I recently broke my ankle and have had to rely a great deal more than I am usually comfortable with on my children, friends and colleagues. As such I have been thinking about the challenges many of us have with
seeking/needing support.
I feel that a lot of the issues around this span from
the fundamental (faulty) belief of our inner child in response to parents who didn’t
necessarily meet our emotional or even physical needs when young. Interestingly
such conditioning provokes two very different but equally unsustainable survival plans.
On
the one hand we have those whose subconscious belief is that “I cannot survive
without the parent.” For them life is spent waiting for the parent to step up,
or seeking others to replace the ‘missing in action’ parent. They demand a lot
from friends/partners and rarely feel fully safe and supported. At the other side
of the pendulum swing (where I have long sat) is the inner child with the fundamental
belief that “I must survive without
the parent.” Again the parent has failed to provide completely but the response
is to ‘not need’. We are notoriously resistant to help and insist on struggling
on our own. To seek help is to fail or to set up the possibility of being let
down.
Both
are fed by evolutionary instincts. At one end is the biological fact that
humans are born at a developmental stage where they cannot survive without
significant input and care from the adults, especially the female. While at the other we have
the evolutionary driver of the survival of the fittest.
Both
are equally distorted and damaging and both set up patterns which can take
years to break. Ironically the end result is the same - both induce feelings of continually being alone and inadequately supported by the world
The
safe and healthy place is of course always in the middle. We have to address
the inner child and replace its fear with the knowledge that as adults our survival
is not threatened and we can let go of either ‘the need to need’ or ‘the need
to not need’. We have to learn to accept that we can survive without the parent/surrogate parent, that absolutely as strong individuals we can get
by on our own but equally importantly that, if we open to the generosity of others, we don’t have to.