Episode 18 – QUICK RESET:  Why you are bad at asking for help and what to do instead

Jane McFadden

Hello and welcome to ADHD Mums. We are on the next episode of the mini reset, which is why you’re bad at asking for help and what to do instead. You are not just bad at asking for help, but you may be traumatized about what happened last time you did ask for help.

Is this weakening? Well, maybe not. Maybe I’d call it conditioning, especially if you are a neurodivergent mum who learned early that competence equals survival. Does the thought of sending a text message and saying, hey, I’m not coping, can you come over, fill you with dread? If it does, then this is the episode for you.

Are you dramatic or have you just been emotionally scaffolding for other people your entire life? So when is it your turn to lean on someone else? Will it ever be your turn? Does your nervous system scream, no, it’s not safe to lean on other people, they will let me down. But that does make sense because for a lot of us, our vulnerability has always been ignored. Maybe our neediness had us feeling rejected.

Maybe if we expressed emotion, we were told we were too much. So now, what we overfunction, we wait until collapse, and then we feel resentment when no one noticed how much we were carrying silently. I’m incredibly passionate about this subject because yes, I have lived this as so many of us have.

I think this podcast, the listeners on this podcast is filled with high-functioning, smart women who don’t like to ask for help. Now, Dr. Krista Neff was probably one of the first to pioneer the research on self-compassion. She has a great explanation on women, particularly caregivers, and how they internalize their value as usefulness.

She says that women like this don’t necessarily see ourselves as people that deserve to be nurtured, but we just need to keep our systems running. Now, this is a really pervasive pattern in women, particularly in caregiving roles where we unconsciously tie our worth to our usefulness. Now, this isn’t just a mindset, this is a really ingrained identity script, and it’s really reinforced with both social expectations, but also lived experience.

For many of us from childhood, we have been rewarded for not expressing needs, but for suppressing them. Becoming low maintenance, easy, good girls. I’ve talked about the good girl conditioning in another episode.

I’ll pop that into the show notes. That’s a much more in-depth episode than this will be.

Now, this isn’t by accident, this is by adaptive behavior. So, if you were praised for being independent, self-sufficient, or being, air quoting, strong, asking for help doesn’t feel unfamiliar. It feels like an actual failure. Now, from a scientific lens, the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps us take on that compassion perspective towards ourselves, is often really under-activated in people who experience chronic self-criticism.

Now, the research from Neff and Germer in 2013 shows that self-compassion training actually increases the activity in that part of the brain, and it supports emotional regulation and reduces anxiety. However, the research also found that you can’t develop self-compassion without actually confronting the belief first that you don’t deserve help. And that is where so many ADHD and autistic mothers get stuck, in my opinion, because if your whole identity has been built on being capable, helpful, efficient, asking for help doesn’t really seem like something you should do.

It actually feels like you are erasing the very thing that has made you valuable and lovable. So what happens? People tell us, ask for help, do self-care. And what do we do? A lot of the time, we don’t do anything.

We don’t do either of those things. So what do we do? We burn out quietly while still picking up and dropping up our kids while smiling, whilst even helping others in our own crisis. And we become a ghost to ourselves.

So Dr. Devon Price will talk about this as pathological self-reliance, which is really a trauma response that looks like independence and looks like something that we praise something for, but actually really negatively affects the person. And it can feel like, and I’m talking about my own experience, that we don’t want help because we’ve come to learn that that comes with judgment, strings attached, or even shame. This experience has really affected me as a wife and as a mother because I had three kids under three and a half.

My husband worked a lot and I never asked him for help. In fact, I had one of my children that used to cry for six to eight hours a day straight for over two years. I can’t even tell you what that felt like.

I have unpacked that with a psychologist. And to be honest, it was traumatizing to have two other small children and have one that cries for six to eight hours a day. And it was isolating. Can you imagine how many friends wanted to come over? Zero. Could I go anywhere? It was an absolute nightmare. And I remember attempting to cook dinner and I had the other two and he’d been crying for like six, eight months at this point straight.

And my hubby came in after work and said, oh, do you want me to take him? Now, instead of saying yes, I actually snapped at him. No, it’s fine. I’ve got it.

And so him being him said, oh, okay, no problems. And so he actually walked off because he’d offered and I’d said no. And when I look back to those moments, I’m actually trying to unpack why I didn’t even ask for help.

Because if I was in that situation now, I would absolutely ask for help, but I didn’t. I was drowning in resentment because deep down, I wanted him to not just take that child, to take all of them because I knew how badly I needed help. But I didn’t want to ask because if I had to ask, it felt like weakness or failure.

Even if he asked me, do you want me to take him? It felt weak to even say yes. I mean, I would have loved it if he came and said, let me take him, but he didn’t. And I don’t want to put that back on him that he asked in the wrong way.

That was on me to say yes. So why in all of those years, I didn’t ask for help or even say yes when someone offered. I’ve really stripped this back.

And I think it’s because of this deep, deep feeling that that felt like failure. Asking for help means I couldn’t cope. I just had to be okay with it.

And it felt weak. But yet if anyone asked me for help, I would never have those judgments on those people. I would jump in and help.

So what can we do about it? How can we begin to make changes? Firstly, the first thing we need to do, which I think is often missed by neurodivergent women, is that we need to actually address the belief. If we go back to what Dr. Kristin Neff said just before, it was that you can’t actually develop the self-compassion and you can’t start to ask for help if you have the belief that you don’t deserve it. So you may have the belief that you don’t deserve help or that it’s weak to ask for help, that you’re there to serve others.

Everyone’s belief is going to look a little bit different. And that might be something that you need to sit with separately. You may need professional help with.

You might need to journal, however it is that you process. But when someone offers to help and you say no, think about the why, what went through your head, what does your inner critic say? Start to address that for yourself to start with. It’s going to be very difficult to start asking for help if you don’t address the underlying belief that stops you.

So let’s say if you go and do that personal work or you’ve done that personal work, what do you do then? After doing the personal work on the why and the belief, then you need to start to build the skill like a muscle at the gym. And again, I use the gym because my husband’s a personal trainer. And so he’s always talking about building the muscle.

And so then I actually started thinking about building the muscle in terms of habits and brains. And so for example, here is something that I have done that I think will resonate with the audiences. I went and did all of the NDIS stuff for all of my kids, all of the appointments, all of the NDIS planning meetings.

Now, if you’ve done any of the planning meetings or not, it kind of feels like a school inclusion meeting, but like heaps worse because you spend a good few hours talking about every single negative thing that your child possibly has. Like any struggle that your child has is spoken about in one meeting and there’s very little positive discussion. And it’s good not to have a lot of positive discussion because you obviously want to get the best NDIS plan.

So you’re talking about all the challenges and you’re talking about worst case scenario a lot of the time. So it’s extremely depressing. Now, I did three plans for three kids in a month and I did not communicate to my hubby what I was really doing and how bad that was.

In my mind at that time, I thought I have to think about this a lot. I have to plan this. I have to talk to an autism advocate that I had with me to do those meetings.

I had to do the meetings. Why would I then talk about them to my husband who’s actually not going to help me in any way with these things? It seemed like just talking about the problem more and then what he’s not going to actually help me. So why would I tell him? But what happened was I was completely rung out after that month and it felt like emotionally had been run over by a truck.

But because I hadn’t actually told him about any of this, he didn’t know. And so then when I eventually he, let’s say for example, he said, what’s for dinner or something one night and I just like completely burst into tears. You don’t even know what I’ve been doing.

You can’t understand. This has been awful. And I just like lost it into this whole spiral, like I just completely spiraled.

And he was so confused. What do you mean? What are you talking about? Because he had no idea. And it’s so irritating when you’re the one who’s been living it.

The huge load of all of it that’s for our family. And he’s completely oblivious to the fact that we’ve been doing anything. That is so irritating.

But then it’s kind of like, why doesn’t he know? Because I haven’t told him. So I’ve really had to talk to him about, hey, this is what I’m actually doing. This is how horrible it is.

But I always tell him after I’ve done it and then I’m already spiraling. I need to get into the habit of doing it before. So I need you to do dinner on Tuesday and Thursday this week.

Or I need you to also do this and this because I’ve got to do this and it’s going to be incredibly taxing. Now, that’s not a cry for help. That’s just like scheduling a need.

And a lot of women I know will do this with PMS. They’ll say, hey, it’s PMS week next week. I need you to do this to help me out.

Now, it is actually, I think, easier to schedule in the help before you need it, as opposed to then being in crisis and being like, I can’t do pick up today. You need to do it because I’m having a crisis. However, it’s different for everybody.

If you are somebody that’s in the moment, then you ask for help. It depends on your relationship, how you feel, how you process things. But you may need to pre-negotiate the help because sometimes in heightened emotion, I find it even harder to ask at that point.

I feel like it’s easier to schedule it in before, but it’s different for everybody. Number two, you may need to practice using a script if it’s difficult at the time. So for example, instead of just going to be like, can you help me? Oh my God, I’m so stressed and spiraling, which is what I do.

And then I usually cry. I try and have a script and I say, hey, I’m so stressed out. I’ve hit my capacity.

Can you take this off my plate, please? I can’t do it. Or I need your support right now. Or I love Brené Brown.

She talks about how she talks in percentages with her husband. She says, and a hundred percent means like meltdown, going nuts, can’t do it. And so she might go, I’m at a 60% right now.

I need you to help me. Or he might go, I’m at a 75. I got to leave the house and she’ll jump in. So it’s that communication around where you’re at. She likes to put hers in numbers that I think is really important. And having some kind of plan before the crisis hits.

So I wouldn’t wait till you’re spiraling to then ask for help and then have the conversation for the first time. You may need to do that beforehand. Again, we do this for our children, but we don’t do it for ourselves.

How about doing this stuff for ourselves? Number three, create a team mentality. So I wouldn’t wait for a full burnout. Train your family, your partner, your extended family, your sister, your friends, to expect that you are going to be starting to delegate.

You may have language that you learn like PMS week. I need more help. ADHD crash. I am in shutdown. I’m max capacity. Whatever it is that your wording is, you may need to just have something that you need to say.

That means you’re out. You’re done for five minutes. However that looks for your family. So you are no longer the martyr that takes it all, that does a fake smile, that cries in the shower alone. If you are going to start to take this on board, you need to embrace that you are a mother with a nervous system that’s valid, and that you do a lot of unpaid overtime, and that you may need to sub in somebody here and there. So you are not bad at asking for help necessarily, but you may be really brilliant at surviving without help.

But surviving isn’t a baseline. That’s not a place to live from. And you deserve support that doesn’t make you feel exposed or shamed.

And it’s okay to need things, and you can be loved even if you ask for help. And that’s your quick reset for this week. You’ve already started just by listening.

You don’t need to push harder. You need to feel safer. Take the pressure off. Let the feelings be real. You don’t have to earn your rest. You are doing better than you think.

I’ll be right here next week. Next time you need a reset. Thanks for listening. Please join the Facebook group. The link is in the show notes. Share this with a friend. Press follow. Review the podcast. It really helps me.

Thank you so much for listening.