Hi Reader,
I got a text last week that made me pause. It said: “I don’t even know how to ask for help anymore. I’ve been the strong one for so long, I forgot I’m allowed to not be.”
I sat with that sentence for a long time because I’ve heard some version of it from almost every woman I’ve ever coached.
Let me tell you about a client I’ll call Kristen. Kristen is the one everyone calls.
She’s the friend who shows up with a casserole, the daughter who manages her mom’s doctor appointments, the wife who “doesn’t like to make a big deal” out of her flares.
Last spring, in the middle of a bad autoimmune flare, she still drove carpool.
She sat in the parking lot before pickup, gripping the steering wheel, waiting for a wave of pain to pass so she could walk in and say “I’m great, how are you?” to the other moms.
Her husband asked what was wrong that night at dinner and she said, “Nothing, I’m fine.”
She genuinely doesn’t remember the last time she asked someone for help and meant it.
Kristen isn’t isolated because no one loves her. She’s isolated because she built an identity around being the one who doesn’t need anything. Asking felt like weakness. Or worse, it felt like burdening the people she loves most and that is the last thing she’d ever want to do to them.
So she prayed alone. She researched alone. She cried in the car alone.
And she started to feel like even God felt far away, because it’s hard to feel close to anyone, including Him, when you’ve stopped letting anyone in.
The Science
This is meant to make sense of what you already feel in your body.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of loneliness and social isolation research found a real, measurable link between loneliness and elevated interleukin-6 (IL-6), an inflammatory marker your immune system produces when it senses a threat (Smith et al., 2020, published via the National Library of Medicine/PubMed).
Your body doesn’t know the difference between “I’m in danger” and “I’m isolated.”
At a cellular level, prolonged isolation can be read by your nervous system as a threat, and your immune system responds the way it responds to any threat by ramping up inflammation. For a body that’s already inflamed, already fighting an autoimmune condition, already exhausted from carrying pain no one else can see, that’s not a neutral thing.
You’re not too sensitive or too dramatic for feeling the ache of doing this alone. Your immune system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, treating chronic isolation as a threat and responding accordingly.
Carrying it all yourself isn’t just heavy on your heart. It may be adding fuel to a fire that’s already burning in your body.
The Scripture
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Galations 6:2 (ESV)
It doesn’t say “carry your own burdens quietly so you don’t inconvenience anyone.” or “be strong enough that no one ever has to bear anything for you.”
It says one another. This means we were never meant to be a solo act.
You can spend your whole life being the one who bears other people’s burdens.
Letting someone carry a piece of what you’re carrying isn’t weakness — it’s actually how this is supposed to work.
It’s how the law of Christ gets fulfilled, in both directions.
The Steps
- Name one burden out loud to one person, today. Not “I’m struggling,” but something specific: “This flare has been bad, can I tell you about it?”
- Practice a specific ask instead of a vague one. “Can you bring dinner Tuesday” gets you help. “I’m just so tired” usually gets you sympathy and nothing else.
- When someone offers this week, let yourself say yes without immediately finding a way to pay it back.
I’d love to hear from you on this one.
Hit reply and tell me: what’s one burden you’ve been carrying alone that you could hand to someone else this week?
It might be a person. It might be God. Either one counts as a start.
I’ll be praying over whatever you send me.
With so much care,
Andrea DuMez, RN, CHN, NBC-HWC
Registered Nurse | Holistic Nutritionist | Integrative Health Coach | Certified Metabolic Balance Coach
