When I was twenty-four, I moved a refrigerator up two flights of stairs by myself. Not because no one was around to help. My brother Justin was twenty minutes across Melbourne. I had mates I could have called. I just didn’t. The thought of picking up the phone and saying “Hey, I can’t do this alone” felt worse than the physical strain of dragging a sixty-kilogram appliance up a narrow stairwell, one step at a time, my knee hitting the edge of each riser until I could barely bend it the next morning. The bruise lasted three weeks. It was the color of an overripe plum, and I wore it like proof of something I couldn’t name at the time.
I thought I was being capable. Independent. A person who handles things. What I didn’t understand yet was that my body had been trained, long before I had language for it, to treat asking for help as a kind of danger. And I’m starting to understand that I wasn’t unusual in that. A lot of people carry this same wiring, and they carry it so deeply they don’t even recognize it as a pattern. It just feels like who they are.
When needing became a problem
There’s a concept in developmental psychology that the researcher John Bowlby spent much of his career mapping: attachment. The basic premise is that how your caregivers respond to your earliest needs shapes the internal blueprint you carry into every relationship afterward. If you cried and someone came, you learned that needing was safe. If you cried and someone sighed, or went silent, or made you feel like your distress was an inconvenience, you learned something else entirely.
You learned that your needs were a burden.
This doesn’t require abuse. It doesn’t require neglect in the way most people picture it. Sometimes the caregivers were loving. Sometimes they were overwhelmed, or stretched thin, or simply raised by people who survived genuine scarcity and passed down an implicit rule: don’t need too much. Don’t take up too much space. Handle it yourself. A child absorbs this rule without anyone ever speaking it aloud. The body learns before language does that needing something from someone is the fastest way to lose them.
The psychologist Hal Shorey has written extensively about what he calls compulsive self-reliance, a pattern closely linked to dismissive-avoidant attachment. People with this pattern don’t just prefer independence. They are physiologically uncomfortable with dependence. Their nervous system reads vulnerability the way another person’s might read a physical threat: something to be escaped, managed, suppressed.
I recognized myself in that description the first time I read it, sitting on a stack of TV boxes in a Melbourne warehouse during my lunch break. I was twenty-five. I thought I was reading about strength. I was reading about a wound.
What it actually looks like
Here’s the thing about people who can’t ask for help. From the outside, they often look like the most capable person in the room. They’re the ones assembling the furniture, driving across town to help you move, picking up extra shifts so they don’t have to borrow money. They show up for everyone. And if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that the current only flows in one direction.
They give freely. They receive almost nothing. And the gap between those two looks like generosity until you realize it’s a form of control. If I never need you, you can never let me down. If I never ask, I never have to feel the particular shame of being told, even silently, that my asking was too much.
I spent most of my twenties performing this version of independence. I assembled an entire apartment’s worth of flat-pack furniture alone in a Melbourne studio: wardrobe, bed frame, desk, bookshelf. I moved a washing machine down a flight of stairs by myself at twenty-four and injured my back. At a mate’s wedding, someone asked how I was doing and I said “good, yeah, all good,” while something inside me felt like it was watching my life happen to someone else. I was so committed to not needing anyone that I didn’t tell a single person about the anxiety that followed me through that entire decade.
A coworker at the warehouse once told me I was “impossible to read.” He said it like a compliment. I took it as one. What looks like coldness or distance from the outside can feel like the only safe way to exist from the inside.
The nervous system remembers what the mind forgets
One of the more striking findings in attachment research comes from work on what’s called the Adult Attachment Interview, developed by Mary Main and colleagues at UC Berkeley. In these interviews, adults are asked about their childhood relationships with their parents. What researchers found is that people with dismissive attachment styles often describe their childhoods as “fine” or “normal,” sometimes even “great.” But when pressed for specific memories, they struggle to produce them. Or they produce memories that contradict their general description.
They’ll say, “My parents were always there for me,” and then describe being left to figure things out alone at age seven. The gap between the narrative and the evidence is the wound itself. The mind rewrites the story to protect the relationship with the caregiver. The body holds the original version.
This is why a person can be standing in a hospital waiting room with a torn ligament and still say, “I’m fine, I don’t need anything.” The words aren’t a choice. They’re a reflex, laid down decades ago in a household where needing was met with a furrowed brow, a turned back, a sigh heavy enough to teach a four-year-old that their hunger or fear or sadness was making someone else’s day harder.
The cost of never needing
There’s a real, measurable cost to this pattern, and it goes beyond emotional isolation. James Coan’s research on social baseline theory at the University of Virginia has shown that the human nervous system is designed to regulate stress through connection with others. Co-regulation, the process by which physical proximity, tone of voice, and eye contact help calm another person’s nervous system, is a biological expectation. We are wired for it.
When someone spends years or decades bypassing that system, handling every crisis alone, never letting anyone close enough to share the weight, the body pays for it. The stress response stays elevated. The immune system takes hits. The cardiovascular system bears a load it was never designed to carry solo. The illusion of self-sufficiency feels like armor, but biologically it functions more like a slow drain.
And it ripples outward. I think about the way I used to arrive early to social events so I wouldn’t have to walk into a full room. The way I’d ask other people questions about themselves so I never had to reveal anything about my own inner state. I was generous with my attention and completely withholding of my actual self. The people around me felt it, even if they couldn’t name it. My girlfriend before my wife told me once that I was “impossible to reach.” She was right. I had made sure of it.
The people who gradually grow apart from everyone around them aren’t always doing it on purpose. Sometimes the architecture of their earliest relationships made closeness feel structurally unsound.
The first ask
I was twenty-eight when I finally sat in a therapist’s office. I’d battled anxiety through my entire twenties without telling a soul. The depersonalization (that floating, detached feeling, like watching your own life through a window) had gotten bad enough that I couldn’t pretend it was just tiredness anymore.
Even then, I almost didn’t go. Not because I thought therapy was weak. I’d studied psychology at Deakin. I knew the research. I believed in the process. The problem was more primal than that. Somewhere in my body, beneath thought, beneath reason, sat the old instruction: don’t need anything from anyone. Asking for help meant being seen as someone who couldn’t cope. And being someone who couldn’t cope meant being too much. And being too much meant being left.
The therapist asked me, in our second session, when I’d first learned to handle things on my own. I said I’d always been that way. She asked me to think about it again. And what came back wasn’t a dramatic memory. It was a quiet one. Me at maybe eight years old, wanting something I can’t even remember now, and the feeling in the room that my wanting had shifted the atmosphere. A heaviness. A subtle withdrawal. Nothing anyone would call harm. But the lesson landed clean: your need is a weight on other people.
That lesson ran my life for two decades.
What I’m still learning
I’m thirty-seven now, living in Vietnam with my wife and daughter. My daughter is young enough that her needs are total and constant and completely unselfconscious. She reaches for me when she’s tired. She cries when she’s hungry. There’s no calculation in it, no measuring whether her need is too much. She just reaches.
I watch her do this and something in me aches, not with sadness exactly, but with recognition. That reflex, the reaching, is what gets trained out of certain children. Not through cruelty, usually. Through atmosphere. Through the slow accumulation of moments where a child reads the room and decides, unconsciously, that the safest version of themselves is the one that doesn’t need.
I still catch it in myself. Last month I was sick for three days and didn’t mention it to my brother Justin until it was already over. My wife noticed before I said a word, because she’s learned to read the silences. She didn’t ask if I was okay. She just sat near me and waited. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes the person who can’t ask just needs someone who doesn’t require them to.
I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. I’m writing it because I carried a refrigerator up two flights of stairs alone and thought that was strength, and it took me thirteen years to understand what it actually was. If your body tenses at the thought of saying “I need help,” if the words feel physically impossible even when you’re injured or exhausted or coming apart, there’s a reason for that. And the reason almost certainly started long before you had any say in the matter.
The work now is learning, slowly and imperfectly, that needing something from someone can be an act of trust. That reaching isn’t a burden. That the room won’t always shift the way it did when you were small.
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