Asking for help

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

I was having a conversation the other day, trying to explain why being embarrassed about asking for help is such a “guy” thing, when the reality struck me dead in the face.

Society really tells us that men are independent and don’t need help, and I’ve often wondered if this isn’t the reason men, generally, seek treatment for depression less often than women do. I think it is, I know it was one of the reasons it took me so long to ask for help when I was suffering. Looking back, I might have avoided some really messy stuff if I had the courage then to ask for help. I don’t think not asking was the strong, courageous thing to do, I think it was the cowardly thing to do. Standing up, and admitting that you need help, takes more courage than sitting quietly by while your life wastes away.

I would hate to think that any one of my friends was afraid to ask me for help because they were afraid of me seeing them as anything less than strong. I would hope they would understand that, from where I’ve been, not helping when I could, or mocking someone who needed help, who be the height of hypocrisy. I know better. Let’s hope more people learn that.

Share with your friends!
BlueskyMastodonThreadsLinkedInRedditTumblrBuffer

Similar Posts

  • Blogroll Updates

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    I finally found the time, and the correct bit of code “magic” to get the new Blogroll tool setup and running properly. Now I can get around to finally making updates to the lists!! I went through tonight and removed a number of blogs that had either gone away, or not been updated in quite…

  • Quick Thought #9 – Trauma Recovery and Connection

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I saw this article today about an amputee softball team, made up of a bunch of folks who were injured during their service, the kind of people we all would typically view as PTSD sufferers, and I really found this part of the article interesting, way above and beyond battlefield trauma: Yet, Schnurr says, there’s…

  • Sexual assault has happened to this many other guys, and almost nobody talks about it?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It pains me to know that so many survivors spend their adult lives in isolation and shame because they don’t know other survivors around them. This is why telling our stories when we can, is so important. No one should spend most of their adult life ashamed of surviving abuse. Those of us who are in a position to share our story and the statistics about abuse can change that. You can change that by sharing those stories and those statistics, shedding light on a subject we spend too much time trying to avoid. That light saves lives.

  • Running on Fumes

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I heard someone on the radio use this phrase to describe herself as we were out grabbing a few last-minute items to assist with riding out Hurricane Ida. She was talking about evacuating her home in New Orleans at 10:30 last night, driving to Alabama to seek shelter, and then doing the show remotely from there.

    Here, we aren’t in as much of a need to evacuate, we are further from the coast and the storm surge, but it’s still going to be a long, dangerous couple of days. So, we are spending a lot of time, and both mental and physical energy, preparing to possibly be without power, for needing to leave if the house is damaged, and so forth. It’s a lot. And that is on top of all the mental energy necessary to deal with large COVID outbreaks we’ve had in recent weeks, all of the recent events in world news, and the various personal and professional challenges that we are also dealing with.

    Running on fumes is a really good description of how I think most of the entire state feels today, and yet, there’s a storm coming that we are all going to have to deal with, while everything else just continues on as well.

  • Disenfranchised Grief

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    This afternoon, one of the folks I follow on Twitter regularly, Jennifer Leggio, wrote a blog post about the loss of her father. Even though she hadn’t seen him in 30 years, his death was hard on her: Because over the last year I’ve had one too many people say to me, “If you hadn’t…

One Comment

  1. Good thread

    I had to ask for help after two failed suicide attempts as if I hadnt I would have tried a third time or drunk myslef to death. I disclosed and started to get better and boy is life good despite the fact that my abuser is being released on parole next week after serving only half of his sentance. Justice dont make me laugh.

    I relive my abuse very nearly every night still and I’m now 49 but im sober and clean and dealing with it all, I never would have got this far if I had not disclosed I would have not started my recovery and there would be a great proberbility that i would not be here. CSA is a life and death issue

    A very angry Dan

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)