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“We don’t have to do all of it alone. We were never meant to.”
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
I used to be proud of how rarely I needed help, until I started noticing how much effort I was spending just to avoid asking for it.
You hate asking for help.
Even if you know someone who actually could help, you would rather struggle with the problem for days on your own.
You say that asking for help has never been your strength, but deep inside you know that sometimes it could make your life easier.
And there is also this bad feeling around the whole thing. Something like guilt, shame, the possibility that people might think that you’re weak or even incompetent.
Then your ego, of course, and even worse, the feeling that you don’t want to owe anyone anything. Because you know that help might come with some kind of emotional currency you have to pay back one day.
You don’t want to hear carefully slipped comments in future conversations like, “You know when I helped you in that situation” or “What would you have done without me back then?”
And they wink at you just to make sure you feel the debt.
So it’s better not to ask for any help. You’re going to solve it alone. Again. Whether that makes things harder or not doesn’t matter as long as you don’t need to deal with those feelings and possible annoying future scenarios.
Everything has its price. At least, that’s what some of us learned very early.
I did too. When I was a child, every time I asked for something, my mother lectured me for an hour before she helped. It was not only about paying a price later for the support, but she took half of it beforehand. I had to listen to her when she said that her life was miserable because she needed to support me all the time. That she would kill herself at some point because of all the work she had to do to help me.
So even before I got the help, I felt that tremendous amount of guilt as the price for it. Since then, my brain has associated asking for help with guilt, which I have always wanted to avoid at all costs.
Maybe you have a similar story or a different version of it. Your parents might have made you feel weak if you asked for help. Or you asked for something but never got it, so you learned that it didn’t make sense to ask.
All these experiences could have taught you that asking for help comes with a certain price. Either emotional, mental or even financial. So you developed a strategy of avoiding asking for help.
Honestly, that’s not a surprise. So you don’t need to blame yourself for it. Imagine you meet a dog for the first, second and third time and the dog bites you every time. At some point, you will start believing that all dogs bite.
It makes logical sense that you then start avoiding dogs. The same happens with behaviors where you have learned that negative consequences can be attached to them.
The problem is that this avoidance starts pushing you in another direction in your life, which is total independence. The feeling that you must deal with the problem on your own. You have to figure it out. There is no other option, like asking for help.
I know how it feels because I developed in the same direction. I became an extraordinary problem solver and a man of independence. When I see people asking for help, I just smile and do it on my own, regardless of how hard my own path is.
And it feels great. Being someone who can handle things alone is freeing and empowering at the same time.
You feel that you can control the things around you. You don’t need to experience rejection and disappointment when you ask for help. There is no future obligation where you feel like you have to say yes because of an old favor they did for you.
You are free. Or maybe a prisoner. Let’s just take a closer look.
When your strength becomes a problem
The downside of your mindset, which you might not notice, starts when you begin thinking rigidly.
When your thinking slightly changes from “I can solve everything alone” into “I have to solve everything alone.”
That’s a huge difference.
When you cannot think any differently anymore and believe that you have to deal with everything on your own. I remember when I was in a relationship and my girlfriend wanted to make me a sandwich, and I told her that she shouldn’t do it because I could take care of myself.
Or at work, when I was dealing with a huge workload but didn’t tell my boss because I wanted him to think of me as a strong and capable employee. Which led to exhaustion and almost burnout.
And this negative process doesn’t stop there because you not only refuse help, but you also educate your environment, the people around you.
You teach them that you are someone who doesn’t need help. So they stop offering their support. Then you feel even more unsupported, which turns into self confirmation that you have to do everything on your own.
I hope you can see how freedom can slowly turn into a self-created prison.
The better definition of independence
Here is the thing I have learned the hard way about asking for help or being that rigidly independent.
That coping mechanism you learned earlier in your life, the one that makes you strong, should only increase the options in your life but NOT become the only one.
What I mean by that:
Let’s say you are sick and your partner wants to make you tea. Being able to deal with problems alone means you know you could take care of yourself if nobody was there.
But if you refuse the tea just because receiving care makes you uncomfortable, then independence is not freedom anymore.
It has become a rule you’re trapped inside.
So you have two options here. One is accepting the help if there is some, but the other option is knowing that you can do it yourself if you’re alone, so you don’t feel helpless either.
This is how you can turn your problem solving skill into a real advantage instead of a burden.
What can you do next time?
First of all, you need to be aware of situations where you might need some help.
Notice the moment when you feel stuck or when you need to solve a problem you’ve been struggling with for a while. Then ask yourself whether there is someone who could help with the problem.
This is the moment where you need to be careful. If the answer is yes, stop your thought process there. Otherwise, you will continue with the “but” and immediately dismiss the option.
Once you admit that external help could make your life easier, your discomfort will arise. Those feelings I mentioned at the beginning. Notice them, but don’t try to escape them.
That will be the moment when you need to remind yourself that these feelings come from your past, but they don’t need to control your present.
Accept them and reach out to someone who could help. Start small. Ask your wife, your husband, a friend or a coworker. Practice the process.
The goal is not to become dependent on other people or to stop solving your own problems. The goal is to have both options available.
You can solve something alone when you want to, and you can ask for help when that makes more sense.
That is probably a much better definition of independence than needing to prove every time that you can do everything yourself.
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