Asking for favours is likely to get you more liked than doing favours for others, as a lot of us have found out the hard way. I believe a lot people who are reading this have a record of doing a lot for others, trying their best to be helpful and useful, getting taken for granted, getting asked more and more, and never appreciated or held in high-esteem by their peers. In all that time, you don’t ask for favours back, or very rarely ask for any. Why does it come to this?
Because some of us have been neglected and punished for asking for help. Because we were taught to be self-reliant, to do everything ourselves, that we have to be compentent on our own, and if we ask for help we’ll be considered a burden and told we’re stupid for even thinking we deserve any help. We had the social inclination to ask for help, attention, to try and figure things out while seeing other people as someone we can count on for assistance as little children, and then this was shut down in the most brutal way possible. If our own parents and caretakes didn’t find us worthy of help, how could we ask other people for favours? How could we even learn that this is something we’re allowed to do? We got rubbed in out faces about how much we 'need’ and 'want’ if we even ask for basic necessities!
Our instincts to ask for favours just as much as we do them has been destroyed. We end up feeling mortified, incompentent, weak and alone if we need help. Healthy people’s instincts to reach out as soon as they need a tiny favour – as well as making themselves likeable and good at social functions, has been denied and sabotaged in us.
This makes the Ben-Franklin effect work on us stronger than on others. We crave the affirmation that we’re needed and considered valuable so strongly, we’re likely to do endless favours, even if there’s next to no gratitude, even if we realize we’re being exploited. It wil become a magic circle where we feel helpless and rude to refuse, feeling used if we accept, secretly harboring feeling of being useful and dependable, as our parents trained us to think it’s our only acceptable trait.
In our strive to protect ourselves from being rejected, triggered, told we’re asking for too much or humiliated like we were in the past, we don’t ask for favours, and we don’t offer our peers a chance to be helpful to us; we’re likely to want to help them, and not allow ourselves to be helped. Some of our peers might feel dejected that we don’t find them needed, competent or valuable to us, just because we never count on them for anything. We don’t make others feel needed, because we don’t know how to. We unconsciously set ourselves up to only be the one who does the favours; others, in return, will accept it’s all they can ever get from us, and get used to exploiting it, without feeling a lot of affection for us in the process.
If we were raised in a healthy environment, asking for small favours would come natural; we wouldn’t even think twice before asking to borrow something small, asking to be heard, asking for help to understand, to fit in, to feel good. It would come instinctively. It seems that if we want to learn to socialize in a more natural, beneficial and fulfilling way, we’ll have to teach ourselves to ask for favours. It will not make us a burden, it will not make us needy, or weak. It will let others see that we’re human and we see them and need them, and they will like us more for it.
End note: This only works with with your peers, if started at the beginning of you getting to know them, it doesn’t work if you’re already regarded as the person to take for granted or considered a danger to be associated with. It also only works with normal people. Narcissists and sociopaths will act like their favours are sacred, worth in gold and function as unrepayable debts. If someone reacts in this way and only does you a favour when it’s extremely convenient for them or tries to guilt-trip you for asking, that’s not normal, they’re trying to reinforce your trauma and exploit it. Steer clear from that. That’s not how society functions. Doing small favours for others should come natural and without any debt, because it’s a basis of functional social behaviour.
gracieabrams
germansingergirl
