Offering help, asking for help - a rather messy minefield
S had her car broken into yesterday, and nothing of value to the thief, but a large wallet of very important paperwork stolen, glasses of a prescription that is probably of no use to another living sole on earth but will be problematic to replace, that kind of thing. Along with the lost property and chaos that causes there is the damage of a smashed window, and the inevitable sense of invasion and scarring of the psyce that comes with such events.
Her car spent last night parked in my driveway for safety, as the smashed window left it further open to the world, and we had a rather daft evening together including lots of sitting talking about asking for, and offering, help ... followed by a trip to the pub and a 2am attempt to buy food in ASDA. An utterly daft excursion that almost killed us both, and we would have had the sense not to try if we weren't tipsy. But thats not the main point... this is
S was in a particularly vulnerable situation, due to her car being jam packed full of her possesions. They had been there for weeks, since she had had to clear out an old address, and would stay there for the forseable future. S can not walk without walking aids, and as a consequence, can not do simple things others take for granted, like lumping a few bags of clothes and boxes of books in from her car to her room. For weeks she had been saying, to all her many friends, that she needed help unloading her car, and would do other favours in return. For weeks, she had got sancimonious lectures on the vulnerability of having a car visibly full of stuff parked on a London street, along with a million vague offers of 'but of course I'll help'. And once she posted what happened on facebook, the similarly sanctinonious, unhelpful 'I told you so's started to pour in.
But no one had any right to really say such things. For no one helped her when it counted, despite her making a clear and specific request. No one turned up, no one ever said 'hows saturday for you' or 'I'm only free in the evenings, can I do it then' or any such thing - they just kept on professing in principle how much they loved to help and she could ask them for anything - but that counts for jack shit since no one DID help.
People love to impression-manage by proclaiming thier goodness and helpfullness in general, but to a person who actually requires help, this is a far more negative attribute that the openly selfish jack-ass who loundly procaims that they won't do nuttin' for nobody. Because at least the latter is honnest, and the help requirer knows to go elsewhere, instead of waiting for assistance they think is comming, but never will.
When it comes to the politics of asking for, and offering, help, my experience of disability is a lot like my experience of single-parenting a small child - except the disability probably makes it all a little more visible still. And its a f*cking minefield. I personally have a compulsive drive to turn down offers of help. I don't know why I do this. Its so deeply engrained in my personality, upbringing and automated responses that even when people are trying to give me help I desperatly need I a) cringe at being seen as needy and b) die a little inside at the thought of inconvieniencing others, so convince people its OK, I actually don't need the help at all. And then suffer for it. having just sent away little small bits of assistance that would have made a huge difference to me. In these last 6 months I have had to unlearn a lifetime of personality formation, and ask people for seats on busses, to open doors for me I can't manage, to carry things for me. But I still find it hard, and everything I'm saying about ways to offer help are based on this foundation that no matter how right the help-offerer gets it, it can still go wrong because the help-reciever still can't manage their end.
But anyway, here's my arrogant advice to others on offering help
1. Always offer, never just charge in and provide. If I've fallen over and you start pulling me to my feet, all you are going to acomplish is a hoast of bruses on my arms where you have gripped me, and probably a wrenched back for yourself too. Ask me if I want picked up, I may want to lie on the ground for 2 mins to get my breath back, and then what I want is your arm so I can pull myself up, not to be janked to my feet. This counts for just about any kind of help, though. To offer assistance is to treat a person with dignity and respect, to charge in and take over/do something for them is to discredit and dehumanise their parenting/bodily autonomy/capacity whatever
1.a. relatedly - peoples mobility aids become an extention of thier body-space, and grabbing a persons crutches is no different from grabbing thier legs. If I drop my crutch I probably do need you to pick it up for me, but please offer first, and randomly grabbing my crutches and moving them accross the room becasue they are in your way is NOT COOL
2. Make the offer real, locate it in time and space. The person who says 'I'd LOVE to babysit for you, call me litterally ANY time of the day or night, I can't WAIT to mind the little one' is a daft twat. Its no different from the idiot who claims to have no hard limits. We all have limits, and no one wants to be woken at 3am on a school night to babysit so a mother who's just run out of fags can take a spin by herself to the nearest 24 hour garage. But there is another consistent pattern. Anyone who claims the above will somehow, mysteriously and magically, never actually be availible when it counts, and not do 5 mins babysitting during the entire little ones childhood. On the other hand, the person who clearly states 'I like to go out on Saturdays myself, but an normally availible to babysit on a Friday, and would love to help out. What about friday next week?' will, quite likely, if asked, babysit on a Friday. Vague offers of help, with no time, place or limits attached, seem sweet the 1st hundred times, but after that they get old and tired. And, eventually, tip over into frustrating and angry making. And their main purpose seems to be, as in the case of S and the vandilised and burgeled car above, not to actually offer help, but to absolve the offerer of wrong-doing when it all goes pear-shaped. You ended up having a breakdown, rocking and screaming in the wardrobe in one room while your baby shreaked with unstoppable colic in the other? Well, you can't blame me, I TOLD you to call me' is so f*ucking easy to say. Actually turning up at an agreed time, in an agreed place and walking the floor with an endlessly shreaking colicy baby - well, thats not so easy.
Secondly, asking for help is not easy for many of us, as said above. In fact, its very, massivly, hard at times. And sweeping generalisations of how much someone wants to help out still leave the help-needer in the position of having to ask, maybe again, and again, and again - to take S and her car as an example again - she asked, at a general meet-up of friends, and loads of people said yes, but with no actual offer attached, so then she had to sort through them one by one, and go back to them, and ask specifically, and still got 'yes, I will help', but still got, 'I'll get back to you' when it came to agreeing when it would be done, so then she had to go back again, and do the rounds of asking again ... and then, when it all went horribly wrong, instead of sympathy, she got, 'but you knew we would help and you never asked, how stupid are you? We warned you this would happen!' I was having none of this, becasue I'd witnessed her asking. Vague offers are no offers ... they do worse than not help, they leave the help needer sitting by the phone, and not looking elsewhere where they might get real help from. They also force the help needer to have to ask repeatedly, something that is very difficult, instead of having to just accept - wich is still hard, but much easier. To take our babysitting-on-a-friday example above, the help-needer just has to graciously accept next Friday (or quickly and easily negotiate a different one), then and there, and its all organised. They don't have to still make the subsequent difficult asking-for-help phone call at a later date, which may be one hurdle too far.
3. Don't offer help you don't want to give. It all goes horribly wrong when you do this. There is nothing worse than a grudging, resentful favour, and the chances are, someone else may have done it willingly. I recently accpeted quite a forceful offer of help from someone, and *I* thought I was doing *them* a favour because they were so insistant that they wanted to do this for me. There was also money involved, and I thought that I was giving them a small nixer when they needed one. I haven't finished paying and *I'm* the one that is now resentful of the rest of the cash I have to hand over, because getting the help that I orriginally needed but planned to pay full market rate for was like pulling teath. I still wish I'd done as orriginally planned and just got a company in to do all the work, with me as employer, dictating how it would go. My stress levels would have been a thousand times lower. I had to turn into a bitch, a nag and a whinge, and it was still all difficult, and they clearly didn't want to be doing what they were doing. Whichever one of us who was really doing the other a favour shouldn't have done it - becasue neither of us were happily commited to the agreement. I was busy resenting and being angry and thinking how, if I'd just hired someone as planned my life would be so much easier, they were also clearly feeling that far too much was being asked, and in a time and manner that didn't suit them. The person in question, I suspect, is a lot like me in one respect. A compulsive help-offerer, but someone who finds it hard to ask for what they need, or say 'no' when 'no' is warrented. It was a lesson for life, for me anyway.
4. 'Pay it forward'. Help and reciprocation. Personally, I've always had a low tollerance for 'favour tally counters' - you know the kind - 'well, I did xyz for her, so now she owes me, and must do abc for me in return' or even just 'after all I've done for HER! Hurump!'
What do you mean, she owes you? If you expected something in return then it wasn't a favour, or help, it was just you looking for something - and thats low. Thats nasty and manipulative.
We live in a big, wide world with a lot of people in it. We all need help at one time or another, no matter who we are, and we can all give help, in different ways, no matter who we are, but we can't all do everything. I'll not be offering to babysit for anyone any time soon. If I tried to pick a child up to change thier nappy, I'd probably drop them on thier head and kill the poor little mite. The help *I* can give is very specific, and the help any other person can give is also specific to them. So, the random stranger who gives me a seat on a bus is someone I'll probably never do a favour for, but equally, the person I gave money to at the oyster card top up machine yesterday will probably never do a favour for me either, and thats OK. I just trust that they remember that I approached them and asked them if they were OK when they were flapping around, obviously upset, and I gave them the 2 quid they needed so that their top up would go through, and they could get home. And I hope that they pay it forward, to someone else, in some other way - maybe by giving up thier seat on the bus some day to someone who needs it. And perhaps just to know, on some level, that the real favour was forcing myslef to talk to scary-flappy-stranger when that terrified me, but I could also see that they were fellow-human-being-in-distress, not the miserly two quid.
What I've discovered recently, however, being in a position where I am having to ask for much more help, far more often, is that this horribly difficult thing of having to ask for help IS much easier if you have a general sense that you are giving something back. And its really, really nice to still be sometimes asked for help, even if you are normally on the recieving end. I couldn't help S unload her car, but I could give her a place to park it when she needed one, and a silly night out shopping is ASDA at 2am when she needed that - and in a few weeks when I have my nose job she has agreed to be my designated collect-from-hospital-and-stay-overnight person that the hospital insist I have as a condition of doing it as day surgery. And the hospital might think I'm bonkers appointing another quite disabled person as my carer, but it really is much easier to ask someone when I know that I can sometimes also genuinley help them out and not end up the constantly needy-needy-takey-takey person in the relationship.
5. Offer help as an automatic entitlement, not some sucky kind of charity or pity, or worse still control. This is a weird one, and comes from the fact that I've been musing on why it is so much easier to both ask for, and accpet, help in Marks and Spensers than any other shop. I have a theory that they are the only high-street chain that actually train thier staff in assisting differently abeled customers. Or something.
When I go into a shop, I can't carry anything, obviously, and this creates an automatic problem. How on earth do you pick up an item from a shelf/display and bring it to a cash register, when both hands are fully occupied in just walking with crutches? Well, in a clothes shop you might try swinging one or two hangers off the handles of your crutches, although this may lead to unballanced crutches, and falling over. In a grocery shop you can get a small basket, put it on the floor, and kick it in front of you.
The worst shops, of which their are many, will respond to a customer doing this as some sort of risk, for which you are To Blame(tm). 'you can't do that, you'll scuff the floor/knock something over/fall over and sue us - let me get someone to carry it for you'. One offer of help DECLINED. There are many things in life I actually can't do, like carry this damn basket. The fact that I am kicking this basket along the floor is surely proof that I CAN do it, so don't come over here telling me more things that I can't do, thank-you-very-fucking-much. If I can't shop in your bloody shop without kicking a basket along the floor, then thats what I've got to do. Its your bloody fault that you have the kind of baskets and floors that clash. Now get out of my way annoying security guard, and let me get on with my shopping.
The second worst shops are the ones that feel sorry for you. 'Oh, you poor dear, here, let me help you with that, oh, how are you coping'. Actually, I'm not poor. I used to be a sales assistant too, many years ago, but now I earn substantially more. Now please go away and let me get on with my shopping, I don't need your pity or charity to slow me down, thank-you-very-fucking-much. Second offer of held DECLINED.
Then there is Marks and Spensers, but only Marks and Spensers. 'hello, I am Mary, and I'm here to help you today with whatever you need. Would you like me to carry your basket for you?' - 'yes, please, that would be lovely'. They have a way of making you feel still in control of going shopping, able to say - I want to go over to the bread rolls now, or wander over to look at tights to match before trying on the dress, or whatever, instead of feeling rushed through the shopping to release whatever poor assistant has been put on your case, because you end up feeling that it really is this persons job to help you, and thats what they are there for, and that they would somehow rahter be wandering around the shop with a customer talking about matching cardigans than stocking shelves, so you are really doing them a favour. And the infrastructure matches. In thier buiser shops, like the one in London bridge, they have disabled and parent tills so you don't have to que in the long que, but can walk up to the empty designated till at the end and the next person free comes up and serves you. It makes a big difference and I have actually planned daft TfL journeys, just to go through the M&S in London bridge rather than take the quicker route home and have to stagger and wobble and possibly fall in some long que like in some awful Tescos local. The help you need (actually just to shop at all) starts to feel like an entitlement you have enery right to ask for (which it should be) and not some huge deal
Anyway, I've always very strongly said that social services need to be a right, not charity, because charity is out of pity and therefore no one ends up entitled to anything (reason no. 376 why the ConDems must die), but never really saw before how this same principle can affect interpersonal relationships. But it can be reflected right the way through to someone offering to go up to the bar for you in a pub - if its because they want to control your possible slightly eccentric coping strategies while trying to ballance a pint of cider back from the bar while walking on crutches and they are obviously mildly embarased that you are part of thier group - well, those people can fuck right off with thier help. If they feel soooooooo very sorry for the poor cripple, they can fuck right off with their help as well. If they are offering to carry your drink for you because they have health privilidge and you don't, and its no skin off thier nose, well, thats help gratefully recieved. So its not really that different from shopping in Marks and Spensers. Some people (lots of people, I'm glad to say) have a way of offering help thats hard to really explain, but they just do it, no strings attached, without butting in or taking over, so dignity is left intact, but at the same time, also in a taken-for-granted way - of course this able bodied person can carry my drink as well as thier own, at no extra cost or effort to them, so its perfectly OK for me to ask
So, thats my arrogant advice on ways to offer help that make it easier to accept. How the heck one accepts help such that it becomes easier to offer is the other side of the coin, and I have yet to figure out.
Her car spent last night parked in my driveway for safety, as the smashed window left it further open to the world, and we had a rather daft evening together including lots of sitting talking about asking for, and offering, help ... followed by a trip to the pub and a 2am attempt to buy food in ASDA. An utterly daft excursion that almost killed us both, and we would have had the sense not to try if we weren't tipsy. But thats not the main point... this is
S was in a particularly vulnerable situation, due to her car being jam packed full of her possesions. They had been there for weeks, since she had had to clear out an old address, and would stay there for the forseable future. S can not walk without walking aids, and as a consequence, can not do simple things others take for granted, like lumping a few bags of clothes and boxes of books in from her car to her room. For weeks she had been saying, to all her many friends, that she needed help unloading her car, and would do other favours in return. For weeks, she had got sancimonious lectures on the vulnerability of having a car visibly full of stuff parked on a London street, along with a million vague offers of 'but of course I'll help'. And once she posted what happened on facebook, the similarly sanctinonious, unhelpful 'I told you so's started to pour in.
But no one had any right to really say such things. For no one helped her when it counted, despite her making a clear and specific request. No one turned up, no one ever said 'hows saturday for you' or 'I'm only free in the evenings, can I do it then' or any such thing - they just kept on professing in principle how much they loved to help and she could ask them for anything - but that counts for jack shit since no one DID help.
People love to impression-manage by proclaiming thier goodness and helpfullness in general, but to a person who actually requires help, this is a far more negative attribute that the openly selfish jack-ass who loundly procaims that they won't do nuttin' for nobody. Because at least the latter is honnest, and the help requirer knows to go elsewhere, instead of waiting for assistance they think is comming, but never will.
When it comes to the politics of asking for, and offering, help, my experience of disability is a lot like my experience of single-parenting a small child - except the disability probably makes it all a little more visible still. And its a f*cking minefield. I personally have a compulsive drive to turn down offers of help. I don't know why I do this. Its so deeply engrained in my personality, upbringing and automated responses that even when people are trying to give me help I desperatly need I a) cringe at being seen as needy and b) die a little inside at the thought of inconvieniencing others, so convince people its OK, I actually don't need the help at all. And then suffer for it. having just sent away little small bits of assistance that would have made a huge difference to me. In these last 6 months I have had to unlearn a lifetime of personality formation, and ask people for seats on busses, to open doors for me I can't manage, to carry things for me. But I still find it hard, and everything I'm saying about ways to offer help are based on this foundation that no matter how right the help-offerer gets it, it can still go wrong because the help-reciever still can't manage their end.
But anyway, here's my arrogant advice to others on offering help
1. Always offer, never just charge in and provide. If I've fallen over and you start pulling me to my feet, all you are going to acomplish is a hoast of bruses on my arms where you have gripped me, and probably a wrenched back for yourself too. Ask me if I want picked up, I may want to lie on the ground for 2 mins to get my breath back, and then what I want is your arm so I can pull myself up, not to be janked to my feet. This counts for just about any kind of help, though. To offer assistance is to treat a person with dignity and respect, to charge in and take over/do something for them is to discredit and dehumanise their parenting/bodily autonomy/capacity whatever
1.a. relatedly - peoples mobility aids become an extention of thier body-space, and grabbing a persons crutches is no different from grabbing thier legs. If I drop my crutch I probably do need you to pick it up for me, but please offer first, and randomly grabbing my crutches and moving them accross the room becasue they are in your way is NOT COOL
2. Make the offer real, locate it in time and space. The person who says 'I'd LOVE to babysit for you, call me litterally ANY time of the day or night, I can't WAIT to mind the little one' is a daft twat. Its no different from the idiot who claims to have no hard limits. We all have limits, and no one wants to be woken at 3am on a school night to babysit so a mother who's just run out of fags can take a spin by herself to the nearest 24 hour garage. But there is another consistent pattern. Anyone who claims the above will somehow, mysteriously and magically, never actually be availible when it counts, and not do 5 mins babysitting during the entire little ones childhood. On the other hand, the person who clearly states 'I like to go out on Saturdays myself, but an normally availible to babysit on a Friday, and would love to help out. What about friday next week?' will, quite likely, if asked, babysit on a Friday. Vague offers of help, with no time, place or limits attached, seem sweet the 1st hundred times, but after that they get old and tired. And, eventually, tip over into frustrating and angry making. And their main purpose seems to be, as in the case of S and the vandilised and burgeled car above, not to actually offer help, but to absolve the offerer of wrong-doing when it all goes pear-shaped. You ended up having a breakdown, rocking and screaming in the wardrobe in one room while your baby shreaked with unstoppable colic in the other? Well, you can't blame me, I TOLD you to call me' is so f*ucking easy to say. Actually turning up at an agreed time, in an agreed place and walking the floor with an endlessly shreaking colicy baby - well, thats not so easy.
Secondly, asking for help is not easy for many of us, as said above. In fact, its very, massivly, hard at times. And sweeping generalisations of how much someone wants to help out still leave the help-needer in the position of having to ask, maybe again, and again, and again - to take S and her car as an example again - she asked, at a general meet-up of friends, and loads of people said yes, but with no actual offer attached, so then she had to sort through them one by one, and go back to them, and ask specifically, and still got 'yes, I will help', but still got, 'I'll get back to you' when it came to agreeing when it would be done, so then she had to go back again, and do the rounds of asking again ... and then, when it all went horribly wrong, instead of sympathy, she got, 'but you knew we would help and you never asked, how stupid are you? We warned you this would happen!' I was having none of this, becasue I'd witnessed her asking. Vague offers are no offers ... they do worse than not help, they leave the help needer sitting by the phone, and not looking elsewhere where they might get real help from. They also force the help needer to have to ask repeatedly, something that is very difficult, instead of having to just accept - wich is still hard, but much easier. To take our babysitting-on-a-friday example above, the help-needer just has to graciously accept next Friday (or quickly and easily negotiate a different one), then and there, and its all organised. They don't have to still make the subsequent difficult asking-for-help phone call at a later date, which may be one hurdle too far.
3. Don't offer help you don't want to give. It all goes horribly wrong when you do this. There is nothing worse than a grudging, resentful favour, and the chances are, someone else may have done it willingly. I recently accpeted quite a forceful offer of help from someone, and *I* thought I was doing *them* a favour because they were so insistant that they wanted to do this for me. There was also money involved, and I thought that I was giving them a small nixer when they needed one. I haven't finished paying and *I'm* the one that is now resentful of the rest of the cash I have to hand over, because getting the help that I orriginally needed but planned to pay full market rate for was like pulling teath. I still wish I'd done as orriginally planned and just got a company in to do all the work, with me as employer, dictating how it would go. My stress levels would have been a thousand times lower. I had to turn into a bitch, a nag and a whinge, and it was still all difficult, and they clearly didn't want to be doing what they were doing. Whichever one of us who was really doing the other a favour shouldn't have done it - becasue neither of us were happily commited to the agreement. I was busy resenting and being angry and thinking how, if I'd just hired someone as planned my life would be so much easier, they were also clearly feeling that far too much was being asked, and in a time and manner that didn't suit them. The person in question, I suspect, is a lot like me in one respect. A compulsive help-offerer, but someone who finds it hard to ask for what they need, or say 'no' when 'no' is warrented. It was a lesson for life, for me anyway.
4. 'Pay it forward'. Help and reciprocation. Personally, I've always had a low tollerance for 'favour tally counters' - you know the kind - 'well, I did xyz for her, so now she owes me, and must do abc for me in return' or even just 'after all I've done for HER! Hurump!'
What do you mean, she owes you? If you expected something in return then it wasn't a favour, or help, it was just you looking for something - and thats low. Thats nasty and manipulative.
We live in a big, wide world with a lot of people in it. We all need help at one time or another, no matter who we are, and we can all give help, in different ways, no matter who we are, but we can't all do everything. I'll not be offering to babysit for anyone any time soon. If I tried to pick a child up to change thier nappy, I'd probably drop them on thier head and kill the poor little mite. The help *I* can give is very specific, and the help any other person can give is also specific to them. So, the random stranger who gives me a seat on a bus is someone I'll probably never do a favour for, but equally, the person I gave money to at the oyster card top up machine yesterday will probably never do a favour for me either, and thats OK. I just trust that they remember that I approached them and asked them if they were OK when they were flapping around, obviously upset, and I gave them the 2 quid they needed so that their top up would go through, and they could get home. And I hope that they pay it forward, to someone else, in some other way - maybe by giving up thier seat on the bus some day to someone who needs it. And perhaps just to know, on some level, that the real favour was forcing myslef to talk to scary-flappy-stranger when that terrified me, but I could also see that they were fellow-human-being-in-distress, not the miserly two quid.
What I've discovered recently, however, being in a position where I am having to ask for much more help, far more often, is that this horribly difficult thing of having to ask for help IS much easier if you have a general sense that you are giving something back. And its really, really nice to still be sometimes asked for help, even if you are normally on the recieving end. I couldn't help S unload her car, but I could give her a place to park it when she needed one, and a silly night out shopping is ASDA at 2am when she needed that - and in a few weeks when I have my nose job she has agreed to be my designated collect-from-hospital-and-stay-overnight person that the hospital insist I have as a condition of doing it as day surgery. And the hospital might think I'm bonkers appointing another quite disabled person as my carer, but it really is much easier to ask someone when I know that I can sometimes also genuinley help them out and not end up the constantly needy-needy-takey-takey person in the relationship.
5. Offer help as an automatic entitlement, not some sucky kind of charity or pity, or worse still control. This is a weird one, and comes from the fact that I've been musing on why it is so much easier to both ask for, and accpet, help in Marks and Spensers than any other shop. I have a theory that they are the only high-street chain that actually train thier staff in assisting differently abeled customers. Or something.
When I go into a shop, I can't carry anything, obviously, and this creates an automatic problem. How on earth do you pick up an item from a shelf/display and bring it to a cash register, when both hands are fully occupied in just walking with crutches? Well, in a clothes shop you might try swinging one or two hangers off the handles of your crutches, although this may lead to unballanced crutches, and falling over. In a grocery shop you can get a small basket, put it on the floor, and kick it in front of you.
The worst shops, of which their are many, will respond to a customer doing this as some sort of risk, for which you are To Blame(tm). 'you can't do that, you'll scuff the floor/knock something over/fall over and sue us - let me get someone to carry it for you'. One offer of help DECLINED. There are many things in life I actually can't do, like carry this damn basket. The fact that I am kicking this basket along the floor is surely proof that I CAN do it, so don't come over here telling me more things that I can't do, thank-you-very-fucking-much. If I can't shop in your bloody shop without kicking a basket along the floor, then thats what I've got to do. Its your bloody fault that you have the kind of baskets and floors that clash. Now get out of my way annoying security guard, and let me get on with my shopping.
The second worst shops are the ones that feel sorry for you. 'Oh, you poor dear, here, let me help you with that, oh, how are you coping'. Actually, I'm not poor. I used to be a sales assistant too, many years ago, but now I earn substantially more. Now please go away and let me get on with my shopping, I don't need your pity or charity to slow me down, thank-you-very-fucking-much. Second offer of held DECLINED.
Then there is Marks and Spensers, but only Marks and Spensers. 'hello, I am Mary, and I'm here to help you today with whatever you need. Would you like me to carry your basket for you?' - 'yes, please, that would be lovely'. They have a way of making you feel still in control of going shopping, able to say - I want to go over to the bread rolls now, or wander over to look at tights to match before trying on the dress, or whatever, instead of feeling rushed through the shopping to release whatever poor assistant has been put on your case, because you end up feeling that it really is this persons job to help you, and thats what they are there for, and that they would somehow rahter be wandering around the shop with a customer talking about matching cardigans than stocking shelves, so you are really doing them a favour. And the infrastructure matches. In thier buiser shops, like the one in London bridge, they have disabled and parent tills so you don't have to que in the long que, but can walk up to the empty designated till at the end and the next person free comes up and serves you. It makes a big difference and I have actually planned daft TfL journeys, just to go through the M&S in London bridge rather than take the quicker route home and have to stagger and wobble and possibly fall in some long que like in some awful Tescos local. The help you need (actually just to shop at all) starts to feel like an entitlement you have enery right to ask for (which it should be) and not some huge deal
Anyway, I've always very strongly said that social services need to be a right, not charity, because charity is out of pity and therefore no one ends up entitled to anything (reason no. 376 why the ConDems must die), but never really saw before how this same principle can affect interpersonal relationships. But it can be reflected right the way through to someone offering to go up to the bar for you in a pub - if its because they want to control your possible slightly eccentric coping strategies while trying to ballance a pint of cider back from the bar while walking on crutches and they are obviously mildly embarased that you are part of thier group - well, those people can fuck right off with thier help. If they feel soooooooo very sorry for the poor cripple, they can fuck right off with their help as well. If they are offering to carry your drink for you because they have health privilidge and you don't, and its no skin off thier nose, well, thats help gratefully recieved. So its not really that different from shopping in Marks and Spensers. Some people (lots of people, I'm glad to say) have a way of offering help thats hard to really explain, but they just do it, no strings attached, without butting in or taking over, so dignity is left intact, but at the same time, also in a taken-for-granted way - of course this able bodied person can carry my drink as well as thier own, at no extra cost or effort to them, so its perfectly OK for me to ask
So, thats my arrogant advice on ways to offer help that make it easier to accept. How the heck one accepts help such that it becomes easier to offer is the other side of the coin, and I have yet to figure out.