Asking For Help

I woke up this morning wondering what kind of help I need.

This is a harder question than it seems, especially for those of us who were trained in the value of independence. As a child, I looked forward to being an adult so that I would no longer need to ask for help. Being dependent always felt like something I needed to fix. The message I heard from grown-ups in my life was ‘Take care of yourself and don’t be needy. Be a big boy.’

Well, I’m as big as I’m going to get and find myself still dependent on the people around me. Of course, I appreciate this dependence more than I used to. Needing others, asking for help, giving help are part of what it means to be alive. Marshall Rosenberg, creator of ‘Nonviolent Communication’ claimed that our needs are our gifts to each other. We are, he wrote, hard-wired to receive great satisfaction from helping each other.

This doesn’t make sense to me when I think about my own needs which often feel like they must be an imposition on others. But when I think about times I’ve been able to make a real difference in someone else’s life, I feel a sense of fulfillment and gratefulness that I was allowed to give something of value. We all want to be able to give something of value to people we care about and to the world we live in. Few things are as satisfying as making a difference. While parenting young children (and older children too) is incredibly demanding, it is also incredibly satisfying. To be able to support and protect and guide another human being is a deep privilege.

The traditional model of giver being the powerful one and the receiver being the weaker one who is in debt relies on a kind of common-sense theoretical thinking that is not really true. There are different roles and different levels of capabilities and influence, but beneath these differences is a web of interconnection where all the roles are necessary and equally valuable.

But many of us are more comfortable being the helper rather than the helpee. We’d rather be the one being thanked than the one expressing gratitude. We’d rather not be beholden to anyone for their kindness. But the truth is that we’re all dependent on each other’s consideration. Blanche DuBois said it memorably in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.

So if we all need each other and depend on each other, can we give up our need to appear to be grown-up and independent? Let’s be grown-up and interdependent. And maybe, if we get really advanced on the path, we can even be grown-up and needy. But that is probably a higher level of development than most of us can aspire to.

What is the help I need? How can I clarify and ask for what I really want? It’s precarious business, to be self-aware of our incompleteness, our longing, our dreams. What do I really want? What do I really need?

When I was writing my first book, I asked for help from someone who worked with aspiring writers to support them in clarifying their ideas and intentions. She coached me to ask two different groups of friends and colleagues to come together to help me understand more deeply what it was that I was trying to say. It was a little awkward to make the calls, but every person I asked was happy to help out by being part of the process. And the two sessions I convened gave me information about myself that I could not have received any other way and were critical to my discovery of the book that it turned out I had already written.

Part of the trick of asking for help is really meaning it. That’s part of the danger as well. Asking for help when the stakes are low (‘I could really take care of this myself.’) is quite different from asking when you really mean it.

So the question with me this morning is ‘What is it I could ask for that would make the biggest difference in my life?’ Or, perhaps starting a little less grandiose, ‘What is one next step on my path and what is the help I need to take it?’