Three Symptoms Of The No Help Complex
This can be difficult to do if you naturally don’t want to.
Growing up, you’re taught to look to others for guidance. Your parents guide you growing up, your friends teach you what you can’t learn at home, your teachers instruct you on your academics, and your surroundings teach you how to carry yourself in the world. So many portals of information are made available to you, but as you get older, you may morph into one of those super independent people that hates not being able to figure stuff out on his or her own.
This seems like the ideal way to be. It’s awesome to feel like you can get things done on your own, feed yourself, solve your own problems, etc. But, there’s an extreme case that I feel many of us suffer from. One that hinders our ability to grow because our willingness to stand alone has overcome our ability to reach out to others. This, my friends, is what I like to call the “No-Help Complex.” The crippling condition that folks like myself suffer from keeping us from participating in tasks that most would find simple, but we find terrifyingly difficult.
You Hate Asking For Help
Any task that you face is yours to finish on your own, and you would rather fail and try again another time instead of ask someone to help you out. You’d rather walk in every single aisle of the grocery store to find that special brand of hot sauce than ask an employee for direction, and you’d rather spend an hour trying to configure your broken wireless router than ask your technology-savvy friend for advice. Google is your best friend and instruction manuals are a last resort. The biggest issue with asking people to help you figure something out is that it makes you feel helpless and unable to do anything for yourself. All or none is your motto. People are a sign of failure.
Self Check-Out is Your Go To
Seeing these pop up in super markets is god’s gift to the anti-help population. Finally you don’t have to look eye-to-eye with a check-out clerk while they ring up your questionable line of purchases. Having to make small talk with a stranger, manage your finances with supervision, and be asked if you need help walking to your car is way too much for you. All these interactions that occur within 5 minutes are all things that you feel you can do yourself, and they are filled with unnecessary moments of awkwardness. Scanning our own cereal box is preferable.
Raising Your Hand In Class Is Out of the Question
Nothing produces more anxiety than feeling like you need to raise your hand in class. Not only does it make you feel stupid for not knowing what’s going on in class, but asking IN CLASS outs a spotlight on yourself in front of your peers. Obviously, no one thinks that asking a question is something to be embarrassed of, and there is technically no such thing as a “stupid question,” but poor stubborn people like us would rather spend another hour of studying to answer our own question instead of asking our professor in the middle of lecture. Maybe it’s our pride; maybe it’s our anxiety.
Getting Over Our Stubbornness
The hardest thing to do in our shoes is learn how to accept that we can’t solve all of our problems. We aren’t superheroes; we don’t know everything, yet it feels like any situation we’re faced with can be solved on our own. Seeing successful people around us admit to getting where they are with help just doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of growth and development in any aspect of our life. Our life-long task is to come to terms with the fact that we need help too. Not only can you learn new things with the help of others, but you won’t grow as a person or discover new passions without diving into something new, which is, revealing to others that you can’t solve a problem on your own.
