Asking for help is hard. There are no two ways about it. If anything, when you’re in a position where you really need help, you’re probably also at your most vulnerable. Which is also at a time when it feels the most scary.
From my perspective, asking for mental or emotional help might be the most terrifying of all. And in addition to the stigma in society about mental illness that still exists, there’s also the stigmas we might have internalised ourselves, such as expectations we put on ourselves to manage everything that comes our way, including our own ill-health. This can become especially crippling if you try to live your life as a self-sufficient person, who is independent and able, and provides for themselves. Surely you should also be able to handle your own emotional wellbeing too?
For the most part, we probably can and do, but needing a helping hand doesn’t make us any less capable as human beings. Asking for help, in fact, can just be another tool at our disposal that helps our overall quality of life. As humans, we naturally want to interact with and reach out to others. Usually we do that by sharing our life experience with each other, teaching each other skills, and generally learning about the world that way. It can often lead to us growing as people, which is probably why we are all so different!
Furthermore, the fact that we have differences means we get to draw on each others skills and try to share what we can, which tends to keep the world going round.
More importantly though, when it comes to our emotional needs, sometimes being in the middle of a situation means we don’t have the perspective that an outsider might have. And said outsider might actually be able to show us what we could not see before, when we were stood in a different position, looking at it from our own perspective. A therapist in particular, is there to show you how to use the tools that already exist within you.
So sometimes we need a helping hand, and it takes a great amount of inner strength to do it. But asking for help is what makes us human, and that inner strength is what ultimately makes us better.