authentic Versus Pseudo Vulnerability in Therapeutic Practice (2023)

“I feel it more than other people”

In Charles Dickens’s novel, the widowed Mrs. Gummidge lives with the fisherman Mr. Peggotty. When the fire smokes, she weeps that she is “a lone lorn creetur’” and “everythink goes contrary with me.” When Peggotty points out that everybody must feel the cold, she answers, “I feel it more than other people.” When Mr. Peggotty comes home and urges her to cheer up, she meets his kindness with a veiled reproach about his evening at the pub: “I’m sorry I should drive you there.” Dickens names no defense, of course, but the scene closely matches the pattern. Much later, when real disaster strikes the household, Mrs. Gummidge stops complaining and becomes, in the narrator’s words, “the prop and staff of Mr. Peggotty’s affliction.”

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850), chapters 3 and 32

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Passive aggression
Both express hostility indirectly. Passive aggression hides it behind apparent compliance and quiet non-performance. Help-rejecting complaining hides it inside requests for help that are then turned down.
Affiliation
Asking for help is not a defense problem in itself. In affiliation, the person brings a problem to someone not expecting them to take care of it, but to help find a solution the person then carries out. The DMRS notes that affiliation does not include “acting helpless to elicit help.”
Hypochondriasis
The DMRS once called this defense hypochondriasis, but dropped the name because it can be confused with the symptom disorder of the same name. The defense is about rejecting help, and the complaints can concern any problem, not only health.
Devaluation of other’s image
Devaluation attributes exaggeratedly negative qualities to others, often to prop up self-esteem. A help-rejecting complainer may dismiss a helper’s efforts, but keeps coming back for more help. The pattern binds the helper rather than pushing them away.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count help-rejecting complaining among their characteristic defenses:

History

The term goes back at least to 1952, when Jerome D. Frank and colleagues published two papers on behavior patterns of patients in therapy groups. One pattern was the “help-rejecting complainer,” a patient who keeps demanding help while insisting it is of no use. They contrasted it with the “doctor’s assistant,” who stresses his own competence and hands out advice. The term continued to appear in the group therapy literature, for example in Berger and Rosenbaum’s “Notes on Help-Rejecting Complainers” (1967).

George Vaillant’s hierarchy used a different name, listing hypochondriasis among the immature defenses, and DMRS studies did the same, grouping hypochondriasis with acting out and passive aggression as action defenses. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) used the name help-rejecting complaining and placed it at the action level. J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales now use that name too, explicitly to avoid confusion with the symptom disorder.

Kramer and colleagues (2013) found that patients with borderline personality disorder used more action-level defenses, a level that in their study included hypochondriasis, than matched healthy controls. In a 2024 network study of 655 adults with depressive and anxiety symptoms, using a self-report version of the DMRS, help-rejecting complaining was associated with both depressive and anxiety symptoms. In that network it was closely tied to acting out, but the two stood apart from the main cluster of defenses. Perry and colleagues (2025) list help-rejecting complaining among the immature defenses that studies have strongly associated with depression.

Sources