When We Don’t Ask For Help

How We Avoid Asking for Help

How often do you ask for help, whether it’s needing emotional support or practical assistance? Asking for help with a problem in life is hard. When we ask for help, we’re admitting that we cannot get through something by ourselves and that can bring up vulnerability for us. Depending on your emotional associations with help-seeking, that might bring up other negative emotions such as embarrassment or shame. Or, perhaps help-seeking is uncomfortable because it’s simply not something you’re in the habit of doing. I’ve heard it so many times from my clients: “I don’t like to ask for help. That’s just not me.” Another variation of this is, “I’m the one that people turn to for help, not usually the other way around.”

Here are some common reasons people don’t ask for help. Have you said any of these to yourself?

I don’t want to burden another person.

I’m right there with you. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want to cause stress to someone else if I can help it. But how do you know you would be a burden if you asked for help or shared your woes? Has your support person told you that you’d be a burden if you asked for them to help you? Or are you jumping to conclusions about how another person would think and feel?

My suggestion is that you practice the boundary of allowing other people to make their own choices about what they are willing to take on or not. If you ask for help and they can’t handle it, can they be the one to tell you, instead of you assuming you would know how they’d feel and react? I think you’re getting my point. I hope it’s a helpful reminder that assumptions don’t always help us, especially in hard times when we can give ourselves permission to ask for a little more.

I don’t want _________ to worry about me.

In my experience with clients in therapy, this statement has been a productive one to explore because it tends to reveal that we think it’s our priority to manage someone else’s anxiety (and by extension, others’ emotions in general). What if this is not always the case? It’s one thing to be be conscientious and take others’ feelings into consideration but another matter entirely to not disclose challenges or ask for help because you believe that most of the time, it’s your job to make sure other people don’t react with anxiety.

If you take a step back and think about it, it’s also an interesting take on relationships in general. It might be helpful to keep in mind that when we care about someone, we naturally worry about them, have concerns about their well-being, want to help them, want the best for them, want to be there in hard times. If our close relationships with family, friends, and partners can’t provide that, what is the function of these relationships?

There are some important cultural norms associated with this sentiment. For many AANHPI individuals, it feels like an obligation to not worry one’s parents, which sometimes leads to not sharing significant aspects of one’s life, such as dealing with a mental health issue, having trouble at work, having marital problems, struggling financially, etc. This can impact the quality of relationships between generations. If you generally don’t show up as your true self in order to not worry a loved one, it’s really difficult for them to understand and accept you as the person you are. This distance between adult children and parents is sometimes inevitable, perhaps due to relational trauma or the parents’ lack of validation and support. However, I’ve worked with many people who’ve been able to increase the degree of emotional intimacy with their parents by being honest and providing feedback.

I’d rather figure it out on my own.

For me, this captures the negative impact of American hyper-individualism that tells us we are supposed to face things alone and that needing others is a weakness. We are socialized to believe that being “independent” is a strength in all situations when in reality, real strength is the flexibility to sometimes be independent and sometimes be interdependent. There’s a real fear of vulnerability embedded in this sentiment too. I can’t show people what I’m really going through. I can’t appear weak. I’m too ashamed to reveal that I’m going through this and need help. This type of thinking really concerns me because it tends to perpetuate hiding parts of oneself, isolation, and loneliness.

I think a surprising part of the therapy process is uncovering messages from society and culture that people may not have realized play a huge role in how they think and feel. We are all shaped by messages from not just our immediate environments (such as family, neighborhood, and school) but also our more global environments (such as media, national events, global events). Part of a robust therapeutic process is examining how cultural and societal ideas shaped a person’s life and whether or not they fit a person’s values. A good question to explore might be, “Where did this idea of handling things on your own come from?” A helpful follow-up might be, “When is it helpful to do things alone and when is it not helpful to do things alone?”

It’s actually not that big of a problem but if it gets to be bigger, then I’ll consider asking for help.

Hello minimization! I see you. This is a very common response and is often related to surviving trauma. When trauma survivors carry on with life without having processed their experiences and memories, they tend to think that relying on others is unsafe. Of course, things vary a lot from individual to individual, but at the heart of the problem for many survivors is the idea that they need to maintain as much control as possible at all times in order to be safe. That means, they don’t share what they are going through because information like that, once it gets shared with someone else might feel out of one’s control. Many survivors don’t want others to know things about them, even people who are viewed as being close or part of their support system.

Minimization can be a strategy to avoid the possibility of being vulnerable (and potentially unsafe) with others. If I convince myself that what I’m experiencing is not that big a deal, then I can avoid the discomfort of sharing what I’m going through and asking for help. I think it’s helpful to think about a preventive stance with mental health. Rather than believing that we have to wait until we’re at “rock bottom” to reach out for help, it might be more helpful to practice believing that we want to get support lined up for a problem before things get really bad for us. An analogy I sometimes use is that we generally would not say “If this tumor gets bigger, then I’ll go to the doctor,” right? When we are proactive, we are taking the best care of ourselves, which we all deserve.

I should be able to handle it on my own.

This is similar to “I’d rather figure it out on my own” but the “should” gives it that extra self-critical sting. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney famously explained that the neurotic personality is greatly influenced by “The Tyranny of the Shoulds.” This “tyranny” describes a mental state where individuals are constantly driven by an idealized self-image and a set of rigid, perfectionistic standards. These "shoulds" are often unconscious and stem from childhood experiences and societal expectations. If a person has gotten in the habit of telling themselves, “I should be able to handle any problem on my own,” it is likely the case that this is something they internalized from an experience in childhood. Perhaps they asked for help or support and did not receive it. Perhaps they witnessed a parental figure refusing to be vulnerable, even if it cost them pain and suffering. For a lot of AANHPI individuals, they may have witnessed loved ones showing stoicism as a way to cope with hardship and decided that is the “right” way to handle things.

Whatever the case may be, when a singular approach becomes the only approach you know, it’s like opening a toolbox and finding that you only have hammers. You can use those hammers to put a bunch of nails in the wall but you’ll never get a complete and stable house with only hammers at your disposal. In other words, being flexible is part of being emotionally mature and having the ability to discern when you need to go it alone and when you need help.

I don’t want it to be used against me.

This is often an indication that a person has been hurt in the past after being vulnerable or may have experienced significant relational trauma. If a person feels ready to explore these experiences in therapy, processing these memories can be productive and healing. As part of this work, it would be helpful to discuss ideas around trust and what realistic expectations you can have related to trust. In general, I suggest that people think about trust as not necessarily binary, as in, I can or can’t trust someone or someone is or is not trustworthy. It’s more helpful to think about what type of trust is important for which relationship. Finally, it’s important to think about how to re-build trust after being wounded in some way when the violation occurs in a generally healthy and non-abusive relationship.

I don’t trust people.

This is similar to “I don’t want it to be used against me.” There’s a defensive stance here when it comes to other people. It has to do with not having healed from relational trauma that likely occurred during a formative time in one’s life (usually childhood). This sentiment is often accompanied by the tendency to isolate and withdraw and subsequent loneliness. Sometimes when we have experienced relational trauma, we have not had the opportunities to develop skills for moving through the friction, tension, and conflict that are normal occurrences in meaningful relationships. So the bind is this: I’m afraid of trusting others and I also don’t know what to do if someone hurts me. This bind can be a powerful reason to avoid emotional intimacy altogether. But of course, ultimately, many people end up feeling unhappy and unfulfilled when they go through life without allies who see and accept them for who they truly are.

No one else needs help, so why do I?

This sentiment is often related to the fear of being seen as weak or incompetent or less than. There might be longstanding issues related to self-worth. There might be a habit of social comparison that tends to put that individual in an unfavorable light. It’s also a distorted view of others—that others are somehow strong and self-sufficient. I sometimes hear this as “Other people seem to be doing just fine.” There might be some projection happening here. Ultimately, the emotionally mature adult can set aside comparing oneself to others and focus on what they themselves need in a given scenario.

An Opportunity for Change

Rather than viewing these barriers to help-seeking as “problems,” I think of them as openings for meaningful, productive dialogue. The more you understand why you operate the way you do, the more empowered you are to make better choices for yourself. That’s the ultimate goal of therapy—to support people in aligning what they want with what they do, right? Want emotional support and closeness? There are things to do to make that happen. Want health? There are things to do to make that happen. Want satisfaction in your work life? There are things to do to make that happen. You get the idea.