Nothing Flourishes Alone: Self-Reliance, Interdependence and the People who Help Us Grow
As an introvert-leaning person who naturally enjoys solo tasks, I’ve been thinking about the value we place on being able to manage things by ourselves.
Perhaps underneath the value is a false sense of security. When we are working through things alone then we feel like we have total control over the experience. But is that true?
I’m not talking about solitude, because tuning in and creating space is vital to our wellbeing. I’m talking about the habitual resistance to allowing another person to contribute something we haven’t yet been able to find for ourselves. For some of us, this can touch surprisingly tender places: a fear of appearing inadequate, incapable, less accomplished or somehow weak. These ideas rarely appear from nowhere. They can be bound up with the identities we have built over time, particularly through periods when being capable, independent or in control helped us feel safe.
Somewhere along the way, self-reliance seems to have become synonymous with strength. We admire the person who can cope, work things out, keep going, make the difficult decision and somehow know what to do next. Needing support can feel like evidence that we haven’t quite managed something we should have been able to manage on our own. Even when life changes significantly and the ground beneath us feels less certain than it once did, there can be a voice somewhere in the background insisting that surely, by now, we should know how to do this.
And yet, when I look at almost anything that flourishes, I can’t find much evidence for the idea that independence is the natural order of things.
A tree does not grow by itself. It has soil beneath it, rain and sunlight above it, an entire ecosystem around it and, unseen below the surface, extraordinary networks through which resources and information are exchanged. We don’t look at the tree and consider it somehow less magnificent because it required all of that in order to grow. Its dependence on the conditions around it does not diminish what it becomes.
Why would we imagine ourselves to be so different?
Interdependence is a concept I return to often. I see it everywhere: in nature, in human development, in education, in relationships and increasingly in my work with people navigating periods of change. Nothing exists entirely unto itself. We are constantly shaped by and responding to the environments, relationships and systems of which we are part. From the moment we arrive, we develop in relationship with other people. Someone teaches us how to eat from a spoon, tie our shoelaces, cross a road and read. We learn language because others speak to us. We discover what our bodies can do through play, encouragement, imitation and practice. We go to school and spend years surrounded by people whose role is to help us encounter things we don’t yet know. If we play sport, somebody coaches us. If we learn an instrument, somebody teaches us. Later there are lecturers, supervisors, colleagues, managers, mentors, friends and the countless people whose knowledge and perspective become woven into our own.
This is so ordinary that we barely notice it. And then, somewhere in adulthood, once we slip into a place where our routines, relationships and work become consistent, the rules seem to change. We can find ourselves facing the end of a relationship, a change in career, children growing up, a loss, a new beginning, a shift in identity or simply the persistent feeling that the life we are living no longer quite fits, and decide that this is something we should be able to work out privately. We might talk to friends, of course, but even then there can be a reluctance to need too much, ask too often or admit that despite being intelligent and capable, we genuinely don’t know what comes next. It’s no longer a part of natural progression, it’s a private matter, riddled with self-judgement, a space of vulnerability that we’ve distanced ourselves from.
I find this particularly intriguing because we don’t apply the same logic to many of the things we take seriously. An athlete working towards an ambitious goal doesn’t regard having a coach as evidence of inadequacy - much to the contrary. Writers work with editors. Researchers have supervisors and collaborators. Musicians continue studying with teachers long after they are accomplished performers. People building businesses seek out people who have knowledge they don’t yet possess. Often, the more committed someone is to developing their capacity, the more intentional they become about the people from whom they learn.
The strange thing isn’t that we sometimes need support. It is that we have come to associate needing it with not coping.
There is another part of this that complicates things, though. Relationships may be fundamental to our wellbeing, but they are also so often the source of our confusion and pain. We learn about ourselves through other people, but we can also learn things about ourselves that aren’t true. We can be loved and misunderstood, supported and constrained, encouraged and diminished. We absorb expectations from families, workplaces, friendships, intimate relationships and the culture around us, sometimes so gradually that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what we actually believe and what we have simply become accustomed to believing.
In that sense, relating to other people is like tending a garden. Relationships need attention. Some need more space, others more care. Boundaries matter. So does reciprocity. Something that once flourished may change in time. And occasionally we have to recognise that something we keep tending is no longer capable of growing in the way we hoped it would. There is skill involved in knowing when to nurture, when to prune, when to protect and when to let something go. An essential part of this is building the inner resilience to stand firm in what we know to be true about ourselves, and while we might feel the impact of other people’s actions, particularly when they are hurtful or upsetting, we have the capacity to return to our clear and balanced state of being.
And so, before going it alone, the idea of the right support deserves more attention than simply an encouragement to ask for help.
When we are moving through significant change, the people around us inevitably see what is happening through the lens of their own experience. Some people might give a wide berth, opting for polite distance over involvement. Friends and family may love us deeply and still have very particular hopes for what we will decide. Our choices can affect them. Our changing can unsettle the roles and patterns that have developed between us. Their fear for us can sound like caution; their desire to protect us can sometimes make the world appear smaller rather than larger. None of this necessarily makes them unsupportive. It simply makes them human.
There can therefore be real value in having someone alongside us who has both enough distance from our life and enough understanding of human experience to help us look at it differently. Someone who doesn’t need a particular answer from us. Someone who can share resources, recognise patterns, bring knowledge we don’t yet have, ask questions we haven’t thought to ask and stay with uncertainty long enough for something more useful than a quick solution to emerge.
I have been fortunate to have people like this at different points in my own life. Mentors, teachers, counsellors, coaches, colleagues, friends and family have each, in different ways, expanded the edges of what I could see from where I was standing. The most influential haven’t given me a blueprint for my life. More often, they have offered a new perspective, asked an unexpectedly good question, introduced me to an idea, challenged an assumption or reflected something back to me that I was too close to recognise for myself. Their contribution didn’t make the eventual decision or change any less mine.
Perhaps this is where the tree analogy becomes useful again. The soil cannot do the growing for the tree. Rain cannot determine the direction of its branches, and sunlight cannot decide what it will become. The tree does its own growing, but the conditions surrounding that growth matter enormously. I think good support works something like this. It should not make us increasingly dependent on someone else’s answers or less able to trust our own judgement. Ideally, it creates conditions in which our own capacities can develop: greater perspective, discernment, knowledge, steadiness, confidence, skill and perhaps the courage to experiment with something we couldn’t previously imagine ourselves doing. We remain responsible for our lives, but we don’t have to pretend that responsibility requires isolation.
This feels particularly important during periods of change because change has a way of taking us beyond the boundaries of what we already know. We may be highly capable in the life we have been living and still feel uncertain when the terrain changes. The skills that helped us succeed in one season may not be the ones we need in another. Sometimes we are encountering circumstances we have never encountered before; at other times, we are finally questioning patterns we have lived with for so long that they have become almost invisible to us. There is no contradiction in being accomplished and needing perspective. In fact, I wonder whether continuing to grow inevitably means arriving, from time to time, at the edge of our own experience. If we only ever encounter situations for which we already possess all the knowledge, skills and perspective we need, perhaps we aren’t venturing very far beyond what is already familiar.
This is where I find myself returning to that image of the tree. We tend to admire what is visible: the height, the strength of the trunk, the reach of the branches, the shape and colour of the leaves, and what has managed to flower. We pay less attention to the conditions that made that growth possible, or to the vast network beneath the surface that supported what eventually became visible above it.
Maybe there is something worth reconsidering in our admiration of self-reliance. Of course there are times when standing on our own feet matters enormously. Developing agency, self-trust and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty are important parts of becoming who we are. But independence and interdependence need not cancel one another out. Part of a full life is becoming more discerning: knowing what is ours to carry, recognising when the right support might take us somewhere we couldn’t reach on our own, and accepting the privilege of offering that same support to others.
The tree still does the growing. It simply never had to grow alone.
Interested in working with me? Please email me here: jen@innervisioncounselling.com.au or book via the website.