A blog post by Elena Overfield | Formerly Pepetoe

There is a particular kind of pain in finally admitting you need help and then not getting it, – because asking isn’t the first step, hope is.

Before you ask for help, you have to allow yourself to believe something might change, that somebody might understand, that maybe you don’t have to carry this alone anymore. When that hope disappears, you’re not simply back where you started. Sometimes you’re worse off, b ecause now you know what it felt like to believe help was coming.

I’ve had my hope crushed more than once

I’ve asked eating disorder services for help and experienced the devastation of not receiving the support I hoped for. Twice. Well, we can thank the NHS for that. I think those experiences affected me in ways that go beyond treatment itself.

When you’re already struggling with beliefs around being unwanted, being difficult, not being enough or people eventually leaving, it’s incredibly easy to personalise something that isn’t actually a judgement of your worth. The emotional interpretation becomes:

I’m clearly not ill enough.

Nobody thinks this matters.

I asked and nobody came.

Even when the reality involves systems, criteria and circumstances far bigger than you. Emotionally, it still hurts like rejection, and if you’ve read my recent blog posts, you’ll know how much rejection and dealing with that has become a key pillar I’ve been working on.

Asking for help is already vulnerable

There is something frightening about saying, “I can’t do this by myself”. Especially if you’ve spent years trying to be capable. You’re handing somebody the most fragile part of yourself and hoping they’ll know what to do with it. So, when that experience goes badly, your brain learns things like: don’t hope, don’t ask, don’t rely on anybody, handle it yourself.

Except sometimes you can’t, and you shouldn’t have to.

Someone failing to help me isn’t evidence that I wasn’t worth helping

This is the lesson I’m trying desperately to separate out. There is what happened, and then there is what I decided it meant it about me. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing. Not receiving the support I needed hurt. I don’t need to minimise that. But I also don’t have to turn it into evidence that I wasn’t deserving of care. I was deserving before I asked. I was deserving when I didn’t receive it, and I remained deserving afterwards.

I don’t want disappointment to teach me never to hope again

This is perhaps the hardest part, because protecting yourself from disappointment by expecting nothing can feel incredibly sensible. No hope means no crushed hope. Except it also means closing yourself off from the possibility that the next person might actually help. The next conversation might be different, the next attempt might work, the next person might listen. However, I can’t guarantee that, and that’s the part that is frightening.

I don’t want the people or systems that failed to meet me when I needed them to teach me that reaching out is pointless. Maybe courage isn’t believing, “this time somebody will definitely help”, and maybe it’s “I don’t know what will happen, but I still believe I am worthy of asking for help.”

After everything, I think that’s a belief worth fighting to keep.