Asking for help and accepting help that is offered makes me cringe. As my family prepares for a major celebration for one of our members, Ive noticed that my husband and I have radically different ways of dealing with people offering to help. My husband, who has no addiction problems, says That would be great! Thank you! each time people offer to help with our party. My response is Thanks, but Id really rather that you enjoy yourself and not feel you have to work. I do want them to enjoy themselves, but Im also painfully aware of my discomfort in saying Yes! I would appreciate your help!

Ive been thinking about alcoholic families and why this would be my tendency to respond this way. Here are some of the things I learned as a child:

Its good to be self-reliant.

You cant rely on others; you can only rely on yourself.

Asking for help means that you arent capable of doing it on your own.

Well, it probably is good to be self-reliant, some of the time. When carried to extremes it can lead to isolation, aloneness, tension, and anxiety, and we all know how effective alcohol is in relieving those feelings, at least temporarily!

Many of us end up in recovery when we finally give up and ask for help. We learn to ask and get help from our recovery group, sponsor, treatment center, Higher Power. But it still isnt easy to pick up the phone and call someone when we need help. Service chairing a meeting, being the literature person in a 12-step group is always much easier.

Now, what about the opposite? How do we feel when we help someone? We feel good about ourselves, generous, a sense of warmth toward that other person, happy that we were asked, happy that someone else felt we could help them, right?

So by not accepting the help that someone is offering we are depriving them of something. We are rebuffing their impulse to be generous, to be giving, and we are making sure that we are not allowing too much of a relationship to grow between us. We are protecting ourselves from the uncomfortable feelings of trust, neediness, being beholden, those feelings that intrinsic to being human but which may have created problems for us when we were younger. If we do accept help and are critical of how that help is given, it further shields us from developing a mutual relationship with the other person.

We are also depriving ourselves of the opportunity to soar when we insist on acting alone. There is a synergy that happens when people work together and come up with a solution that would have been impossible if each had acted alone. My sons school encourages project-based learning as a way to teach this principle. (On a larger scale, notice how difficult it is for the U.S. acting unilaterally in the world and how we have deprived ourselves of valuable input from other nations.) Mentors, guides, mastermind groups, coaches, sponsors all forward the idea of working together.

Im sure there are people in your life that you allow in, that you let help and nurture you. But I bet this only goes so far. I challenge you to just say Yes, thank you! the next time someone offers help. Live with the bit of discomfort and see if you can allow a different outcome. And think of me as I practice doing the same next Saturday.