On The Burden Of Self-Reliance & Why It's So Hard To Ask For Help When You Need It

Let's explore self-reliance as an adaptive response using Internal Family Systems & polyvagal theory & identify how to unwind this response (hint: it doesn't involve bypassing our protectors).

I see this theme all the time for trauma survivors and parentified adult children: asking for help when they need it feels too threatening, so shouldering all the stress and responsibility feels like the easiest thing to do.

If you too fall into this dynamic, it can be helpful to know that there is embodied wisdom to how this adaptive response to stress and trauma develops. Chronic stress and complex trauma anchors your nervous system in a state of overwhelm that shows up with activation of the sympathetic nervous system. This energy of the fight or flight response permeates your thinking when you feel overwhelmed so that you perceive less options, think quickly and reactively, and reach for the most automatic, easy coping strategies like self-reliance.

Self-reliance makes a ton of sense when you consider this cognitive concotion of sympathetic nervous system arousal. Asking for help can feel like an increase in the cognitive load rather than a relief from it. Asking for help means you have to assess your needs, effectively speak for them, and delegate. This all requires you slowing down enough to be able to connect with the stress of your predicament, which is exactly what an overstressed nervous system and overstretched cognitive load does not want you to do.

A nervous system that is stuck in fight or flight is threatened by slowing down, resting in connection, and exploring alternative responses. It wants to survive how it knows best and self-reliance is one of the strongest survival strategies in its repertoire.

Asking for help also asks you to connect with your vulnerability. This disrupts the well-meaning intentions of protective strategies like hyper-independence which defends against vulnerability. If you are under-resourced and over-tapped, feeling vulnerable can zap the necessary grit and energy you need to handle life problems.

The nervous system tells us it's not safe to connect with vulnerability when we're in survival mode. Until the nervous system neurocepts or perceives safety again, it will continue to reach for what is most effective in the short-term even if this is detrimental for our health and well being in the long-term.

Rather than bypassing the body's ancient wisdom and forcing ourselves to ask for help when it feels like work, we can help this protective strategy unwind by first affirming all of the ways this makes sense.

Repeat the following affirmations, noticing how they land on your system and how the parts of you that are insisting on shouldering it alone respond.

Asking for help feels threatening to the predictability of doing things my way.

Doing things on my own feels safer than relying on others to help me with such a big need.

I don't feel comfortable letting someone in right now, and the best way I know to protect myself is to get it done myself.

I still feel safer attending to my needs on my own, even if I feel like I’m unraveling or drowning.

I don’t have the energy to explain to someone what I need and trust that they won’t drop the ball.

Observe how these affirmations impact your internal system. What often happens when we acknowledge our protectors is that we realize just how overwhelmed we are. When we connect to our protective strategy instead of unconsciously blending with it as we say in IFS, these protectors experience a sense of spaciousness and relief. When protectors feel understood, they naturally soften and become open to other perspectives beyond the burdened mentalities they grasp within the landscape of chronic stress and trauma.

Instead of asking these protectors to engage in action completely foreign to them like asking for help before they are ready, you introduce safety with this kind of deep listening and affirming. And when your internal system and nervous system feels safe, protective strategies naturally open to more hopeful perspectives , including the possibility that asking for help may benefit your system rather than capsize it, and being vulnerable isn't so threatening after all.

The next time you struggle to ask for help when you feel overwhelmed, remember this:

Self-reliance is deeply adaptive when we have histories of not being able to rely on others or when others dropped the ball.

Self-reliance makes a ton of sense autonomically, as chronic stress overloads the nervous system and the nervous system perceives a demand / stressor in having to figure out how to offload the stress via accepting extrinsic support.

Self-reliance is an extremely useful, often misunderstood protective strategy that benefits from acknowledgement, compassion, and understanding instead of being strong-armed or coerced into accepting help (note: accepting help before this part is ready can result in a stronger entrenchment in the strategy as the part feels threatened).

Self-reliance amplifies when vulnerability is present that isn’t safe to connect with, especially in cases where there isn’t enough resources to deal with the stressors, which creates feelings of intense helplessness.

Self-reliance is a way you have learned to keep yourself safe, and it’s important that you have ways to keep yourself safe in life. You can learn other skills that promote safety while still appreciating this protector. Two things can be true at the same time.

Always believing in the gifts & genius of your parts,

~Sarah