When a relative was seriously ill and in intensive care for more than a month, Cianne Jones stepped in. “I took it upon myself to be that person in the hospital every single day – chasing doctors, taking notes, making sure I understood why they were doing things.” It was so stressful, she says, that at one point her hair started falling out, but she ploughed on.
It was Jones’s therapist who gently questioned whether she was going to ask for help. Jones laughs. “The hair falling out didn’t suggest to me that I needed help, it was somebody else looking in and saying that.” She has a large, close family who would have helped immediately – and did, once Jones asked – it’s just that it didn’t occur to her to ask. “I had taken that role on: ‘I’m just going to get everything done.’ I just took off, and that was it.”
It’s an experience many of us with so-called hyper-independence will recognise. I’ve behaved in similar ways, from more serious situations (I too have shouldered care responsibilities) to ridiculous ones, such as moving house alone, and the time I bought some weightlifting equipment then realised I wasn’t strong enough to carry it home. For most of my life, I’ve prided myself on my hyper-independent lone-wolf status – not relying on anyone but myself. But in recent years, I’ve come to see it not as a sign of my superior capabilities, but fuelled by fear of burdening others with my requests – or worse, being rejected – or of losing control.
It is well established that the quality of your relationships is key to happiness, and also has a big impact on health. “We are wired for connection,” says clinical psychologist Dr Stephen Blumenthal. “It’s bad for you to exist alone.” There may be those whose hyper-independence is more innate, and less of an issue, but for many people it can lead to isolation and loneliness. Blumenthal sees it in his clinic every day. Often, hyper-independent people are successful at work, “but then it’s a disaster when it comes to interpersonal relationships”.
For Jones, it has been more of a learned behaviour. She saw her single mother raise four high-achieving children while leading a charity. “She did everything herself, and it was very much me watching that that suggested this is what you do, you just get on with it. I was always inspired by my mum.” It spurred Jones on to qualify as a solicitor, run a company, found a charity – Women in Leadership, based in Uganda – and start a PhD. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given all that, as well as her propensity to shoulder everything herself, Jones has experienced burnout. “I didn’t realise how much I was taking on until I had a panic attack one morning and had to go to hospital.” She smiles at herself. “Even then, I thought I would take my laptop with me.”
She resists asking for help in general. “Anything that shows that I’m not capable, I don’t think I’d ask.” She is close to her family and has strong friendships, some going back decades, but she thinks her hyper-independence has affected romantic relationships. “There’s this narrative with quite a few women in my age group, our 30s: we’ve got everything, jobs, our own homes. Then, considering romantic relationships, you feel a little bit lonely, but do I really need anyone?”
This was the same for Urvashi Lad, who had run businesses and was, she says, “single pretty much until I was 43” – much of which she puts down to her hyper-independence. “It gives you a feeling of control.” But, she says, it “can keep you alone because you don’t feel safe to find that love”.
It took more than a year doing journalling and other therapies, she says, “to feel safe, to let that guard down and let somebody in”. Then she met someone (they’re getting married this year). She still catches herself trying to reject her fiance’s help, even with small things such as checking the screenwash in her car. “It got my back up initially, until I went: ‘No, it’s OK, he wants to do something nice for me, and it’s really nice that he wants to do this.’” She has tried to curb her hyper-independence in other areas of life. “It can really lead to burnout, brain fog and overload. We can’t do everything ourselves, no matter what we tell ourselves.”
In western society, independence and individualism is encouraged over community and relying on one other. For men, especially, says Blumenthal, our culture celebrates the hero forging his own path, from the characters of 19th-century novels to the cowboy archetype to the “sigma male” internet trend of the past decade. Hustle culture and “girl boss” goals similarly prize individualism in women.
There are other cultural forces at play. Jones, who is Black, sees a lot of hyper-independence among other Black women. It comes from the stereotype of being “strong”, she thinks, and is “very much a narrative that’s placed on us”. Her PhD is on domestic abuse in the Black community in London, and the response by the Metropolitan police, and this stereotype feeds into it. “So will women actually go out and ask for help in the first place? And do police officers think that you need help?”
She sees how successful Black women in the workplace are often placed in “saviour” roles – for instance, as an incoming CEO of a struggling company – which creates added pressure. “On top of that is care responsibilities,” says Jones of her Caribbean cultural heritage. “I know others in the Black community understand that. So you’re ‘strong’, you’re a carer, you’re a saviour, you’re a survivor. And you’re working.” It is, she says, “having a detrimental impact on many Black women’s lives”.
Lad thinks hyper-independence is about “protection – from being disappointed, being hurt by someone – or having had an experience that’s led someone to believe that it’s actually easier to do it all themselves. It’s not that a hyper-independent person doesn’t want help. In fact, they crave that help, but they want to feel safe enough to receive it.” In the past, she says, whenever she has let her guard down, “someone would take advantage, or expect [something in return], and so I put my guard back up, and I put myself in a fortress and it can be a lonely place”. If someone did her a favour, Lad would feel indebted – even letting someone buy her a coffee would feel uncomfortable. She thinks her hyper-independence partly has roots in her Indian heritage. “[Women] have been conditioned to do it all ourselves – to cook, to clean, to get a good job, to have our own money, all of that kind of stuff.”
Hyper-independence tends to start in childhood, says Kathleen Saxton, psychotherapist and author of My Parent the Peacock. Perhaps parents or caregivers were inconsistent, unreliable or emotionally unavailable. “Maybe they were working very hard and couldn’t give you the attention, so you learned to cope well on your own. It could have been that you had somebody who might have had an addiction, or maybe just a very dismissive parent for various reasons. Maybe they were brought up in quite an unemotional environment themselves.”
Or perhaps you are the eldest child and took on care for a parent or siblings early on. As an adult, it could develop from an experience of betrayal. Hyper-independence, she says, is “a coping mechanism. It’s a sense that: I can’t rely on anybody, so I will rely on myself. We sometimes wonder if there is suppressed grief and anger in there.”
Her hyper-independent clients are often proud of it, she says. “The positives are you’ll be seen as the fixer or the organiser or the rescuer, and that also allows you to be in control quite a bit, but underneath that you may feel exhaustion. You may offer to do it all, but in the end, you may feel resentful.”
The fact that her clients have recognised it, and are seeking Saxton’s help, shows hyper-independence has its downsides. “The negatives I see are emotional isolation, so you don’t share your vulnerability with other people. You share very selectively – you worry about burdening others. But it means that nobody ever really gets to know you, and people aren’t ever able to help you, and you start to have a belief that your needs can’t or won’t be met by other people.” This can also lead to cynicism and emotional numbness.
Hyper-independence has typified Phil Rowe’s life, he says. “Certainly, when I was younger, it was feeling not important enough to warrant anyone’s effort. I think I just had zero confidence for that kind of thing. It was a case of, ‘Who am I to ask?’” In his late teens, he was hospitalised with depression. “A part of that was probably my inability to discuss what was going on. I think it was very much that I didn’t want to burden people.”
Though he was an academic child, Rowe left school at 14 to work in a factory, because he was keen to start earning his own money. Now in his mid-50s, he has been married for 35 years, so it didn’t affect his chance of creating a strong partnership, but it has only been in the past 10 years or so that Rowe has become more comfortable asking for help from others.
Five years ago, inspired by his love of drama at school, Rowe started a new career as a voiceover artist, which required him not only to ask people for help and advice but to work in a collaborative, creative way. Sometimes he still feels uneasy, he says, but “not only does the world not fall apart, it gets infinitely better. Looking inward is kind of negative, compared with reaching out into the world. Usually, people are quite happy to help. I think, generally, people are a lot nicer and forthcoming than they are in my head at times.”
Independence verging on the extreme is, says Saxton, “a great thing to have in the locker, but I would challenge someone: what would it be like to begin to state what your needs are and seeing whether or not they could be met?” If your hyper-independence is something you’d like to change, try to understand where it might have come from. A therapist could be helpful, but Saxton says you can do a lot of this yourself. A person may have “lots of reasons and excuses as to why and how they like being independent, but if they’re able to drop down into whether or not there might be an inner wounded part that was let down, then you can work on being able to be with that part that felt nobody was there for them. Where did I learn I was better off to be on my own? Who might have failed me? Who didn’t give me maybe some of the support that I needed? And then we can begin to move towards tolerating some level of vulnerability.”
One way would be to start practising bits of “micro-dependence – asking for help with a small task that maybe isn’t so important, sharing a worry with somebody, letting somebody in a little bit. Micro-dependency or micro-vulnerability is stepping out and seeing what it feels like, just to show a little bit of your underbelly.” Healthy intimate relationships, points out Saxton, require reciprocity.
It was challenging herself to let someone buy her a coffee, remembers Lad, that allowed her to start to shift some of her hyper-independence three years ago. As well as leading to her relationship – which she thinks wouldn’t have worked before – the change has also improved her friendships. She now works as a coach, helping “hyper-independent women heal so they can feel safe, open up and receive that love and support that they crave”.
Jones has experimented with reaching out more, for instance by trying a local running club. “This sort of accountability and having other people around to support you with your goals I know is important.” Although she does lean on close friends, this is about being more vulnerable with people she doesn’t know well, and accepting that “those people could be supportive”. She is a little sceptical about how much of her hyper-independence she really wants to give up, but she is considering it. “You take on this role where you just do everything and get on with it.” As she gets older, she says, “the more I start to realise that I’m not sure I particularly like that role all the time”.
