Why High Achievers Often Struggle Most to Ask for Help

There is a particular irony in the way that competence can become a barrier to seeking support. If you are a person who manages complexity well, who is regarded as capable and reliable, who holds a great deal together, you are probably a person who also finds it hardest to acknowledge, even to yourself, when you are struggling.

The identity investment in self-sufficiency

For many high achievers, competence is not simply a skill set, it is an identity. The capacity to manage, to cope, to not require too much from others, often becomes a defining feature of how you understand yourself and gain praise from others. That identity tends to develop for a number of different reasons. You may be a highly self-sufficient person who learned early that relying on others was ill-advised, risky, or even dangerous. It may be that your role was to be the one who held things together rather than being someone who needed support (like a parent or perhaps a sibling did). For many of us, self-sufficiency became an early adaptive response which worked. The difficulty is that self-sufficiency can continue long after the original context has shifted.

How professional competence can mask personal difficulty

When there is enough to do at work and at home, and enough external structure demanding attention in the day to day, our internal experiences can be kept at a distance. Professional competence and personal difficulty can coexist for a long time without one interrupting the other. The external performance holds well and even garners praise, while the internal experience is a different story.

Why the skills that 'work' at work do not transfer inwards

The skills that produce professional success (be they analysis, problem-solving, or efficiency) tend to be less useful when turned toward our inner lives. Our emotional experiences do not respond so well to being 'managed.' Difficulties that have been suppressed or rationalised tend to accumulate rather than resolve over time. You may be excellent at working through a problem analytically at work or at home, while finding that applying the same approach to your own internal experiences produces frustration rather than progress.

What therapy can offer

Therapy with high-achieving, self-sufficient people often begins with demystifying the unspoken expectation that therapy will be another form of problem-solving, where sufficient 'effort' and 'intelligence' being applied can lead to desired 'results.'

What tends to be more useful is a different orientation entirely: less about fixing problems and more about understanding the impact of one's past on the present. In therapy we attend to what is actually happening internally and externally, rather than what should be.

If you have spent a long time being the capable one (for others, for your organisation, for your family) and have found that there is less and less space for attending to what is actually happening for you on the inside, therapy can be a space to unpack and explore your experiences.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.