Asking for help is hard for many of us, and it can keep us from getting the help we need and from making progress in our recovery. Learning to be able to ask for help requires we shift some of our perspectives.
If you have a hard time asking for help and receiving the help people offer you, chances are you carry the limiting belief about yourself that you don’t deserve love and support. This might be because you’re carrying shame from the mistakes you’ve made over the course of your addiction. It might be because you internalized your traumatic experiences to mean that you are undeserving of help and love. Explore whatever it is that has contributed to forming this limiting belief, and work to create new beliefs for yourself. Tell yourself that you deserve help, that you deserve to get better, that you deserve love, forgiveness and support. Tell yourself that you are a good person, and that your mistakes don’t define you.
Sometimes we block ourselves from getting help because we’re afraid of the first step, the hardest step, reaching out. If it’s hard for you to reach out, ask people you trust to check on you. Tell them that you’re having a hard time reaching out to people, and so you need them to reach out to you. Ask your sponsor to check in with you on a regular basis. If it’s hard for you to keep up with your therapy appointments or support group meetings, ask someone to be your accountability partner, to help remind you, encourage you, and give you someone to be accountable to. Having people we can lean on can help us get over our fears of accepting help. When we are in moments of crisis, very often we freeze, paralyzed by fear. If we have people checking on us, we can relax a bit, knowing that we have someone in our corner keeping an eye on us. This can help us immeasurably with our anxiety levels, and the more we see that it’s ok to receive help, the more comfortable we’ll be learning to ask for help.
Many of us are afraid to ask for help because we’ve been let down in the past. Maybe someone you depended upon betrayed your trust. Maybe this blocked you from opening yourself up to support down the line. Give energy to forgiving that person, the situation, and the past in general. Forgive yourself for any mistakes you’ve made that make you afraid to open yourself up to other people. Remind yourself that your past doesn’t have to dictate your future, that the people in your past don’t have to be the people in your future. When we’re open to it, we attract people we can depend upon, people we can trust, who will be there when we need help.
Call 888-570-7154 for information on how we can help.
