No support from parents and/or other people in your life: now what?

Life has its ups and downs and sometimes that's when you need some help on support. You would expect to get that support from your parents, family or partner? But what if that doesn't happen? How is this possible, what are the consequences and how can you best deal with this? In this blog, we take a closer look.

Support can take many forms such as financial support, giving advice, helping with a task, reassurance and providing a compassionate listening ear[1].

No parental support

In your youth, you often still get support from your parents; in your twenties, you often get more financial support. But that support often stops again when you reach 30. Other forms of support parents may also stop after the age of 30. This often does not go down gradually, but happens "suddenly."[2]

This can come as something of a shock, but it is also often the case that parents are also just a bit older and need more support themselves because of this old age. It is then really just time to fend for yourself.

In this case, if you get a little angry at your parents and that they don't support you, there is a helpful exercise you can do. Namely, you can think of all the things you are grateful for.

What did your parents consciously and unconsciously teach you that you can be grateful for? After all, not receiving support also teaches you independence and that you can count on yourself. Somewhere, there are some really cool things you learned from your parents, perhaps without them consciously doing so. This can turn your feeling of not receiving support from your parents - and if that makes you a little angrier at your parents - into love.

What is troubling, however, is that if you didn’t receive emotional support from your parents during your childhood, this can affect you for the rest of your life. As a result, you may be more prone to developing depressive symptoms, have lower self-confidence, and struggle to build relationships[3].

In this case, you likely developed unhelpful beliefs during your childhood that are holding you back. If so, a hypnotherapist can help you change those beliefs. Sometimes the gratitude exercise works in this situation as well, but it may also be necessary to have a conversation with your inner child.

No support from family

Not getting support from your parents is one thing, but if you find that your siblings and/or parents are also not supporting you, this can be extra painful. To your mind, you may have lost your entire family while they are still alive. An extremely painful feeling.

What then?

Even then, you may suffer from feelings of depression. Especially if not experiencing support from your family is a stable condition. Therefore, it does not matter whether you are male or female[4].

In this case, it’s especially important to focus on your own self-confidence and the belief that you can achieve something on your own—or with the help of people who aren’t your family.

Another solution might be to practice with a family constellation. This is a technique that allows you to examine where you place your family members on your mental map. Perhaps people in your family are very close to you, which means they have a significant influence on how you feel.

If you can then put them a little further away from you in your mind, their influence can also diminish, and that can cause you to become a little less depressed already.

Sometimes moving family members around in your family constellation can have an immediate effect. For example, I did this exercise myself once. I then moved my youngest child a little further away from me and my oldest child closer. After the exercise my oldest child called me. He had never done this spontaneously before and we had a nice and good conversation. So you see, sometimes the effect can happen very quickly.

In Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' third training course, you will get to work with this technique.

No support from partner

A relationship is a joint effort, which means supporting each other—both emotionally and practically. If men don’t receive support from their partner, this can lead to symptoms of depression. Another striking finding in a study on support is that as women get older, they receive less support from their partners (source 1).

If you experience little support from your partner, it is helpful to consider how independent someone can be in the relationship. In fact, research shows that people who can function independently in a relationship are more supportive of their partner than those who do not experience this freedom.

What's interesting is that I once helped someone who had a relationship problem because he was putting his girlfriend on a kind of pedestal, precisely. He wanted to do everything for her, but this caused her to feel that she was no longer independent, which led to arguments. So this is not helpful at all.

Then we also used a visualization to make the relationship more equal in his mind, so he offered the support she really needed instead of suffocating support.

Such visualization can also help you communicate more easily with your partner about what support you need. After all, it is important to express what support you could use.

For example, you might have unhelpful beliefs about how relationships work, such as the idea that your partner should just intuitively know that you need a certain kind of help. But no one can read minds; even highly sensitive people sometimes don’t know what’s going on inside another person or what specific help is needed. They mainly sense that something isn’t right, but what that is still needs to be communicated.

In addition, most people are not highly sensitive, so communication remains important.

You can then instill helpful beliefs by, for example, repeating certain hypnotic suggestions , such as:

"My partner needs me to tell him what I need."

"When I support my partner, my partner supports me."

"When I let my partner know what is important to me and what I need help with, I get support."

These are just examples. Depending on the problems you are experiencing in your relationship with support, you may receive other suggestions to help you with this.

No support at work

At work, a certain amount of collegiality is nice, too. Sometimes emotional or practical support in certain activities or projects is helpful. What if work really does let you figure everything out on your own?

Support from your colleagues is quite important. Research on teachers and support from fellow teachers shows that this helps reduce stress at work and improve teachers’ performance[5]. Support from colleagues can involve collaborating to achieve specific goals and making plans on how to tackle a problem. The more you collaborate with colleagues, the less stress you’ll experience.

So figuring everything out on your own can be quite stressful. So what should you do? So it is important then to indicate to your colleagues or a supervisor that you would like to work together more or that you need help.

This can be very challenging if you hold beliefs that you have to work hard or that asking for help is a sign of weakness. If you find yourself getting stuck at the idea of having to bring something up with your coworkers or manager, it’s helpful to identify which beliefs are causing this.

With regression, for example, you can go back to the first time you got the negative feeling at the idea of asking for help. These are often moments from your childhood, because that's when you consider how life works and how you can best function then.

Then a therapist can then help to "fix" this moment. You then reinterpret the moment so that instead of a blocking belief, you get a belief that helps you move forward in life. There are all kinds of ways to reprime this moment. For example, you can empathize with other people who were also there at the time, you can play the moment completely differently like a movie, or you can start the conversation with your inner child. Depending on your reactions, the therapist will determine the most helpful way for you to change the belief.

Subsequently, you will find yourself asking for help more easily at work and perhaps even offering help more easily. Leading by example, for example, can also do a lot for you.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how you can use it to help people? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

Or sign up for one of our seminars or trainings, as you will get to work with the above technique so that you can help yourself or just others who are not experiencing support.

Want your problem solved? Then go to bestetherapeut.co.uk

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