When Your Needs Are Not Being Met

Last week, I introduced human needs at a high level. I shared that when our needs are met, we experience positive emotions; when our needs are not met, we experience negative emotions. This is not revolutionary. This is something we probably all know to be true (because it resonates with our experience), but unless we’ve spent time contemplating it, we likely haven’t been able to put words to the knowledge. Words can be quite useful because they are the map that helps us explore the territory of our experience. 

This week, I want to build on human needs, and explore a question that has been on my mind lately: If meeting our needs means we experience positive emotions, why are so many of us so bad at meeting our needs? What is it about how we’re living that makes us disconnected from them?

How You Learn About Needs in Childhood

Life is an interaction between you and the world. The fact that you have needs proves that you are interconnected with your environment, and that your life depends on things beyond yourself. 

Initially, you are entirely dependent on your mother’s body. Her air is your air; her food is your food; her warmth is your warmth. Nine short months later, you graduate (so to speak) and are now only 90% dependent on your mother. The other 10% of your needs are now met by your environment—your oxygen, your warmth, your safety. As you grow, you gradually acquire the ability to meet your own needs, becoming less and less dependent on your parents, and more and more dependent on your environment. Instead of mom and dad carrying you, you learn to put on your shoes and walk through the world yourself. Instead of mom and dad making you breakfast, you learn to use the stovetop and make your own scrambled eggs. Instead of living under your parents’ roof, you become financially independent and provide your own shelter.

As you go through the process of learning to provide for your own needs, you start by watching others. You observe how mom moves through the world, and you learn to meet your own needs by watching her meet hers. You see how dad handles situations and makes decisions, and he becomes a model for how to be a human being. How your parents handle their hunger, their careers, their relationships, their obligations becomes a jumping off point for the way you handle yours.

Healthy & Unhealthy Ways of Meeting Needs

If your parents were masters at meeting their needs, they would observe their experience closely for negative emotions, and upon noticing something unpleasant, would step back and ask themselves silently, “why do I feel this right now? What need of mine is not being met?” Upon identifying the need, they would then formulate a plan for getting it met, either by calmly requesting something from another person, or by interacting with the world in a particular way. This is what a mature human looks like. 

But your parents learned how to meet their needs the same way you learned to meet yours: by watching others. So if their parents were less than perfect at meeting their own needs, and they didn’t have other role models who knew how to get their needs met in a healthy way, they likely didn’t model this to you. What they likely modeled to you was something like this:

• They experienced a negative emotion

• Without wondering about their unmet needs, they externalized their negative emotion to people around them, usually in the form of a judgment, criticism, or blame

• They used guilt and shame to get others to change their behavior to quell their negative emotions, which perhaps works momentarily, but creates resentment in their relationships long term

If this sounds familiar, you now know that this is what it looks like when people are disconnected from their needs. It isn’t their fault. This is just what they learned. If you have a lot of people like this in your life—and many of us do—what can help is knowing that whatever poison comes out of your loved one’s mouth during this time, it’s happening because they have an unmet need and they have no awareness about what that need is or how to meet it. Whatever behavior they are showing you is literally the best example of meeting their needs they have experienced. They simply do not know any better.

Let’s assume that you know some people who are not skilled at meeting their needs in a healthy way. Let’s assume you’ve even picked up on some of those habits and ways of being yourself. What does it look like when your needs are not being met, and you don’t know how to meet them in a healthy way?

How to Know When Your Needs Are Not Being Met

By now we know that negative emotions are the canary in the coal mine that lets us know that we have an unmet need. If we don’t know how to meet that need in a healthy way, this is was life often looks like:

• Negative Emotion: We experience negative emotion, and since we haven’t trained ourselves to look at our needs when we experience negative emotion, we become reactive to what we’re feeling. We know that what we feel is unpleasant, but we may not have words to put to the feeling, and we certainly don’t know what needs to happen in order to neutralize the feeling.

• Trains of Thought: Our negative emotion produces a train of thought. Depending on how we’ve learned to think when we have unpleasant feelings, these thoughts may take the form of: 

  • Judgement - “This is bullshit!” we might exclaim when we see our bonus check is less than our boss had promised us.

  • Criticism - “Her ears stick out too much” we might think when we see someone getting social attention that we want for ourselves.

  • Blame - “Why can’t you make the bed the right way?” we blurt out when our spouse has failed to meet our cleanliness standards

• Cycles of Reactivity: Feeling an unpleasant emotion coupled with being disconnected from our unmet need creates a situation where we are likely to react quickly and poorly to the situation. We may be tempted to share our trains of thought without being able to share the underlying feeling and unmet need. Sharing the feeling and need is what allows others to feel connected to us and provide us empathy. When we share judgments, criticisms, and blame, others are more likely to get defensive and take the message personally, thereby decreasing our likelihood of getting our needs met in a productive or healthy way. As a consequence, resentment starts to build in our relationships and our loved ones start to feel on-edge around us, waiting for the next explosion.

The solution to this cycle of reactivity is to reprogram how you identify and communicate your unmet needs. 

What to Do When Your Needs Are Not Being Met

Think of how many times you’ve practiced meeting your needs in unhealthy ways. While this may not be an entirely pleasant thought exercise, it’s important because it allows you to establish expectations for your growth. As the adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will be your personal growth in this area. However many times you’ve practiced meeting your needs in conflicting and confusing ways, is approximately the amount of times you will need to practice something different in order for it to feel natural.

Most of us are skilled at knowing when we’re feeling positive emotion and when we’re feeling negative emotion. That’s clear to us. We may not be able to name the emotion or the need it maps to, but we know with certainty when we’re feeling on top of the world, and when we’re feeling crushed by its weight. Since that’s the case, let’s use this to our advantage. Let’s start by gaining clarity with the feeling, and use that clarity to learn about our needs. 

The next time you experience negative emotion, try this three-step process to meet your unmet need in a healthy way.

STEP 1: Name the Feeling

The first thing to do when you experience negative emotion is try to name it. You need a quiet moment to do this. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do this while standing in front of the DMV representative or waist-deep in an argument with a loved one. Find a solitary moment to step back, stack all your problems to the side, get quiet, and consult with your body’s sense of the situation. The sensation may be in your stomach or your chest or your throat; it may be spread out all over; it may be in your back and shoulders. Wherever it is, close your eyes, feel it reveal itself in your body, and ask yourself, “What word or quality is this feeling?” Is it anger? Is it hurt? Is it jealousy? Is it constriction? Try on words until you feel your body agree with you. When you name the feeling correctly, the first relief happens. The feeling no longer seems like an emergency. Tip-of-the-iceberg clarity brings the first small wave of calmness and the situation starts to feel more manageable. 

STEP 2: Map the Need

After you name the feeling, the next step is to map it to an unmet need. This begins by trusting that your body is not generating negative emotions willy-nilly. Your body is not overreacting or creating unpleasant feelings for no reason. There’s something real here. There is a real need underlying all of this that ought to be addressed if equilibrium is to be restored. The next question is: What is it? Is it a survival need? Is it an interpersonal need? Is it an autonomy need? Take some time to become literate in human needs, potentially even consulting this list during this three-step process as you learn to become more connected.

STEP 3: Frame the Request

By the time you get to step three, you’ve likely spent several minutes trying on different words to match the feeling, and another several minutes consulting with your body’s sense of the situation to map the need. Now it’s time to guess at the action that either you or someone else could take that would meet the need and resolve the unpleasant feeling. 

The first trick with the request is it must be a doable action. It can’t be something like, “I want you to love me,” or “I want you to respect your sister”. Those aren’t doable. On the other hand, “I want you to let me know when your attention wanders when I’m talking so I can perhaps minimize the amount of times I repeat myself” is a clear and doable action.

The second trick with the request is that it must be a genuine request, and not a demand. The difference between a request and a demand is that there are negative consequences if a demand is unfulfilled, whereas there are no negative consequences with a request. A request respects the freedom of others; a demand denies it. Demands are manipulative, requests connect us with each other and encourage natural giving. 

Becoming Mature

You’ll know you’re becoming more mature because you will feel a stronger sense of responsibility for meeting your own needs. You will become more skilled at identifying your feelings and needs, and communicate straight-forward, clear requests to others when you sense that others can assist in making life more wonderful.

As you become more skilled at meeting your needs, you become more confident. You will feel less victimized, less out-of-control, less helpless, less hopeless, less dependent.

You’ll trust yourself to handle increasingly more complex and challenging situations. As a result, more opportunities will present themselves to you because you are in a better position to handle them.

You’ll find that other people enjoy being around you because they don’t feel burdened by judgments, criticism or blame. They don’t feel burdened by trying to become a mind reader, or helping you because they feel they will be punished in some way if they don’t.

Before the world needs you to do anything else, it needs you to become mature. Luckily, that’s well within reach.

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