Asking for Help When Help Feels Few and Far Between

Lately, it’s been feeling like being ready to ask for help doesn’t ensure that people are willing to provide it. No matter what people say, simply asking might result in two outcomes: cue the proverbial sound of crickets, or interactions that leave you feeling… well, wanting.

In recent weeks, I’ve been parsing a string of interactions that threw me right back to childhood:

• I pissed off a supervisor for taking initiative that wasn’t mine to take.
• I felt excluded when she invited a coworker to sit with her in between shifts.
• I felt chastised after emailing another manager on a totally different matter… and he didn’t feel it necessary to be as proactive as I suggested, leaving me feeling generally overzealous.
• I wondered what I’d done wrong when I asked how a coworker was and she glossed it over, or seemed not to hear me.

Normal people would say she’s just in a quiet mood, or simply oblivious. Hell, how many times have I, as an ADHD’er, failed to hear what someone else said, or felt too overwhelmed to engage?

I knew I needed this job to help heal my sense of belonging, among other things. Yet after being recognized, maybe even sought out, for long-buried leadership skills and customer service — conscientiousness pays off in crisis  — I realized my weakness in vulnerability was my real lesson.

In other words, I can navigate emergencies all day long, but that's just survival mode: my comfort zone. Real trust and connection is forged in between, and that’s where I fall flat.

I joke that I’m naturally awkward, but…

My challenges with social skills are linked to my fear of disapproval and my difficulty feeling like I belong anywhere. If anything, being my vulnerable self, living my truth out loud, deeply triggers my inner child.

I assume fault because that’s how I was raised. I learned I was responsible for family moods, expected to be their “sunshine” but also never too assertive or not demure enough.

Confrontation has always been extremely difficult for me to engage in. This was compounded by people who, when faced with a grievance, turned it back around on me, or else told me they didn’t want to share their grievances or feedback for fear of my reaction.

I’m thus hypervigilant to the slightest perceived shifts in mood or temperament. After many years of work, my inner child or nervous system still wants to default to “fawn”: trying to make it better, even if I’m not at fault.

But fawning is codependency, or a form of control — attempting to manipulate others to change their behavior. And I don’t want to do that anymore, either.

I’ve begun to move from questioning my social skills

I now question things like where my responsibility versus others’ begins and ends. Yet changing my mental habit from assuming fault — or that I’m too much or not enough — to working on believing that it’s “not about me” feels dangerous.

What if I honestly did offend them, and they’re too uncomfortable to say anything? My introversion, I know because I’ve been told, can seem like snobbishness.

Then again, I also know these are projections. People see their own shadows reflected in me, assuming malicious or insensitive intent based on past experiences or worse, their own malice or insensitivities.

From there, I believe, people don’t want to help those they deem unworthy — who reflect the traits they dislike in themselves.

That’s where community gets tricky for me: we are encouraged not to care about what other people think, but so many people tie their giving to others’ conformity to their values.

At the same time, people seem so loath to speak to us, eager to avoid confrontation, that often we’re stuck between the truth and its distortions: our own as well as others’.

So is it on me to reflect more favorable traits, or is this another form of fawning and codependency?

Often the kind of compromise we’ve learned is so crucial to get along feels like capitulation, submission — there are power differentials we don’t like to examine, possibly because they remind us of all the things not in our control.

Because part of my trauma is feeling the need to prove myself worthy of respect and even love, I’ve only ever approached my interactions with this goal in mind.

Yet, realizing how this approach kept retraumatizing me, I’m in a vacuum. I listen to coworkers talking to each other about how they spent their weekends, whose child had a baby, who is moving or making a big purchase or a job move.

I’ve never felt comfortable with these kinds of conversations, and yet they are the glue that bonds people. People who feel cared about show up for one another and the work they do.

Yet I’ve spent most of my life believing that no one can possibly be that interested in me or my life. That makes it harder to come up with details to share.

On the reverse, I can struggle to retain details, especially the more people I hear them from. It isn’t that I don’t care about them, but rather, that I’m used to people being temporary. They move on from me, or I move on from them, usually very literally — someone changes jobs or homes, neighborhoods, whole states.

Plus, the down side of that social glue is the way it can include gossip. At worst, this gossip reflects disapproval of loved ones’ choices like employment, spending habits, marital and parental choices, and so on. Smear campaigns designed to keep a person in their place factor in, too.

This is all what confounds our efforts to organize and bond in community. I’m told that being myself will allow me to find “my people,” but:

What if it’s all about engaging with those I already have?

I’ve tried to figure out what kinds of vulnerable details I might share with coworkers who seem to have decided they don’t like me:

• “I know I’m pretty enthusiastic about this job, but it’s more because I’m so grateful to have it.”
• “I’ve had a really tough few years, and I’m still learning how to do confidence.”
• “I’d really appreciate more mentoring from other leads.”

But just in case my words aren’t enough — there’s that not enough again — I’m working on practicing consistency in what I do and say, how I do and say it, showing up, and once again, observing who else shows up, when, and how.

Even something as small as a recipe is huge when I can remember my promise to provide it. I haven’t always remembered my promises, dissociated or distracted as I was, so focused on meeting others’ expectations.

I try to remember this when people don’t show up for me the way I’d like. Everyone these days is in some form of survival mode. It’s just harder to show up, much less really connect. But maybe it’s in the showing up that incremental connections are formed, and this really can be enough.

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