Why getting help isn't always helpful
Hi! I’m Katie, and I’m a cultural and social psychologist—but you can think of me as your BFF with a PhD. I live in the desert of Texas alongside the cacti, roadrunners, and horned lizards. If you’re looking to understand your inner landscape and the whirlwind of the world around you, I hope you find something of value here. Make sure to subscribe—and you won’t miss a beat! Thank you so much for being here.
Support in communities is vital.
Yet, we oftentimes feel resistant to receiving it.
Other times, we receive unhelpful support or limit our view of what support can be.
In Western culture, we’ve also been socialized to believe that needing support means weakness.
So, we feel guilty when we do receive it or we simply don’t ask for it at all.
All of these beliefs have limited our ability to have more fulfilling relationships and connections.
There are numerous ways that we can help others or receive help.
Support is not one-dimensional.
It is not just tangible, transactional, or superficial.
Support is so much more than that.
But, it is oftentimes seen as one-dimensional.
People place limiting definitions on it.
For example, one may say that support is like someone helping you when you have a flat tire and are stranded on the side of the road.
That’s tangible.
Others may view support as giving you something when you need it.
That’s transactional.
Sometimes, support may be seen as only spiritual, like praying for you if you have a problem in life.
Support is all of those things.
But, it’s important to see that we can give and we can receive support in several different ways in our relationships and our communities.
The study of social support has proved to be important and relevant in a variety of academic and applied areas.
Researchers from the social psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, sociology, medical and nursing, public health, and social work fields have addressed the physiological and psychological implications of social support.
Generally, social support has been defined as responsiveness to the needs of another and specifically as actions that display caring, validate one’s worth, feelings, or actions, or facilitate coping through providing information, assistance, or tangible resources.
Specifically, supportive acts may be tangible or instrumental (financial assistance), esteem (encouraging competence or self-esteem), informational (advice), emotional (nurturance), and social integration or network/companionship (membership in a group sharing a similar outlook).
Social support may be conceptualized as the tangible receipt of support or the perception of available support.
Further, support may be provided from many different sources, including spouses, family, friends, colleagues, pets, and/or strangers.
As a side note, the terms “help”, “aid” and “social support” are used interchangeably in this piece and denote the same concept.
Help or aid usually refers to instrumental support—those tangible acts of help.
SOCIAL SUPPORT IS GOOD FOR US
There are known benefits of social support in a variety of social science and health fields.
Social support has been shown to promote physiological health.
Previous research has supported the notion that social support is a great tool for coping with the negative effects of stress.
Furthermore, social support has been found to result in adaptive coping with chronic illnesses, such as coronary artery disease, childhood leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV, stroke, and cancer.
In addition, social support has been shown to have a positive effect on immunity.
Research has also shown that those with more social ties were less likely to become ill following exposure to a cold or flu virus.
Further, those who did become infected and had more social ties had a shorter experience with the illness and were able to recover more quickly than those with fewer social ties.
Social support has also been linked to health benefits for those in high-risk populations.
Specifically, social support results in fewer issues during pregnancy and childbirth, better diabetes control, faster recovery from coronary artery disease surgery, lower coronary heart disease rates, and less pain among arthritis patients.
Social support has been found to have positive effects on mental health, as well.
Social support can reduce depression and anxiety during stressful events and has even been shown to buffer against cognitive decline in aged populations.
In the clinical and counseling psychology literature, behavioral couples therapy and couples research are two areas of research assessing the benefits of social support in relationships.
Traditional and integrative behavioral couples therapy emphasizes acceptance in relationships, supportive and active behavior in relationship conflict, and emotional reactivity and has long-term implications for couple satisfaction and stability.
Moreover, some researchers stress the importance of what they call “caring days” as a characteristic of intervention.
These “caring days” employ behaviors such as washing dishes or calling a spouse during the day that make a partner feel supported in the relationship and have been proven to increase positivity in the relationship.
This work has shown that increasing positive interactions and positive affect in the relationship is related to couple satisfaction and longevity.
“Caring days” are a vital means of “refocus[ing] the relationship to caring and thoughtful actions, thereby increasing positive affect between the spouses”.1
According to the industrial-organizational psychology literature, several studies report that social support at work is related to psychological well-being.
Specifically, employees who have supportive supervisors and frequently receive positive feedback concerning their skills and abilities from others are less vulnerable to job-related burnout.
Furthermore, support from different sources, including coworkers, supervisors, and even family, has also been negatively associated with burnout and positively associated with satisfaction and productivity in the workplace.
Research in educational psychology has even shown social support to have a positive impact in the classroom.
Specifically, at-risk first-grade students in classrooms with higher instructional and emotional support show improvement in achievement scores and student–teacher relationships while at-risk students in less supportive classrooms have lower achievement and more conflict with teachers.
Further, perceived support from teachers and peers has been shown to increase academic prosocial goals and academic social responsibility goals which in turn predict social acceptance and positive social behavior.
TRUE STRENGTH IS BEING ABLE TO ASK FOR HELP
As you can see, receiving help can be good for us.
It can bolster our physical and mental well-being.
But, we often feel resistant to it.
I love this quote from Abby Wambach:
"Strength is a full gamut. You've got to be strong from top to bottom, but you also have to raise your hand and say, 'I'm feeling weak right now. I need some help.' There is true strength in being able to ask for help."
What happens so often in our individualistic society is that we want to appear as the strong person in the community.
We want to give, we want to do, we want to help, we want to support, but we don't want to ask for those things in return when we need them.
We don't want to even need them.
The research shows that especially in Western cultures and individualistic societies, we don't ask for help.
We're a bootstrap type of country.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Get it done yourself. Figure it out yourself. Don't ask for help.”
We have learned to believe that asking for help shows weakness.
Yet, needing help is not weak, and believing this is unhealthy.
This belief limits us from having deeper connections with others and it also robs us from the opportunity to lessen our stress through leaning on our social connections.
Women, especially, live their lives this way.
We want to appear perfect, especially in the era of social media.
We don't exercise authenticity.
We are often not honest with others and ourselves.
We do not ask for help when we need it.
VULNERABILITY INVITES VULNERABILITY
I once heard Brené Brown say that being perfect makes everyone want to be like you, yet they don't actually like you.
How good does it feel when you have a friend who reaches out to you and asks for help from you?
Not only does this make the person seem human.
But, it also gives you a chance to give back to the relationship (more on that later).
When you go over to someone's house and it's not perfectly clean (just like your own home), you love them even more.
You do not find yourself engaging in upward social comparison, making note of how you fall short of any seemingly perfect person in your life.
You feel more comfortable with them because they are more relatable.
We do not want to strive for perfection as we are seeking out community, and as we are creating space for community.
We want to show up authentically, as we are, with all of the good, the bad, the ugly.
We especially want to ask for help when we need it.
When we ask for help from other people, we show other people that it's okay to need help.
It's okay to say, "I feel weak right now," as Wambach says.
And, it permits others to do that with you.
When we show up with vulnerability, we invite vulnerability.
When we show up with authenticity, we invite authenticity.
“When we show up with vulnerability, we invite vulnerability. When we show up with authenticity, we invite authenticity.”
Make sure to read the one where I talk about why socializing sometimes sucks.
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Read Gurman & Jacobson’s work from 2002 and Driver & Gottman’s work from 2004 for more on this.
Cover art by Alena Ganzhela used under license