Background
For the past year or so I’ve been seeing a (very awesome and excellent) psychologist who I’d happily recommend to everyone and anyone were it not for potential conflict-of-interests. Usually when I book an appointment I have a topic in mind that I want to address, and in preparation I write out notes for myself to help formulate my thoughts. This time round I wondered if maybe posting these publicly on my personal blog might be useful at some random point in the future.
The Problem
As far as I can remember, for my entire life, I’ve never had a natural tendency to ask for help except for specific situations:
- If I recognise the topic/question requires consulting with someone with a certain level of expertise/domain knowledge that would take me an exorbitant amount of knowledge and time to amass.
- If I know I am able to give something in return i.e. a transactional process
- At work: if they fulfill a work role that’s technically not in my job description
- If I judge the amount of work to be insurmountable
Reasons I don’t ask for help
Fear of Judgment
This is probably the obvious one, but for me personally I’ve found that the more I get to know someone the more comfortable I am in asking at least quick questions or small requests. Bigger favours, not so much. I suppose the exception is that if I haven’t met said person but other people have vetted them as trustworthy, then I’d have a bit more confidence in reaching out.
I’m capable of doing it myself anyway (but sometimes forget about time investment required)
One of my personal principles is that “no job or task is below me”. For example I hate cleaning, editing subtitles, doing a print run, delivering parcels, but if worst comes to worst I’ll still grit my teeth and get it done.
It takes quite a while for me to identify/realise a situation as problematic enough to require help.
In other words, there’s an absence of a threshold/trigger in my mental model. This is also quite noticeable when it comes to cleaning my own place – it’s not something I do regularly, it’s only when it ‘feels’ bad enough to annoy me such that putting in the effort to clean it would override having to bear with the irritation.
Who do I ask, and can I trust them? But I don’t really want to bother them, they’re probably too busy…
In my head there’s a giant balancing act of trying to be considerate of other people, but also not wanting to be disappointed with being rejected, which means I have to temper my expectations in a way that I shouldn’t technically need their help when reaching out, but if that’s the case why would i reach out? And I’m happy to admit that my brain’s just being fucking stupid, but I’m not sure which direction to think, and now I sort of understand the whole “When people strike up a conversation with you, pretend to be nice, but secretly need something from you.”
Digging Deep
Hyper-independence
It’s reasonably safe to conclude that I’m in a situation where I feel very very inclined to do everything myself, and sometimes it can be difficult for me to reasonably delegate tasks.
Any kind of argument on a social level sort of…just doesn’t work for me. For example, asking someone for help is seen favourably, and certainly, sometimes people ask other people for help as an excuse to socialise/hangout.
This doesn’t mean I necessarily refuse help, though. In fact I welcome when other people take the initiative. Although obviously I can’t continue to operate this way.
Fear.
There is surprisingly a lot of things in my psyche that I can trace down to the basic primal fear emotion, and this is no different:
- Fear of their not understanding my request properly
- Fear of me not wording the request properly
- Fear of them not doing things the way I wanted or slightly differently than what I’d anticipated
- Fear of inconveniencing them
And probably a whole nonsensical lot more. So when my brain throws all of these up, I feel the need to carefully consider all that, when it’d just be so much easier to not bother.
What have I tried so far?
Honestly I thought I could start inching towards conquering these fears by asking questions and making simple requests (e.g. a question via email, the person next to me in the office for a small favour), and for the most part it’s slowly working.
But I don’t know how to progress from there, and given that I have something coming up soon where I’m definitely going to need to practice a bit more confidence in this particular task, that’s why I’m seeing my psychologist.
Post-Consultation Thoughts
So it turns out that the underlying thing I couldn’t realise, and was stuck on trying to name, was fundamentally a fear of appearing and being vulnerable. And hooboy did that open the cover on a bunch of emotions I’ve not felt in a while, spending half a day feeling utterly restless and still trying to do things while my brain re-jumbled itself to make sense of this realisation.
It really is one thing to know that men in general struggle with this due to societal pressures as well as the way they’re brought up, but I can think of why this has completely eluded me:
- The medium I’m comfortable being vulnerable in is through text. When I type on this blog, in Discord to friends, and on social media. But not ever in person.
- I don’t have anyone in my life (apart from my psychologist and maybe one close friend) that I’d be comfortable being vulnerable with in person.
- Interpersonal interactions at work (university, academia, teaching) is pretty superficial and surface-level, and are usually in very structured contexts (e.g. lectures, seminars, tutorials, topical sessions), and rarely have I made opportunities to hang out with workmates and just talk about life.
So the obvious homework here is to aim for low-stakes situations in-person where I try to reach out and be just that little bit more vulnerable. Try this for a few months, then check back in with my psychologist.
One thing that I also commented on in our consultation is that when I’m confronted with or processing a (usually new and non-mathematical) situation, it’s always an emotional fear response first. My brain will explode with thoughts and ideas, mostly negative, and the more unfamiliar the situation the more likely I am to freeze as I take a few seconds to process my thoughts. Any positive emotions of appreciation and the like rarely manifest themselves until 1-2 days later at the minimum. The same usually happens when I have to make some commitment (e.g. hang out with a group of friends), my brain will always start throwing up all the ways it could go wrong, overplan the trip, and constantly scream at me when any mishap happens.
I just hope it gets easier the more times I push through these initial fear responses.
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