Psychedelic Lessons: Why we’re afraid to ask for help and how to start
In the years I’ve spent in integration circles listening to what people are working on in psychedelic spaces, I’ve listened to a share repeated many times: “I’m unable to ask for help.”
The story typically goes like this, “I needed help, I wanted to say help, and so I sat there for what felt like hours forming and feeling the shape of the word ‘help’ in my mouth, and in the end, I didn’t ask for help.” I see a sea of heads nod in the room in agreement and understanding.
I was one of those heads nodding emphatically. Even being someone who has spent thousands of hours bringing people tissues, buckets, blankets, water, sat with people, sang with people, carried people, I was unable to ask for it myself. I’d be freezing, or have snot coming out of my nose, or be so thirsty, and couldn’t say the words I’ve told people hundreds of times to say, “blanket, tissue, water…help.” Why?
Source: Power of Positivity
After sitting in this loop and turmoil during many journeys and talking to others, here’s what I’ve found. I share this in the hope that it reaches others who also relate to the difficulty of asking for help and hope to invite them to start making the journey across the bridge as it’s imperative to having a healthy, nourishing, connected life and healthy, nourishing, connected relationships.
So what’s the block? Fear. Fear of what? Fear of the feeling of your need not being met. That is vulnerable and scary. Does this feel like you?
Here’s a question — what is the earliest memory you have where you had a need and it wasn’t met? I’d bet everyone’s answer is sometime in childhood. This is par for the course of being human. You’ll have needs and they won’t always be able to be met. So what is the difference between typical life experiences versus experiences that shift your internal help asking mechanism?
The question is, were your needs chronically not being met? Or when you had needs, did you feel like you were attuned to? It’s not about did you get everything you ever wanted but when you needed something, was someone there and present to it? If not, some core functions for survival start to shift including the ability to co-regulate, feel safe in your body and environment, access play and creativity, and attune to and express your needs.
So what happens? Babies and children are needy. They need help eating, sleeping, and pooping. They start forming words on average between 12–18 months. Their entire life in that phase of development is shaped by eliciting some signal they have a need and someone caring for them. They wouldn’t survive without this.
The healthy path of development is for a child’s expression of need cause a response in the caregiver to provide care, mainly in the form of presence. This foundational equation of I signal to my caregivers that I need something = they acknowledge it and I am soothed is primal, encoded in our DNA. This equation is the start to our understanding of communication, relating, trust, and safety. It reinforces within us that having and asking for things is safe and leads to our most basic needs being met and therefore our life continuing. This very mechanism is deeply entwined with our sense of life and death.
There are a number of scenarios where a child’s needs are not met.
The caregivers are simply unable to meet their needs for various reasons
The needs of the caregivers override the needs of the child
The needs of the caregivers are in direct opposition to the needs of the child
In all three of these environments, when this happens over and over, the mechanisms of need attunement and communication are directly impacted.
What happens internally?
A child feels a need
The child communicates they have a need
The need is not met
Overtime, the child associates their feeling of having a need with the pain of it not being met
This pain compounds until unbearable
To cope with this pain, the child moves away from it and the thing they perceive to cause it — their own need. They could do this by numbing or disassociating.
The child learns overtime to suppress that need
In the process of doing so, they can tell themselves a number of stories including: I’m wrong or bad for having this need, I don’t deserve to have needs, I don’t actually have this need, no one can meet my needs so I must soothe myself.
In the case where caregivers needs chronically override that of the child or are in direct opposition, for example in cases of narcissistic caregivers or instances of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, the child is placed in a complex predicament where their own need is in contrast to what they see as a need of their caregiver. This creates a typical dynamic where the child has to decide between their own need and that of their caregiver. Gabor Mate calls this “authenticity versus attachment.” Authenticity is what is true to their own authentic experience and need. Attachment is the attachment to a caregiver and anything that threatens their relationship with their caregiver is a threat to their own survival. What happens time and time again is the child will always choose the relationship to their caregiver over themselves, they choose attachment over authenticity. This disavowal of themselves becomes a maladaptive behavior that causes serious problems later in life.
Overtime, these dynamics lead to levels of misattunement with oneself. It becomes the less painful option to detach from the need instead of actually having it, asking for it, and having it unmet. Over time this pattern becomes ingrained, automatic, and fades into the background as normal operating.
What then does someone look like after years of this adjusted behavior?
An inability to know what one needs. You do not know what you need because from a young age it was unsafe and painful to feel your own needs
A fear of expressing ones needs. You fear expressing your needs because it previously led to them being unmet, shame, guilt, punishment, or abuse
A diversion of attention from one’s own needs to others. Focusing on others needs was the safer option as it was the way to enact control on a situation, like caretaking your caregivers
At the deepest level, when needs are unmet, an aspect of humanity feels denied. Hardening to needs overtime can feel like an emptying, a deadening, a losing of hope and connection, a place of non-love. It’s no wonder this can feel like annihilation of the self and death itself.
As an outsider, one might believe the solution is so simple as asking, “What do you want?”
It’s not easy after years of firing the opposite neural networks. The blocking of needs can be deeply tethered to primal systems of life and death. The wise nervous system will take over for better or worse in its attempt to protect, even if this means having a panic attack before voicing an answer.
So what next? Three main sequences include healing, updating, and integrating.
Healing: This is the sequence that I find true for all healing. It includes awareness, presence, understanding, compassion, and gratitude, sometimes linear, sometimes now. With the light of awareness comes a presence to the inner experience. Then there is understanding of why the mechanism developed. The a-ha! moment comes to see how that mechanism was developed to protect, how wise! That usually leads to an important part of grief, sadness, or anger for what wasn’t attuned to in the past. Which then unlocks compassion and eventually gratitude. Rinse and repeat this many times.
Updating: The second sequence is to catch ourselves up to the present. This technique is done often in Internal Family Systems, created by Richard Schwartz. When you’ve internally located the part of you that might be afraid to ask for help, try this:
Ask that part that is unable to speak the need, “how old are you?” Wait for an answer. You’ll be surprised at how quick and exact the answer is. Then you can follow up with a couple of questions:
“What are you afraid would happen if you didn’t do this (block the asking for help)?
“Do you know how old we are now?” ← Wait for a moment to feel the part and then answer from your current self with your current age. Tune into any internal sensations of this information.
“Would you like to come with me out from where you are to someplace different?” Wait for any answer
If yes, use your imaginal powers to bring that part to somewhere else they’d like to go. Their favorite field, or even to where you are now.
Then say, “ it is safe now for you to have needs. I am here to listen to your needs. I will do my best to meet your needs.”
Integrating: How can you create the new behaviors, patterns, and actions to integrate? Set up a daily ritual, even if it’s for 5 minutes, to attune to this part and ask what it needs. You can place your hand on your heart or belly, take a couple of breaths and ask either out loud or silently, “What do you need?” Listen, with compassion for the answer. If you can meet that need, make sure you do it that day. If you can’t meet that need, let it know you can’t meet that need in the moment and why. Offer another suggestion.
This is also called reparenting. Check out this article on reparenting from the Holistic Psychologist. “Reparenting is the act of giving yourself what you didn’t receive as a child.” It is establishing a new relationship of trust between your Self (adult you) and that part. This is important to practice repeatedly until that trust is developed. As you develop this internal capability, it will start extending out to others. Start with people you trust. Let them know you are working on this and ask them for their support in it. Guess what? Asking people to support you on your ability to ask for help, is asking for help.
Reparenting by The Holistic Psychologist
A note on watching out for old parts and patterns. If you’ve been carrying these behaviors for a lifetime, it won’t be surprising that the old patterns are still there. But now that you are aware of them and you can practice the healing sequence. Know that what IFS calls, “managers”or “firefighters” are parts that may show up on the scene again to play the roles they know best. Dialogue internally, remind them how old you are now, that it is safe to express needs, and you are there to listen.
As adults, who are no longer in scenarios where we rely on others for survival, it is our now own responsibility to be attuned to our own needs and meet them and ask others to meet them. This is what makes relationships so juicy, the dance in between the vulnerable and connection and resilience. It is in our responsibility to inquire into, meet and heal old patterns that prevent that. In psychedelic journeys we really emphasize the importance of asking for help. After reading the book Radical Responsibility by Fleet Maul, I’ve experienced how asking yourself, “what can I do” enables you to make the shift from victim to empowerment and is then accompanied by liberation. Especially for those who have previously been victimized or experienced any sort of disempowerment, exercising your choice and sovereignty is going to be key to changing your life. And this can start by learning how to say “help.”
In closing, i’ll share the hack I use in psychedelic journeys. I go to the helpers before hand and tell them that I was working on my ability to ask for help. I asked if they would come check on me at some point in the journey and ask if I needed help. First, It was much easier to ask for this when before entering a psychedelic state. Second, it was easier to say yes to help when the invitation was there. Third, this helped to prime the new neural synaptic firings that were previously not firing and get them going again, especially in a psychedelic state where windows of neuroflexibilty are wide open. I’m happy to report that I have since then said the words, “tissue,” and “blanket.”
Next up, “help.”
Need help? You can find me here and I’ll be happy to attune to your needs in whatever way I can.