When Seeking Support is a Strength
My dad was sitting at the dining room table reading the local paper when my mom finally got up the courage to say, “I need help with something.”
He sat for a beat with the Casper Wyoming Tribune still held up in front of his face, and then deigned to sloooowly lower it to reveal the irritated look on his face. He sighed as he deliberately folded the newspaper to place it on the table.
“Either I ask you,” she said, “or I go to the elders. I don’t know who else to ask.”
Mom doesn’t remember what happened after that, but his initial reaction has stuck with her for 40 years, and she never asked him for help again.
In my family, you didn’t ask for help.
If anything was going wrong, the appropriate response was private prayers to God. Otherwise, asking for help felt like a request to have someone disappointed in me and discounted for doing/thinking/feeling something wrong.
In our small congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, we avoided going to the elders. It felt shameful, and could lead to public shunning.
That was my experience-- what was yours?
What was it like growing up in your family? Did you feel like you could ask for help when you needed it? What happened when you asked for help?
After my dad took his life when I was in my early 20’s, I began drinking and smoking pot regularly, and obsessively. I wasn’t honest with myself or others about what was really going on with me. I continued to numb myself with the very things that were making everything worse, and I felt ashamed of it.
I was also afraid of telling someone what was happening, because that meant I’d have to change.
About seven years before I finally became sober, a friend who had just gotten sober herself tried to do what felt like an intervention with me. I broke down crying, and finally said the words “I think I need help.”
I told my friend I needed help, but I’ve never considered myself an alcoholic, and I didn’t want to go to AA.
So what did I do next? I decided to handle it myself by taking a break.
I got all my alcohol and pot out of the house, and went about two months without it.
During this time, I counted down the days to my trip to Turkey, where my brother was getting married. I figured that break was enough proof that I didn’t have a real problem, and when I got back I returned to drinking and smoking again.
Does that sound familiar?
Seven years later, when I did finally decide to start my initial experiment of one year sober, I couldn’t figure out how to identify myself. I did need some kind of help, but the term “alcoholic” didn’t resonate with me… at all. I felt like it would be more harmful to think of myself that way.
At the time, I hadn’t heard of “gray-area drinking” (and I still haven’t heard anyone talk about “gray-area pot smoking”). I didn’t know there was an entire spectrum of brain disfunction.
Until I read This Naked Mind by Annie Grace after already being sober for a year, I still secretly harbored a question about whether my obsessive thinking had been a weakness, or failure on my part.
Although I didn’t use an official recovery program to become sober, and I’ve never called myself an alcoholic, I did rely on help from others, and I couldn’t have done it without that support.
What was my support?
What worked for me was a patchwork of resources that included: learning meditation, doing exercises from books , listening to podcasts, attending full moon women’s circles, nature/spiritual/women’s retreats, experience design workshops, and other women’s empowerment workshops.
I had accountability from everyone that I told about my one year experiment. I found the two sober guys at work, and told them how I was doing every time I saw them in the breakroom. Not to mention I had the benefit of my husband-- a fully supportive partner.
The longer I’m sober, the better I’m getting at identifying when I need help, in what areas, and ways to get that support. I love my ever changing patchwork of helpers and mentors.
What has become more and more clear to me over the last 3 ½ years of sobriety, is that asking for help is an empowering skill.
I am more capable as an individual because I get help from other people on a regular basis.
How did I make this change, after a lifetime of trying to do everything on my own?
What allows me to get help before I start spiraling out of control, like my dad did?
Moment-to-moment mindful self-awareness of my internal experience
Willingness to reveal the truth of my experience
Understanding better how addiction works (thanks to Annie Grace’s This Naked Mind, which removed any residual shame)
Being around other badass sober women who are proof that I’ve chosen a valuable way to live
I wanted to end this post with something that said, “If you think you need help, but don’t know where to start, you can…”
But then I thought, why not ask you instead?
What advice do you have for someone who thinks they might need help in an area of their life, but doesn’t know where to start?