I grew up in a culture that taught fierce independence, never asking for help, and pushing through, even when hurting. I have been working to learn something different for a long time, and I’m still working at it.
Like many people, I have countless stories about how I learned that I wasn’t supposed to need anything. My mother was told by her mother, “if you’re going to feel bad, whether you’re at home or at work, might as well go to work and get something done.”
I worked in places where I could ask for help, but my Black coworker couldn’t. If I did, I would be given help or thanked for being a team player. If she did it, she would be criticized for not trying to solve problems, for being a burden, for not knowing how to do her job. There is nothing wrong with asking for help and asking for help isn’t safe for everyone all of the time.
I had a colleague tell me that I was rude and a bad facilitator for correcting her on my pronouns while we were co-facilitating. I was told that it was too distracting and upsetting to her, and her train of thought was the most important. (More important than my wellbeing? More important than the wellbeing of the group who needs to see respectful behavior modeled? More important than demonstrating the skill of handling a simple and kind correct?)
There are the even harsher stories, times when people blamed me for bad things that had happened to me, rejected my requests for help, and so much more. Many trans/nonbinary survivors have similar experiences at some point in their lives. These events shape us; they can affect our thinking, our brain chemistry, our trust in others, and so much more.
I also have countless stories of finding ways to ask for help, having people support me, and finding ways to support others. These stories, the kind ones, the compassionate ones, the sometimes messy ones – don’t always make as much of a dent in my brain. I wish they did. I wish that the first thing that came to mind when thinking about help wasn’t rejection, but all the myriads of times support has been there. My best friend quietly sitting with me to watch tv, when I was too depressed for anything else; care packages of food from friends and relatives; career advice and job openings sent along from colleagues – these are all small actions that made a big difference in my life.
“How can I help? Do you need anything?” I get these texts all the time. I send these texts probably way too often. Getting help is often not as easy as a simple text message though. For me, there’s several steps, which all sort of overlap into a bizarre Venn diagram/roller coaster of a process.
1. Knowing that I need help
I watched a webinar about long COVID. A panelist shared that where they live, there are home helpers for people with disabilities. They were struggling to work and get through their day (in ways strikingly similar to how I struggle). The home help agency did an assessment and determined they were eligible for 35 hours a week of assistance. This allowed the person to go to work part-time. I admit that I was shocked. The idea that people could just get support to make life easier absolutely aligns with my values, but I almost never see it in action, especially government-funded!
Like many of us, I am far more generous towards others than I am towards myself. To convince myself that I do need help, I sometimes have to project my needs onto others. What would I say to a friend in my circumstances? What actions reflect my values about caring for everyone (self-included)?
Sometimes knowing that we need help is a lifetime of work. Sometimes it’s about recognizing patterns in ourselves. One way we can start accepting that help is useful can be identifying ways others have supported us. For example, many people find body-doubling really helpful. Others like to talk through their feelings. Some people find it easier to cook when they share a meal. All of these things are forms of “help.”
2. Knowing that I “deserve” help/have the right to help/that it’s okay to ask for help
The culture I was brought up in is a strange mix of fierce independence and self-reliance alongside generosity and helpfulness to others. While success is seen as not needing other people, it’s also important that anyone who shows up at your house is fed and offered iced tea. While this has taught me to care and to offer support, it hasn’t allowed me much space to ask for help.
Once I said something to a therapist about deserving support. He told me he didn’t like that word – deserve. It implies that there are people who don’t deserve support, if some people do deserve it. Instead, help is something everyone has the right to. I try to remember that everyone has a right to help whenever my brain tells me I don’t deserve someone’s care.
3. Knowing what to ask for/figuring out what I need
Okay, but what do I need? This one is really hard for me. Partly because there are so many things that I do a specific way, it’s hard to ask someone else to step in (ex: I buy groceries by wandering around and getting stuff on sale. Asking someone to shop for me would mean planning ahead for what I want and need and making a list. Sometimes that is more work than shopping is!). Other times I don’t know what would help – maybe it feels like nothing will alleviate the pain (emotional or physical) or maybe I’m too overwhelmed to even know where to start.
Here are a few things that have helped me:
Emotional Safety Planning/Crisis planning tools: These resources encourage us to have conversations about the support we need at times when we aren’t in crisis. By asking specific questions, these tools can help us to identify what helps and what doesn’t. For me, these are most helpful if I remember I don’t have to know all the answers right away. Some of the questions are better for me as conversation starters. For example: When I’m angry, I want …… I find it helpful to talk this through with a trusted person. We can think together about times I’ve been angry, what I liked and didn’t like, or what I might want to try.
Once we think through some of those questions, we could share our crisis plan. That could look like:
- Keeping a copy on the fridge so you and others can remember it.
- Carrying a copy of important information or reminders with you.
- Talking through the plan with a friend or trusted person.
- Saving reminders in your phone or calendar.
Permission for things to be different: Giving myself permission to be okay with things getting done differently than how I would do them has been such a great shift. There are so many times in life when the process isn’t that important – does it matter how someone else does the dishes or cooks dinner if it gets done? This is not always an easy shift to make. For some of us, the need to have things happen in a certain way or to control our environment, may be a need that has come from experiences of trauma. Each of us can assess what change or difference we are able to tolerate before we embrace things being different fully.
Paying attention to what I do, what makes things easier/harder or better/worse: So many of the ways that we take care of ourselves we don’t give a ton of thought to. Trans people often get asked if they would like other people to correct folks who misgender them. I’ve found many of us are like – “uh, I don’t know, I guess, sure, whatever, umm….” That’s often what I say.
Let’s be honest, what I really want is to not even think about it. In the meantime, I can pay a little more attention to how it feels when someone corrects someone else on my behalf and what it feels like when someone doesn’t.
Another example is with chores – by paying attention to the steps I need to take; I can better give people directions on how they can help me. With cooking – I noticed that I was avoiding chopping vegetables – it was just too exhausting. Which means, that if someone was at my house and wanted to do a thing – I could ask them to cut up the broccoli for me.
4. Asking for help
I have three main ways of asking for help: specific asks, general conversations, and responses to requests.
Specific asks are things like, “I need someone to go with me to this appointment. Are you free and is that something you could do?”
General conversations are more like, “I realize I need support. It’s been hard coping with all this anti-trans hate in the world. Can we talk about it?” Then the conversation might include processing what each of us needs, what we are able to offer, and what would be helpful. This might include some specific asks (“are you a person I can call if I’m having a panic attack?”) as well as a broader discussion of how you want to be in each other’s lives.
I use this method with trusted people who often offer a variety of supports. We might have a conversation when situations change in our lives (I’m about to break up with someone, can we talk?) as well as on a somewhat regular basis across the course of our friendship. For example, one person close to me really hates the question “how are you?” I, however, love that question. If you do not ask me directly how I am, I will absolutely not tell you. At some point, we noticed this difference and talked about it. Now we have tools to support each other.
Responding to requests. This overlaps with receiving help. Sometimes people say, “can I do anything to help?” Or, “what can I do?” My first instinct is to say, “nothing, I’m okay.” Now, I am practicing accepting their help. However, this means that when I say, “yes, you can do something,” that I often need to figure out what it is that they can do!
Typically, this will take the form of a specific request, if I have one (“Can you pick up my prescription?”), or a few examples of helpful things (“some things I’ve found helpful are having someone drop off food, walk the dog, or text me funny memes – are any of those things something you are up for?”)
5. Receiving
Accepting help can be hard, very hard. Everyone has different barriers to accepting help. Here are a few common ones: worrying the person isn’t sincere with the offer; not wanting the help offered; feeling like a “burden;” wanting to be able to do the thing without help. Many survivors of violence have been hurt or betrayed by people they trusted or have been blamed for the harm that was done to them. These things can have major impacts on our ability to trust others and to accept their support.
Again, I’m a huge fan of talking about things. With one person in my life, we agreed that we would only offer to pay for things for the other person if we really meant it. That gave the other person permission to say yes without arguing or worrying about how much the other person actually wanted to pay. It was such a relief to just be able to accept a coffee from them or buy them a donut without stressing.
This approach doesn’t just have to do with money. You could tell someone, “I’m working on accepting help from people, so if you offer something, I will do my best to say yes. Please only offer things if you mean it and know that you can take it back if you aren’t able to do something.”
I also “trick” my brain into letting people help me, by reminding myself that they want to help, so really, I’m doing them a favor by saying yes. This also helps me accept help with less urgent things. One person loves to rearrange my pantry – great, it’s a mess, and I can’t do it. It’s not urgent, but it is helpful, and they like it. Someone else enjoys complaining about stuff. Perfect – it’s much easier to grumble to them.
For people close to me, I often try to learn their helping strategies. Then, when the person who always wants to problem-solve gives me advice I didn’t ask for, I remember that this is how they show love. I can still tell them to stop, ask for a different sort of support, or ignore the advice, but I’m able to appreciate the form of help more.
Asking for help is complicated.
Asking for help can often feel complicated. It may seem like we have to know all the answers, all the time, but we don’t. A friend of mine recently came out to friends with new pronouns. They shared how hard it was to figure out how to correct their friends when they messed up. It occurred to me that they could just ask their friends – how would you like to be corrected? They of course don’t have to go along with the friends’ ideas, but opening up a direct conversation can make a huge difference.
We all navigate different considerations when asking for help. These include how we were raised to think about help, how people have responded to our requests in the past, and so much more. There’s no one solution that works for everyone. A lot of what influences us may be out of our control – such as how other people perceive us or how they respond. The world is not safe for everybody to exist freely and fully in, and it is not always safe for everyone to express their needs. We need things to change so that we can live in a world that values and has space for all of us.
As we strive to live in a world where everyone can express themselves and where people’s needs are respected, I think about how I can stay rooted in my values. I believe that people are interdependent and interconnected. I believe we need each other and that that’s a good thing. I believe life should be easy. When I can integrate this belief into my actions, it becomes easier to respect my own needs and ask for help.