Once I asked a person very close to me for help and assistance in one important matter. This man refused me... But he didn’t just refuse, he tried to convince me that I didn’t need what I asked for either. I experienced a whole range of emotions and plunged into the feelings that I experienced as a child in a similar situation. It was a feeling of piercing loneliness and the feeling that in difficult times I had no one to count on but myself. Resentment rolled up to my throat and stuck there in a lump that was impossible to swallow. I was at a loss and asked myself questions: - Did I have the right to count on this person’s help? - And can I be angry with him now? When I dealt with this situation and lived it, I came away with several important realizations that I want to share with you. 1. Any person has the right to need help and ask for it. Doubts about this right arise if in childhood a child asking for something from a parent was refused and his desire was devalued. Something like: - You don’t need this because I don’t want/can’t do it. - I don’t like it, so you shouldn’t want it either. In this situation, the child begins to divide his desires into those that can be to want and which not to. Right and wrong. And he learns to give up those desires and needs that are not approved by those around him. Or he doesn’t refuse them at all, but seems to lose the right to ask for them. Hence the question I asked myself: - Do I have the right to ask? Do I have the right to count on the help of this person (and other people in general)? Beliefs with which a child enters adulthood: - You shouldn’t ask - they will refuse anyway; - Needing help and asking for something is bad; - If I asked and they refused - I'm bad. Because I asked for something wrong. Or because I don’t have the right to ask, but I asked. Perhaps this is why many people are so afraid to ask for something from others? The next decision that a child makes in this situation is to “deal with everything himself.” And he begins to cope on his own, not because he suddenly becomes strong, but because he “loses” this right to the help and support of other people. He copes on his own out of despair. This is a decision that is made from the conclusion: “I have no one else to count on but myself. In a difficult situation, no one will help me.” A conclusion that has been confirmed by early experience, but which, of course, is not the only truth. 2. We have the right to be angry at those who devalue what is important to us. Anger is a reaction to the violation of our boundaries, which gives us the energy to defend them. When someone tells us that we shouldn't want what we want, this is an attack on values, and therefore a violation of boundaries. Anger in such a situation is a very healthy reaction. But if we do not have the right to desires or the right to ask, then we will not feel anger at such devaluation. She will be depressed and go into unconsciousness. Or it will manifest itself as auto-aggression, and the person will scold himself that he, they say, is somehow different and wants something wrong. I want to say a few words in defense of the one who devalues. A person does this not out of malice, but, as a rule, in self-defense. It is difficult for him to refuse, because then he faces his feelings of guilt. One way to avoid it is to convince the person asking that his request is not needed and neither is he. And the easiest way to do this is to devalue it. 3. Other people have the right to refuse our request. The other side of the “I don’t have the right to ask” coin sounds like: “Close people should always help me.” It is formed again from childhood experience. In his grandiosity, the child decides that his parents are special people who are obliged to fulfill all his wishes. And if they don’t comply, then you can influence them in all ways available to him - hysterics, insults, anger, refusal to communicate, and so on. This expectation continues into adulthood. Such a person does not give another the right to refuse. And the closer!