Why People Really Hate the Idea of "Getting Help"

If someone in your life is telling you that you have a problem and you need to get help, and the thought of that just makes you feel like you're going to vomit, or maybe you have an immediate reflex that you just want to tell this person to fuck off, this video is for you because there are a lot of reasons why people resist getting help. And some of them are pretty valid. Like, it can be expensive. It's inconvenient time-wise. It can be a little awkward sometimes. All that is all true. Not going to lie. But the deeper reasons, the ones you're probably not saying out loud, those are what we're going to dig into in this video. For those of you who are new here, my name is Amber Hollingsworth. You're watching Put the Shovel Down. For years, I've watched people avoid getting help like the plague until it was almost too late. And I've watched families begging someone just to walk through the door of a treatment center, a therapist's office, an AA meeting, anything, and then getting met by wall after wall of resistance. And this resistance isn't just about denial. It's not about them not caring about their family. There are real reasons why getting help feels like the absolute last thing that you want to do. Now, whether you're the one resisting or you're the one watching someone resist, you need to hear what these reasons are. I'm not trying to say that it isn't a problem and someone doesn't need to get help, but if you're going to break through this resistance that you're having, you need to understand why it's happening. We got to get honest about what getting help actually sounds like when you're the one being told to do it. There are 3 deeper reasons. Once you can see them for what they are, the whole conversation will shift. Now, reason number 1 is you don't think that it's Bad enough to need help. You're still showing up at work. Your marriage is still intact, although rocky. You haven't gotten a DUI, or at least you haven't gotten one in a long time. You're not drinking in the morning. You're not smoking all day. Then in your mind, it's not that bad. You can point to all the ways things are fine, and you can definitely point to a lot of people who are way worse than you. You look around and you think, I'm not like those people who need help. And on top of all that, you've had periods of success. Times when you successfully cut back or stopped for even weeks or months. Times when you've had it under control, so you know you can do it. You've proven that you can do it, which is why, you know, if you just put your mind to it, you can get back to that place without needing any kind of outside help. Because the idea of getting help feels like admitting that you're worse than you are. Or why pay all that money when you're not even that bad and you can stop if you decide to? It kind of feels like overkill for someone who just needs to try a little harder. But every time you try harder and then it works for a little while and then it stops working, you're not getting the data that you can control it. You're getting data that willpower alone just isn't Now, reason number 2, this is probably the biggest one, to be honest, is that you're not ready to commit to never doing it again. Yeah, this one is kind of uncomfortable. When someone says you need to get help, what you hear is sign up for lifelong sobriety starting now. You're admitting it. You can't control it, which means you need to stop forever. And you're not sure that that's what you want. Maybe you just want to do it less. Maybe you just want to do it differently. Maybe you're not ready to say that you're never going to do it again for the rest of your life. And traditional help like Treatment centers, AA, most therapists feels like you got to make a commitment before you even walk in the door, like all or nothing, black and white, abstinence or nothing at all. So instead of getting help, you just avoid it like the plague because it feels like surrendering to something you're just not totally ready to give up. And I get it. You don't want to be told what you can and can't do for the rest of your life, and you don't want to be locked into someone else's definition of what recovery looks like. And let's be honest, a big part of it is you don't want to admit to your loved one that You need to get help because they're going to take it as a sign that you're totally admitting it. You know you have to stop forever, so you just keep avoiding it because you're not ready to commit to all that. But that means you're staying stuck in a cycle, in a version of the plan that's not working either. All right, before we talk about what works, let's look at number 3. Number 3 is because thinking about talking about it out loud feels humiliating. Number 3 is the thought of talking about it out loud to someone else feels humiliating. That's where that little vomit feeling's coming from. The thought of sitting in a room full of Admitting you have a problem, thought of calling a treatment center or walking into a therapist's office and saying out loud, I've screwed up my whole life and I can't stop. The thought of telling someone about the worst moments in your life, the things you've done, the lies you've told, the people you've hurt. You can't even really stop and tell yourself that because it feels so uncomfortable. It makes you feel horrible, squirmy, defensive. It brings all that shame to the surface and makes you feel like a total failure. And the truth is you already feel terrible enough about what you're doing. The last thing you want is to sit in that feeling with someone watching you. So you don't. You keep trying it on your own because trying and failing privately feels better than asking for help publicly. Okay, but that shame that's keeping you from getting help is the same shame that's keeping you stuck. So if those are the deeper 3 reasons why people resist getting help, what do you do instead? Because I'm not here to tell you you have to get help, to pile any more shame on top of you. To make you go to a treatment center or tell you that there's only one way to do this thing. I just want you to think about getting help a little differently. What if getting help wasn't about admitting defeat? What if it wasn't about surrendering control of your whole life and having to commit to something forever and ever? Amen. What if it was just getting on the fast track to solving the problem? Think of it this way. Yeah, you can figure this out on your own and you probably will eventually, but that track usually takes years of trial and error, years of trying things that don't work, years of white knuckling it and relapsing. And starting over and burning bridges. And worst of all, feeling terrible about yourself. Or, or you could just work with someone who solved this problem like 1,000 times before. Someone who can help you skip the 10 years of suffering and get straight to what works. If you stop thinking about like getting help because you're broken and start thinking of it like, I'm going to hire a consultant because I have this problem and I want to fix it really fast. Now you're on the right track. Like people that hire business consultants, it's not because they're stupid or they can't run their business. They hire them because an outside person can see things that they can't see and just help them get to their goals faster. You don't get your son private baseball coaching lessons because he's a failure and he's terrible at it. You get him a coach because the coach knows how to unlock what's already there and you want him to make progress faster. You don't hire a personal trainer because you're weak. You hire them because they can help you build a plan that works for your body. So instead of wasting years doing the wrong exercises, eating the wrong things, you can just fast-track to the result. That's what getting the right kind of help is. It's not surrender. It's an advantage. Like, yeah, I could probably do my taxes myself. I'm smart enough. I think maybe I could read the codes and do all the research, or I could just pay someone, or I could just get help from someone who, that's what they do all day, every day. They already know all the boxes to check, all the loopholes. And that's the person I want to hire because I have more confidence in them. Not because I think there's something wrong with me for not knowing all the tax laws. A lot of times the people that come to me for recovery coaching are pretty close to having the problem solved, to be honest. There's usually just like one Or 2 little patterns that keep popping up or things that keep happening. It's like these little stumbling blocks. And sometimes it's even more simple than that. Sometimes it's really just a mind shift thing. It's like a reframing kind of situation where I help them look at the situation differently. When they look at it differently, they feel completely differently about it and it makes the whole process seem— sometimes it's just about understanding their personality, what works for them and what doesn't. About sometimes it's just a matter of understanding what motivates them to keep drinking or using and what motivates them to want to stop. One little reframe, one little shift about how how they see it, and suddenly they have the traction that, to be completely honest, you probably already know exactly what you need to do, but maybe you're just having trouble being consistent. There's a lot of ways to recovery. You don't have to follow any kind of one specific formula. If you don't like meetings, there's ways to do it without meetings. And the research shows that the majority of people are able to get sober without going to treatment. It's just about finding a strategy that works with who you are instead of against it. Getting help is not a weakness. It's the smart thing to do. This video is just about helping you. I just want you to think about What getting help means differently. I think it's just these old school thoughts of like getting help or getting therapy or something. It kind of feels like you're saying I'm crazy or something like that. But the truth of it is, is therapy just doesn't work for crazy people. You have to be pretty smart, pretty self-reflective, able to make change happen in your life in order for things like therapy, counseling, and coaching to even work. I mean, if you have a personal trainer, you feel totally embarrassed that you have a personal trainer, or does it kind of make you feel sort of bougie? Maybe you just name drop that you have a personal trainer. It really is a lot more than that. The people we see in our office are very smart. They're from great families. They're super successful. Oftentimes they're good people. They're kindhearted. They're just stuck in a bad cycle and we figure out how to get out of it. And it's not as deep and horrible and uncomfortable as most people think it is. So stop thinking about it like going to the principal's office because that's not what it is. It can be as simple as just having a sounding board to bounce ideas off of someone that's objective who like doesn't have any stake in the game. Okay. If you're still not convinced that getting help is just not not as bad as you think it is, and you just feel really weird about talking about these kind of things out loud to a person, maybe a good step for you is just sort of like talking to an AI like ChatGPT or Claude. I've been using Claude a lot lately. I like Claude a lot. Now, I do have an AI that's trained on my methods called Amber AI. You can talk to Amber AI, but I don't even want you to feel like you have to do that. I'm just saying there are a lot of ways to get some perspective, not just pure misery. It doesn't have to be horrible or even uncomfortable. So I'll put a list of resources in the description for you, a variety that covers all different kinds of things so you can find what works for you.