Sometimes we are hurting deeply, emotionally, but we don’t, consciously, know that we are hurting. To acknowledge emotional pain, and that we need help is a sign of health. Or sometimes we know that we are in pain but we don’t really know how to ask for help.
Perhaps when we asked for help as children we were either ignored altogether, or the help that we were offered by significant adults in our lives was not empathic with our needs, or it was conditional on achieving goals that were impossible to achieve, or someone got angry. (For example, as a child, being true to myself, described in this post – about half-way down).
So we never learned the art of identifying what we need, asking for appropriate help, and then responding positively to the help given.
Indeed, our primary mission in life became finding someone, anyone, who will take away our pain.
But, because it is very difficult to say I-want-you-to-take-away-my-pain directly, it is usually expressed in code – or, indirectly, i.e. what many people would label as unassertively.
The behaviour that we exhibit (which is perceived by others to be needy) is usually a cry for help, but becoming aware of it, identifying it and then articulating is a different matter.
To sum up, in order to ask for help and then ensure that the help we get works for us we need to:
~ Have the ability to discriminate between what we need and what we don’t need.
~ Have the confidence to inform the helper that what they are offering is not what is needed, and either ask for something different or go somewhere else.
~ Have the skills, and be comfortable enough with intimacy, to appreciate the help given, be grateful for it, internalise it and build on it.
These tasks are challenging for everyone, including adults who, as children, grew up in a good enough family with reasonably secure attachment.
If we have been very hurt we might find them even more difficult. It’s not that we don’t have the intelligence to do the tasks, it’s because our experience of trauma:
~ Dulls our ability to identify, refine, and then express our needs.
~ Reduces our confidence to the point where we often believe that we are wrong in our analysis of events. [1]
~ Causes the build-up of emotional armour that inhibits the intimacy that is necessary to admit that help is needed and ask for it.
The third one is of particular importance. Asking for help with an acute emotional problem is an intimate act which, as I said above, can be challenging at the best of times. If our attachment experience as a child has been disorganised, we may perceive giving away power (which we have to do when genuinely asking for help) as being unsafe.
[1]. In a previous post I identified the type of prisoner that this website is concerned with. I believe that identification of need is where, for example, prisoners of conscience, or prisoners of war, and people who are sent to prison for committing a crime, differ. The former are usually acutely aware of their needs and can articulate them clearly to achieve a particular end. The latter, generally, struggle greatly in this area.