I talked a couple weeks ago about how asking for help is brave. I have found that one of the barriers I face to asking for help is that I often don’t know what “help” would look like. Sometimes, brave or not, I’m too confused to ask for help.
I am often slow to realize what I need, recognizing most clearly what I need when I realize I am not getting it. That makes for awkward timing. I’ll be angry that no one called me on an anniversary related to my husband, and that will trigger me to realize I wanted someone to call me on the anniversary. I didn’t know I wanted that until I didn’t get it. By that time it would be counter-productive to text someone in my angry state and say, “Hey, call me! This is an important day to me!”
Ideally, I would have realized a day or so before the anniversary that I would want a call and then I could have texted a friend to ask for a call on that day. I’m certain that any friend I would ask that of would happily deliver. The problem isn’t with the friends who didn’t call but with me not realizing in a timely fashion that I would want a call.
And on a related note, I usually hate getting phone calls and most of my friends know that. One of the ways they show their love for me is by not calling!
So the trick to effectively asking for help is to identify the need before I have the need or at least before anger or overwhelm set in.
Simply asking myself what I need or want is often not at all helpful. For example, often when I’m feeling intense grief, when I ask myself what I want or need, I answer with the self-evident, “I need my husband back!” In that scenario, it’s just not helpful in any way to ask that question. It just makes me angry on top of feeling grief.
I also find myself getting tangled up in semantics. Parsing out needs from wants and the possible from the impossible isn’t helpful and actually just makes things worse. Most of the time if I ask myself what I want or need, the answer is I want or need my husband back, and the impossibility of that just hurts, all the way into my gut.
I’ve been experimenting with some different questions to ask that feel a little more helpful:
- What would make this situation easier?
- What would make this situation less stressful or upsetting?
- What do I want more of or less of in this moment?
Sometimes the answers to these questions are surprising. Here are some answers I’ve come up with lately:
- What would make this situation easier? A nap, giving myself permission to not think about it for a while, giving myself permission to think about it without apologizing, going to Tom’s bench to talk to him about it
- What would make this situation less stressful or upsetting? Taking a deep breath, journaling about it, calling a friend to vent, going for a walk or working out, holding somebody’s hand, chanting or meditating, listening to a meditation, sitting outside and listening to the leaves rustle in the breeze
- What do I want more of or less of in this moment? A glass of water, more time with the dogs, more laughter with someone who loved Tom, less feeling pressure to have the answer
A couple interesting things I notice about these answers are that they are much more varied and thought-provoking than “I want my husband back” and that most of them don’t involve asking for help at all—they are things I can easily do for myself. I’m an introvert, so it makes sense that some of the forms of help I would most want do not involve social interaction with others.
Which brings me to my final and perhaps most profound observation about the subject of asking for help: sometimes it’s ourselves we need to ask for help from.