Our culture is one that operates in a way that is at odds with our humanity.
In many, many ways this is true.
Generally speaking, we live lives where we have limited access to nature and the green spaces we evolved to be a part of.
We have a system that teaches us to be in a constant state of stress and being ‘on’ with very little time for rest and relaxation.
We are living in a reality where many of us feel pressured to turn our passions and the things we enjoy into work, or where we feel like we are failing if we aren’t able to find work that is also our passion.
We live for quick fixes and have very little awareness of how to develop the discipline and willpower required to achieve what matters to us.
We are trained to be disconnected from our bodies, feelings and emotions in exchange for striving to be in a hyper intellectual space constantly.
Most importantly, we have been indoctrinated into a culture that doesn’t teach us how to have healthy interdependent relationships - but rather relationships built on codependency or hyper independence.
Many of us, as we come onto the self love path, find that this idea that we are ‘supposed’ to be people who have no needs, who are able to fully fulfill ourselves, that are always capable of being there for ourselves and never need or want the support, love or acceptance of others sneaks it’s way into our self love journey.
Many of us have been deeply shamed, blamed, guilted and abandoned in our need for love, connection and support when we were growing up, and this caused us to believe that in order to be loved, worthy, safe and good enough we MUST become the kind of people who never need or want anything from anyone else - lest we get hurt or rejected.
Many of us have experienced a lack of true connection to our friends, families, neighbours and coworkers - and this has led us to believe that wanting connection makes us somehow weak, vulnerable or not good enough.
Many of us have experienced so much pain in being rejected, abandoned and misunderstood that we’ve adapted by becoming hyper individualistic - never LETTING ourselves want or ask for the love or support of others.
Many of us don’t know how to recognize when we’re in a state of wanting to be seen, loved, heard and validated, but rather only know how to try to please others, how to try to placate the needs of others, how to try to help or be supportive of others or have developed deep people pleasing tendencies as a way of trying to get our needs for love and connection met - often without even realizing that this is what we want and what’s going on for us.
For many of us, navigating what can be the murky waters of true interdependence is incredibly challenging and we don’t have a lot of examples of what it actually looks like to be healthfully attached to people.
If this is you, I really want you to know that there’s nothing wrong with you and that this isn’t your fault.
You’re not failing and you’re not broken.
You ARE worthy of love, connection and support, and you don’t have to live a life where you are the only one available to meet your own needs and to support yourself.
In this article I hope to begin the process of removing the shame, blame and guilt that may be surrounding any needs you have for love, security and attachment from outside yourself, so that you can then start to work on becoming AWARE of what you really want and need, and aware of how to ask for those needs to be met in healthy ways.
Because you see the true space we want to get to in our relationships is not one where we are OVERLY dependent upon others to love us and make us feel secure, while at the same time not swinging so far the other way that we feel like we’re NEVER allowed to ask for love, support, witnessing or compassion.
We want to live in the healthy middle.
Remember - if this is hard for you - that’s ok. Learning interdependence isn’t something you’re going to do by simply reading this article, and it’s not something that’s going to be super easy to just ‘get to’ - for many of us we are going to have to go on a journey of healing and re-learning that will require time, other resources and a process - so let this just be something that helps you to plant seeds of awareness that you can grow as you progress along your path.
Learning That Needs Are Not Ok
The first step in this process is learning to have compassion for the parts of us that feel like having needs and wants is not ok.
For many of us again we are going to find that there are a lot of shame and guilt stories that are attached to our desire to be seen, heard, loved and validated by others.
Many of us may have a hard time even recognizing that we are IN a state of wanting/needing love and validation from others because we have developed such a deep fear of having this need that we either go directly into feeling guilty/shameful/like we can’t possibly ask for help and like we must just be weak, lazy and incapable - or we quickly go into ‘help others’ mode - searching for who we can please, who we can serve or even feeling like maybe someone is mad at/upset with us - because we actually don’t know how to identify what we are actually feeling and wanting.
If we learned that having wants and needs is going to lead to being rejected, being told we are a burden, being told that our needs and wants are too much or if we experienced being shamed, blamed and guilted every time we expressed our needs - chances are we are going to go directly into that shame state/feeling like we are failing and weak when our natural, human desire for connection comes up.
Whenever we feel fragile, like we aren’t in total control or like we aren’t safe - we will ‘snap’ into this state of feeling like we aren’t good enough, aren’t doing enough, or simply just aren’t ok - and that is our sign that what we are REALLY feeling is the need for support that our nervous systems now believe can ONLY come with the negative consequence of being judged, shamed, abandoned or abused.
We won’t even connect the dots that we are feeling how we are - we will just think that we are doing something wrong or failing, that we are weak or somehow defective and like we need to fix ourselves.
If we experienced that the only way we were given love, attention or support was through helping or supporting others, we may not register that we are in a state of wanting or needing affection, love, care and support but rather will automatically jump into ‘fixer’ mode. We will notice ourselves looking for someone to help, someone to serve, monitoring the feelings of those around us and believing that what we are feeling is that we need to help others/fix the world in order for us to be ok.
Either that or we will notice that we have deep people pleasing tendencies and that we often feel like someone must be upset with us, mad at us, judging us or rejecting us.
If we were raised in a situation where we were conditionally given love and attention, we will have grown up feeling like we MUST be that particular way ALL THE TIME in order to be safe. If we learned that we were only validated, witnessed and supported when we were happy, when we were productive, when we were accomplishing things, when we were in a good mood, when we were - you can fill in the blank - we will have a deep nervous system program that tells us that we must never stop being that way otherwise we will be made deeply unsafe and we will be abandoned or rejected.
What we have to remember here is this: from our childhood perspective being shamed, blamed, abandoned, rejected or otherwise dismissed by our caregivers was not something we could deal with and be ok with.
Rather it was a deep existential threat.
Experiencing caregivers who told us that we were not allowed to be certain ways, that only showed up for us when we performed in a certain way, that only loved us when we were in certain states and that made us feel like security and safety was going away any time we didn’t live up to expectation OR if we were in a situation where our caregivers simply weren’t able to show up for us in the ways we needed them to - we still perceived that this lack of support and connection was OUR FAULT and that it meant that we were NOT going to be ok.
As adults we can look back on our childhoods and think that things weren’t that bad, that we had what we needed, that being abandoned or rejected by our caregivers wasn’t a big deal.
As adult we generally have such a deep feeling that the parts of ourselves that were not loved, supported and cared for by our caregivers ARE terrible, wrong, bad and need to be changed - that to even CONSIDER that these parts may not be BAD but rather it may have been that our CAREGIVERS were failing us, failing to meet our needs, failing to show up for us, failing to support us and failing to help us learn emotional regulation, problem solving, how to identify our needs and how to ask for support feels totally impossible or just ‘wrong.’ We are so deeply entrenched in guilt and shame, it feels SO familiar to just assume that these parts of us are bad - that we can’t even take a step back to consider that perhaps this is a fear response and not a reality.
In reality, in our BODIES we learned that we were NOT SAFE to ask for our needs to be met, to have needs, to be in any way that wasn’t loved, valued and approved of by our caregivers - and if we haven’t processed that now in our adulthoods, there’s a good chance that we are still running those subconscious programs.
There’s a good chance that what we perceive to be flaws in ourselves, what we think of as being ‘wrong’ with us - are actually the parts of self that our caregivers didn’t show up for, that our caregivers shamed and blamed, that our caregivers didn’t support - and we now feel like these parts are ‘bad’ because they separated us from the LOVE and ATTENTION that we NEEDED for our caregivers in our childhoods.
We weren’t able to see that our caregivers could be wrong. That our caregivers could have been failing us. That our caregivers could have been incapable of loving and supporting us in the ways that we needed. We couldn’t rationalize any of this - we only had the option to turn in on OURSELVES, to try to fix these parts of ourselves or get rid of these parts of ourselves in the hopes that if we did, we would finally be given the love and safety that we NEEDED as children.
And we are likely STILL doing this today in our adulthoods.
Again, what we are ACTUALLY feeling in our current reality is a sense of loneliness, being abandoned, not having our needs for affection met or like we aren’t able to do what we need to do to be safe on our own and are wanting support - but our brains and bodies will jump straight to shame or people pleasing/assuming someone is mad at us because that’s how we learned to COPE with the environments in which we grew up in where secure attachment wasn’t available.
If we weren’t SHOWN that it was ok to have wants and needs, if we were instead put in situations where it really WASN’T ok to have wants and needs and if we were abandoned in our actual expression or in our desires - we are now likely stuck trying to fix these parts of self, vs. seeing what we actually want and need, and instead of being able to get those needs met in real and practical ways.
Thus, the first step in this process of healing is going to be AWARENESS.
Becoming Aware Of The Cycle:
So what do we DO about all of this?
Again, the purpose of this article isn’t to try to posit that it’s possible to fully understand and process all of this in one sitting. It will likely take MANY different tools and many different processes to get to a place where you feel totally capable of identifying the love and support you need and want, and where you get to a place where you are able to ask for that care and support when you want and need it in healthy ways.
This is going to be a process.
The point of this article is to help you bring awareness to what you may not have been seeing, and to give you the first few steps on the path to help you get started in your healing.
Which brings us to the FIRST step - which is becoming AWARE of this pattern.
In order to support you with this awareness, I want to invite you to ask yourself some of the following questions:
- Do I believe it is NOT ok to want love, attention, support or validation from others? Why or why not?
- Do I believe I must be providing for others all the time? Why do I feel that way? What do I think will happen if I’m not?
- Do I get really activated when I think someone is upset with me? If so, what do I feel is going to happen if someone is upset with me?
- Do I feel comfortable asking for support, love, affection or someone to just listen to me when I am in pain? Why or why not?
- Do I feel like if I show vulnerability that I am going to be abandoned, rejected or that people will judge me? Why?
- When I was growing up, was it safe for me to be emotional, sick, in pain or not totally well? How did my caregivers respond to me when I was in need?
- Do I believe it is a weakness to need love, support, validation or witnessing from the outside?
- Do I feel like if I am not fully independent that I am failing? If so, why?
- When I feel the need to help/support others, do I feel relaxed in my body, or do I feel a tension/like I NEED to do it in order to be ok?
- If I ever did need the love and support of someone else, what do I think would happen? Do I trust that people would be there for me? If no, why not?
- When my caregivers noticed that I was not doing well or that I needed support, how did they respond to me? How did that make me feel?
- If I have SHAME about having needs, wants or not feeling safe, why do I have that shame? What are the stories I have around having needs? Where did those stories come from?
- If it WAS ok for me to be down, to have needs for love and affection and to need support sometimes, how would that CHANGE the way I perceive myself?
- If I were to accept that I am ALWAYS going to need others at certain times in my life, how does that make me feel? What are the stories I have about that?
- Do I feel like it would be ok if I never got to a place where I was fully independent and fully confident? Why not if not?
- Where did my caregivers fail to support me when I was in need? Is it possible that I wasn’t failing to ‘do good enough’ but rather that they were failing to help me regulate my emotions, to help me problem solve, to help me process my experiences or to help me get my needs met?
- If you identify as a people pleaser - what happened in your childhood that made you feel like if you didn’t please those around you, you weren’t going to be safe?
- Does the way you speak to yourself now as an adult mirror the way your caregivers spoke to you as a child when you were down, struggling, suffering or in need of love and support?
- When you were down as a child, what happened? Were you loved and cared for? Or did something else happen? How did that make you FEEL?
Just see if you can bring some awareness to your stories.
Next, I want to invite you to really look at the parts of yourself that you see as BAD.
To come into awareness of all the parts of yourself you are currently telling yourself you must change otherwise you aren’t ok - and I want to invite you to again deeply question WHY you feel that these parts of you are bad.
Where did you learn that these parts of yourself are bad and wrong?
Where did you learn that you didn’t deserve love and support when you were expressing these parts of yourself?
What happened in your childhood when you expressed these parts?
What are you afraid will happen if you never change these parts of yourself?
What are you afraid will happen if these parts of yourself continue to exist for the rest of your life?
Again, just see if you can bring some awareness.
Where did your stories come from, what was your experience like, and can you start to consider that perhaps you aren’t broken, wrong or bad for having any parts that you have or having any needs that you have - and rather that your caregivers failed to support you the way you needed to be supported?
Starting With Compassion:
From here, I want to see if you can start to invite some COMPASSION for yourself.
I want to invite you to look at everything you just became aware of, and to see if you can give yourself some love, validation and support in these areas where you learned that parts of yourself are not good.
I want to invite you to see if you can start to soften to the idea that having wants and needs isn’t actually a bad thing - and that instead if you feel like they ARE a bad thing that this may be because you weren’t given the love, attention and support you NEEDED in your childhood.
I want to invite you to see if you can begin noticing your patterns of people-pleasing, helping others from a place of urgency, feeling like you need to be fully independent and never need anyone ever again - and rather than turning in on yourself or trying to fix yourself - can you instead do the following:
Notice when you are in the states mentioned above and pause.
Place your hands over your heart.
Say to yourself “I am so sorry that you weren’t seen and supported in your needs when you were young. That was not your fault. I see you now. It’s ok to not be ok. I’m not going to abandon you.”
Just notice how it feels to respond to yourself the way that you SHOULD have been responded to when you were young and when you had a need.
See what it’s like to make ROOM for these parts of yourself to exist without trying to fix them.
See what it’s like to give these parts of yourself COMPASSION vs. trying to get rid of them.
What happens in your BODY when you respond to yourself with kindness instead of rejection?
What happens in your nervous system when you show up with gentleness instead of trying to push or force yourself to be different?
What happens when you get curious and ask yourself about your experience instead of assuming that there’s something wrong with you?
See what happens when you practice that for a few weeks.
See if you can start to open up to more information.
See if you can allow this to be the beginning of a discovery process.
What happens when you question your stories, and when you show up to these parts you usually shame, blame and guilt with compassion and understanding?
How does this shift your awareness and how does it shift your experience?
Start with that and see how you go.
One step at a time.
<3
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