In order to ask for help, you need to feel that other people can help you, and you need to know what you want. Traumatized children (and adults, for that matter) struggle with asking for help, but more importantly, we struggle with knowing what we want. Bessel Van Der Kolk is a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In his nonfiction book, The Body Keeps the Score, he explores why childhood trauma survivors so often struggle as adults, particularly with social connection.
Children who grow up in stable homes, “learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help.”
In other words, stable children and stable adults know what they want and they know how to get it. They know when they can get something for themselves and when they need the help of others to reach their goals. More importantly, they believe they deserve what they want. To feel that you deserve what you want makes it far more likely that you’ll be willing to vocalize that desire. You’ll be more willing to ask for help, more willing to ask for what you want.
The irony is that those who most need help, are often least likely to ask for it. To ask for help and to ask for anything at all requires vulnerability. Risking vulnerability often requires that one come from some kind of stable background. Those who are most likely to ask for help often have a secure enough family and social structure that allows them to be vulnerable and to take risks.
And those who are least socially connected may also be least likely to ask for help. The radically vulnerability required of the asking, also invites others into your life.
“In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.”
Traumatized children and adults don’t always know what they want, but they often learn early on that asking for help doesn’t bring them the help they need and want, and often asking for help creates more problems than it solves. They give up on all people because of the formative experiences they had with just a few.
Artists and creators often use their artistic medium as a means for social connection. Moving your vulnerability to the medium of music or words on paper or art on a page can serve as a kind of buffer, especially when the art of asking feels like it’s just too much. The art itself is a form of vulnerability. The artistic act is itself a kind of asking. Unfortunately, our society doesn’t necessarily foster the kind of community that allows the artistic act itself to be the asking. (Though, my boyfriend Sergio has shown me how powerful and how connecting it can be to sit in a public place with a sketchbook. We have been invited into homes, been given rides up mountains, and have met people we would have never met were it not for the sketchbook. And so, perhaps, in some contexts, the art itself can be the asking. )
Yet, by and large, the old patronage systems are dead. Amanda Palmer, in her beautiful Ted Talk, “The Art of Asking,” notes: “For much of human history, musicians, artists, they’ve been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.”
She defines celebrity as many people loving you from afar. But Palmer’s model of artistic patronage is less about the nameless masses and anonymous adoration of celebrity, and more about a return to community. It’s not about random people loving you from a distance, but “it’s about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.”
How do we let the people in our lives be enough?
How do we learn to ask for help when we do not know what we need and when we don’t always trust that asking will bring the response we desire? For those of us who struggle with asking for help, a denial can feel like a kind of prophesy fulfilled—we knew all along we could never get what we asked for, and denial feels almost inevitable. To make matters worse, children and adults who suffer from trauma may not have developed the social skills that teach them how to ask for help. Stable parents teach children how to ask for help.
The denials become the proof that we cannot ask, which serves to make it less likely we’ll ask in the future. Worse, because we don’t practice the important skill of asking for help, we don’t learn from our mistakes. We don’t develop frustration tolerance. Van Der Kolk, in his nonfiction book, explains:
“Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress, but also their emerging selves—their interests, preferences and goals… But if your caregivers ignores your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal.”
This can create confusion in the child and adult about what is safe or dangerous. “If you feel chronically numbed out, potentially dangerous situations may make you feel alive. If you conclude that you must be a terrible person… you start expecting other people to treat you horribly.”
Trauma can obliterate our “inner maps” leaving us charting terra incognita our whole lives.
So, how do we learn how to identify what we want? How do we learn how to ask for help?
Van Der Kolk explains, we must learn how to tolerate feeling what we feel; knowing what we know. The process of sitting with rejection, humiliation, loneliness, despair, sadness, grief, and other difficult emotions can be painful and challenging, but if we don’t do it, we are doomed to remain ignorant to our own inner states.
“In order to know who we are—to have an identity—we must know (or at least feel that we know) what is and what was “real.” We must observe what we see around us and label it correctly; we must also be able to trust our memories and be able to tell them apart from our imagination… Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival, but the price is that you lose track of who you are, of what you are feeling, and of what and whom you can trust.”
Instead of asking for help, we might seek help in other things: self-harm, high-risk behaviors, drinking, drug use, sexual promiscuity. These tools might be used instead of seeking help and connection with others. And when they are used in this manner, they can become harmful and damaging, not the problem itself but a symptom of the underlying problem.
The consequences of failing to ask for help are severe. When we ask for help, we form social connection, the bonds that make us human. When we fail to ask for help we become reactionary rather than proactive.
Van Der Kolk notes that “Humans are social animals…everything about us—our brains, our minds, and our bodies—is geared toward collaboration in social systems. This is our most powerful survival strategy, the key to our success as a species, and it is precisely this that breaks down in most forms of mental suffering.”
How do we ask for help? We can start by treating it like a practice, by making a point to make small requests for things that aren’t of great significance, and working our way up to asking for bigger things. One person I know said that she made a point to start asking for everything she wanted, every time. By practicing, we can learn boundaries, learn how to ask, how to accept rejection, and how to create lasting bonds with other people.
Amanda Palmer’s beautiful Ted Talk, “The Art of Asking” is a brilliant comment on the power of asking and the social connections it creates. When Amanda Palmer was touring with her band, she made it a practice to ask her fans for help—for a place to spend the night, for food before the show, and even a neti pot. In the process, Palmer formed stronger social connections with strangers, and with her fans.
Capitalism has conditioned us that any exchange must be commercial, must involve money, and must involve a kind of perfect material reciprocity. The truth is that some people’s gifts are not material. For example, written words and poetry, though they can be put in a book, can also be ephemeral and ethereal—the whispered encouragement overhead on the street corner, wisdom from a friend, the exchange of conversation whose only commitment and investment is time. Music, now that it can be downloaded, doesn’t always need to come in the form of a physical album. Palmer’s genius is that she tapped into modes of exchange that don’t involve the capitalistic social contract. She saw her ethereal gifts and gave them freely, but asked for what she needed in exchange.
Perhaps the true secret of learning how to ask is learning how to tap into our ethereal gifts, the ones that can’t always be so easily commodified in a culture predicated on so much brute exchange. Palmer reminds us all, “asking makes you vulnerable.” But the rewards of vulnerability are worth it.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.