Asking for Help Can Be HARD. I Get It

Why asking for support is so darned hard and what we can do about it

Do you find asking for help really hard? Would you rather do anything but, even if it means you end up suffering? 

Welcome to my wilderness. Reaching out for help has always been something I find, well… excruciating. Which, yes, is pretty ironic when I deeply know how much joy it brings to me to help others. So why can’t I let others experience that same joy and help me? Let’s talk about it. 

“Why is it hard for me to ask for help?”

I think we all deep down know what comes next. Ye olde trauma is at it again. Yes, not asking for help is a trauma response. The word that gets bandied around here is ‘hyper independence’.

What is hyper independence? Basically, childhood trauma trained our brains to believe that asking for help was a dangerous game. Clearly, if adults who were supposed to take care for us abused us in any way, we learned trusting others could lead to extreme pain. 

Indeed, a 2021 study by Stanford researchers really made me sad for Western society, showing just how, trauma aside for a moment, we are trained to be disconnected. It found that children were already connecting asking for help with appearing incompetent in front of others at the tender age of seven.

But what if our childhood wasn’t full of abuse? Don’t forget the joys of ‘attachment trauma’. If we had a primary caregiver who was inconsistent with their love and care, who sometimes, say, randomly shouted at us when we turned to them for love? Took out their bad moods on us when we asked a question? Little wonder we end up terrified to ask for help. 

And if you are like me, and are in the ‘all of the above’ category, well, no wonder asking for help feels like a dangerous thing to be avoided, right? 

All the little ways we avoid reaching out for help 

Note that it’s not just the big things, like calling someone and saying, “Look, I need some financial help”. Or, “I’m depressed, can you listen”. Not reaching out for support can manifest in all sorts of tiny (but important) ways.

Important, as we are constantly training our brain to believe that we don’t deserve support. And feeding in to that deep, hidden core belief that asking for help is dangerous and bad. 

Do these ways of avoiding help sound familiar?

• overdoing everything

• never delegating anything 

• assuming nobody can do things as well as you can 

• saying yes to help then changing your mind and being all, ‘actually, I can do it, don’t worry’

• or accepting help then doing the task alone before the other person can help

• not asking questions even when you have them 

• taking on too much 

• saying yes when you want to say no

• apologising profusely for the inconvenience if someone does manage to help you. 

Also note how you feel when someone offers you help. Do you experience anxiety, does your stomach clench, or your muscles tighten? Does something in you shrink back and close down? Or do you immediately think, despite yourself, “this person is after something from me?” 

Two more reasons we don’t just ask for help

There are two more deep n’ dirty things we need to talk about, beauties. Rejection sensitivity and, the one people get most upset about if I raise it, the victim mentality. 

Rejection sensitivity can mean we’d rather suffer than dare ask for help, as to us, being rejected is the worst kind of suffering of all. What if we ask for help and someone says no? The risk simply doesn’t feel worth it.  

The victim mentality is in my experience and in my work with others THE hardest thing to let go of, but also the one thing that can lead to the most change in our lives should we do just that. By recognising we are taking our power from milking others for sympathy, and choosing to instead step into adult responsibility, our life evolves. No, our past was not a choice. But our current life is full of choice now we are all grown up. 

If we still have the victim mentality operating we won’t ask for help as then we wouldn’t be able to complain about our suffering, and all the things going wrong for us. We will unconsciously choose suffering every single time while believing it’s all just ‘bad luck’. 

How to ask for help 

Look, I am not going to feed you any kind of trite self-help nonsense like, ‘just overcome your core belief you don’t deserve help’. In fact I don’t even believe, radical as it might sound, we can get rid of our negative core beliefs. I’ve now discovered that’s just a rabbit hole, and it’s far more efficient for us to work with where we are at, and learn to navigate life despite the core beliefs we live with. 

So what does that actually look like? How can we ask for help without changing our core beliefs, and when asking for help feels like hell on earth? Try the following: