Depression

If You Need Help Ask For It

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When people are struggling with some life issue it’s easy for them to start to feel alone in their suffering, to feel like nobody else really cares. Especially when depression, with its associated feelings of worthlessness and unlovability, creeps into the picture a vicious cycle is born where coworkers, acquaintances, friends, and family members are seen as distant and unsupportive but at the same time the distance and lack of support are to be expected.

More often than not the secretly held belief that nobody really cares is a case of mind reading, it’s projecting thoughts, feelings, drives, and motivations into others without having enough evidence to prove it. And really at bottom it’s rationalizing the felt inability to reach out for help as a fundamental lack of caring in others, it’s transferring full responsibility for what’s going on away from Self and onto some external person or entity. It’s kind of like the person who sits alone in a crowded room with a gloomy look on their face thinking “Everyone is so cold and closed off here” while at the same time not doing a thing to reach out to anyone in that room. It’s very likely that from the perspective of everyone else it’s the person sitting alone who’s cold and closed off.

Our point is that if you need help ask for it. You can’t blame others for not doing anything to alleviate your suffering when they’re unaware of how deeply you’re suffering in the first place. It can be scary to reach out for help because doing so breaks down the social veneer and shows your vulnerability. But unless you do reach out you can’t reasonably expect others to simply be cued in to your internal world and respond in kind.

Just because few if any people have noticed what’s going on with you doesn’t mean they don’t care, it only means that you’ve been doing a good job of hiding how deeply you’ve been suffering or that they’ve been preoccupied with their own things or maybe just don’t know how to approach the situation. Most of them aren’t trained therapists. But they probably are willing to help if you’re willing to help them understand what’s going on and how they can be of assistance.

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