Pride or Low Self-Esteem?

If you are an independent person, used to making your own way in the world, it may be difficult for you to accept help from other people when you are having a hard time. There may be a couple of causes for this:

1. Pride -- It's not really that you are "too proud" to accept help, but that you feel ashamed to need the help in the first place. This plagues individuals who have always been the ones to take care of others; people who are decisive and capable, and who are accustomed to managing their own affairs. In many instances, they have HAD to be self-sufficient because the traditional supports of family or friends may have been denied them.
2. Low Self-Esteem -- During our hard times our self-esteem can suffer, particularly if we feel that we are the cause of our own misery. In such times, we may want to reject the help others offer because we feel we aren't worthy of receiving it. We may interpret the need for assistance as yet more proof that we cannot do anything right, or that we haven't the power to fix this situation ourselves.

Pride and Low Self-Esteem are two sides of the same coin. Looking at them another way, they are either end of a continuum that ranges from "I don't need God" to "God doesn't need me". Neither case is true.

As mentioned in the June 1, 2005 post "Where is God when it hurts?", helping someone else gives you a positive boost. By rejecting help someone offers to give us, we are denying them the blessing of being able to reach out to someone else and make that connection. Similarly, if we take a few moments to help someone even though we are suffering ourselves, we can forget our troubles for a short time and get that boost ourselves.

The ideal is to be in the centre of the continuum, with you and God as equal partners in life, and having the understanding that helping others and being helped is a natural and vital part of our human identity.