It’s easy to assume that our broken situation is our only situation and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. What if we restructured these assumptions to see asking for help as a source of strength and healing?
Seeking help can feel difficult in a world full of judgment where social standing seems disproportionately important. Who hasn’t felt embarrassed or humiliated when faced with asking for help in hard situations, like losing a job or grieving the loss of a loved one? Sometimes the words get trapped in our throat, unable to come out, even when we really want to ask for someone’s aid during dark times. Surely, we can do this on our own, we might think, and any flaws need to be hidden away to save face and preserve our reputation among our friends, family, and peers.
Photo by Radu Florin
However, seeking help and healing shouldn’t be demonized. In his BYU devotional “Healing=Courage+Action+Grace,” Jonathan G. Sandberg says, “In order for healing to occur, we have to be courageous enough to move forward when we are afraid.” He attributes the healing process to the courage to admit we need help, seeking said help instead of waiting for someone to extend it, and accepting grace for our faults. He says simply that “in a word, healing is change.” I myself was taught to keep family problems within the family and not share them with the world, even when asking for outside help would have benefited us in the short and long term. Even now, it’s hard for me to ask for help, and when I do, it’s only when I’ve exhausted my own attempts to solve the problem. But Professor Sandberg shows us that healing starts with asking for help.
Change in all things is inevitable, but we can overcome the stigma around healing. It’s okay to seek aid when we can’t do something by ourselves. Rather than seeing healing—a form of change—as something to be feared or shunned, finding strength in healing can help us take our faults and hidden wounds and mend them, turning ourselves into someone new in the process.
Read more about how to approach the healing process in Jonathan G. Sandberg’s full article, “Healing = Courage + Action + Grace.”
Source: BYU Speeches
—Hannah Hubbard, Latter-Day Saint Insights
FEATURE IMAGE BY KELLY SIKKEMA
Find more insights
Look for more insights on this topic from Jeffrey R. Holland in his talk “However Long and Hard the Road.”
Read how to navigate the healing process with God’s aid in Taylor Nash’s article “Healing Mentally with God in Mind.”