Man realizes his cousin is secretly living in the storage unit he was renting and quickly cancels it: ‘My aunt called me later saying I should have given him options instead of humiliating him and putting him on the street’ – FAIL Blog

Different styles of helping

We all have that one family member who takes everyone else’s generosity too far. That cousin who thinks everyone owes them favours or is entitled to everyone else’s property or food, for example. This type of behaviour always stems from a weird mix between their personality traits and nobody in the family drawing the line or setting some good ol’ boundaries. Anyways, in my opinion, when you’re dealing with that kind of people, a boundary is an act of love, and you’ll probably help them more by saying no than by giving them everything that they want. To me, they are people who need help learning that getting things takes effort; they don’t really need the thing they’re asking for; they need to learn to get things in a more honourable and, frankly, realistic way. It’s how the world works, most of the time; if you want something, you have to give something in return: your money, your time, something. We all need unconditional help once in a while, but when expecting unconditional help has become our personality, we need urgent boundaries. Plus, I forgot to mention what, to me, is the key to the matter: HE DIDN’T ASK TO USE THE UNIT; HE WAS USING IT IN SECRET; so no amount of guilt-tripping should make his COUSIN forgive and forget that. If I’m honest, he should even try to avoid having anything to do whatsoever with him or his mother, but that’s just my opinion…