The Humiliation of Needing Help
We know that God can help us if we are willing to be helped.
I want to be the helper, not the helped. I want to be the strong one, the capable one, the one who has it together. Admitting I need help feels like admitting I'm broken, insufficient, weak. It's a wound to my ego that I've spent decades protecting.
'Willing to be helped' sounded gentle until I realized it requires smashing my self-image. It meant admitting that all my strategies—my control, my management, my fixing—have failed. It meant sitting in a meeting and saying, 'I don't know what to do.' It meant calling my sponsor and confessing I'm falling apart. The humiliation is physical.
I don't want God to help me; I want God to applaud me for helping myself. I want credit for my self-sufficiency. But that's just another form of control. True willingness means accepting that I am insufficient on my own, that I need something beyond my own resources to survive this.
Al-Anon is teaching me that the pain of admitting I need help is the same pain that heals. Smashing my ego isn't the death of me—it's the birth of humility. And humility, it turns out, is the only foundation strong enough to build a real life on.
When I feel resistance to asking for help, I can pause and notice: Is my ego protecting me or imprisoning me? Can I make one small admission today—'I don't know,' 'I'm struggling,' 'I need support'—and see if the humiliation is survivable? What if needing help isn't weakness but the beginning of wisdom?
