When We Love Ourselves – Do We Stop Having NEEDS In Relationships?

Hello Friends 🙂

For the next two weeks, I'd like to simply plant some seeds around how to develop truly interdependent relationships.

Relationships where we aren't living from codependency - expecting others to meet our needs for us at all times or expecting that we should be able to mold ourselves to whatever is desired by those were relating with - nor are we living from independence where we feel like we have to be fully self sufficient and able to be ok with anything in relationship because we are the sole arbiters of our own happiness.

I want to explore how the idea that we have so much capacity to meet our own needs, to be there for ourselves, to comfort and validate ourselves doesn't mean that we are meant to become fully needless in relationships.

I want to explore how learning to love ourselves doesn't mean we should be able to be happy and fulfilled in any relationship - having NO expectations of others in terms of what makes us feel connected and supported.

There is a tendency towards black and white thinking in our world - and that makes total sense. Life is complex and we often crave some form of simplicity to help us navigate. But ultimately when we are looking for a solution that's TOO simple, we are only going to lead ourselves to more discomfort, not less.

So let's again plant some seeds of complexity here.

If you're feeling like you SHOULD be able to be totally independent, needless and happy in any and all relationships because self love means taking TOTAL responsibility for your own happiness, this blog may help you find a happy middle ground that actually feels BETTER than codependency or independence.

Self Love Can Be Confusing!

Something that I KNOW can be really confusing on the self love path is the idea of establishing healthy interdependence within relationships.

Specifically figuring out how to have needs and wants without DEMANDING that others give us what we want/desire, but not going so far the other way that we think in our self love work we’re supposed to become totally self-sufficient.

Often times when we start diving into self love, we’re told that we will start to become more and more AWARE of our wants and needs, and in this we're going to start to see all the ways in which we ARE capable of showing up for ourselves in areas where we thought we were dependent upon others. We're going to start to see that in real reality we ARE capable of meeting many of our own needs. That we're able to show up for ourselves in ways we thought we needed others to show up for us. We're able to provide things for ourselves we thought only others could provide. We start to come out of the childhood state of not understanding ourselves and looking for others for understand as a way of getting our needs met indirectly AND we evolve past feeling like we are responsible for understanding and meeting the needs of others.

As we develop this new found awareness and ability to show up for ourselves, it’s common to start to feel like we’re now supposed to be able to meet ALL of our own needs on our own. It can start to feel like if we’re really 'doing our work', we'll no longer depend on others in any way - meaning we become people who have no expectations of others in relationships ever.

Many of us can interpret learning to understand and meet our own needs to mean that we are supposed to get to a place where we can tolerate anything in relationships, where we can ALWAYS satisfy ourselves and where we never ask anything of anyone ever again.

This idea can actually be really attractive to the parts of us that have been hurt in relationships in the past - we can be 'predisposed' to taking this teaching and making it about being fully independent for a few very important reasons:

1. We may have a tendency to want to deny our own needs/desires in relationships because we’ve learned on a deep level throughout our lives that people really DON’T care. That they aren’t going to show up for us, change for us, be considerate of us.
2. We may have learned that asking for what we want and need gets us rejected, that it creates a situation where we’re alone and isolated - and we would much rather be in a relationship and try to adjust to whatever IS, than be totally ALONE asking for something and then being told no. We may have learned that the only way to keep people around is to be pleasing, to be needless and to be tolerant.
3. We may have grown up feeling like it was our responsibility to meet the needs of those around us in order to be loved and safe, and in order to be protected from judgement and abandonment. We may have learned that in relationships we have to be CONSTANTLY bending ourselves to the will of those around us. In this, we may have decided we HATE that, and in an attempt to get out of these codependent cycles, we have closed ourselves off to empathing and changing for others at all. We may have decided that in our adulthood, we aren’t going to be responsible for anyone and their needs, and we aren’t going to ask anyone to be responsible for ours. Wanting to break the cycle of feeling that we HAVE to show up for everyone perfectly may involve going through a period where we cut ourselves off from doing or being anything for others and allow for others to do the same in our direction.
4. We may have interpreted the idea of unconditional self love to mean that we are supposed to have total and complete unconditional acceptance and tolerance for EVERYONE/ANYTHING at ALL TIMES no matter what. We may have been told that in order to be truly spiritual, truly wise, truly GOOD - we have to have empathy for all beings, and never expect anyone to be anything other than that which they already are. That true love means we embrace everyone just as they are and learn to be 'ok' with that - no matter how others behavior may be affecting us. We may have learned that true love is love with no boundaries and therefore in order to be in love we MUST be in a state of total acceptance.
5. We may have grown up learning that the only ways to get our needs met was through manipulation and passive aggressive behavior where we don’t communicate what we want or need, we simply expect it and then punish those around us when they don’t measure up. We may have only ever witnessed those around us having wants and needs that they never communicated but then punished US for not living up to expectation. We may have witnessed others having wants and needs that they tried over and over to suppress and repress - trying to simply NOT have the need - only to eventually explode in not being able to ‘get rid of’ the need, and this coming out in some way or other. We may have seen these patterns in ourselves, deemed them immature, and in our attempt to not be this way have tried to swing to independence. 
6. We may feel GUILTY and bad about what we want and need - feeling that our preferences, desires and true needs in relationships are simply too much, wrong and somehow need to be gotten rid of. We may be in a cycle of really trying to repress and deny what we need - only to find that we get caught in self abusive or addictive behaviors - or that we end up having a bunch of built up resentment and pain all the time because no matter how much we try, we can't actually get rid of our needs. We only know how to suppress and deny and then cope in some way.
7. We may have never learned to understand our own needs and thus have FELT super dependent on others our whole lives. This may have left us feeling super vulnerable a lot, and so discovering that we can meet our own needs will feel like the biggest liberation tool EVER. We finally can be free of NEEDING others and therefore will have so much less to worry about in the way of being let down.
8. Finally, we may have been told that the best way to reach happiness is to never depend on anyone, never expect anyone to do anything for us, never expect anyone to change or be different - because that’s ‘giving our power away.’ We may have learned that having needs or desires that we look to others to fulfill is the fastest way to being disappointed and hurt. So with that logic it may make total sense to us that if we want to be happy we have to be fully able to meet all of our own needs, never depending on anyone so that we can’t be let down.

Ultimately, we all learned how to be codependent and have been harmed by all the relationship patterns that go along with that. So we are going to tend towards having skewed perceptions when we start to journey OUT of codependency, that will lead us to seeing things in extremes when they are actually existing in the grey - and that's ok! It's not our fault. It just means there's still room for growth and exploration.

This Isn't A Prescription - Rather A Seed:

This article isn’t going to be the be-all-end-all prescription for figuring out how to have healthy interdependence - as I believe and have witnessed that maturing into this is a PROCESS that will be unfolding for the rest of our lives in many ways. Rather, I want to simply bring some nuance to this concept so that you can take it and explore within it for yourself. I’d like to bring an alternate perspective to the above mindsets, giving you some space to explore your own belief systems and to question patterns that may not be working for you.

As listed above, there are many, many reasons why we might come to believe that we’re supposed to be self-sufficient and needless in relationships. There are many routes to arriving at the conclusion that true adulthood is never wanting or needing anything from anyone and that if we are really doing our self love work we will become impenetrable to disappointment and hurt from others.

We’ve been hurt.

We’ve been let down.

We’ve been dependent because we didn’t know how to understand ourselves and we didn’t realize that we did have some agency to do for ourselves what we thought could only be done by others.

We’ve been taught that having wants and needs makes people leave.

We’ve only known how to DEMAND things from others, or how to subconsciously want/need things and in this we’ve been driven to passive aggressive behavior patterns that we now find abhorrent so we are trying to make sure we NEVER do those things again.

This all makes perfect sense.

At the end of the day, most of us weren’t ever truly empowered - and those we are learning from when it comes to relationships and spirituality also haven’t ever been truly empowered. We are seeing that *most* people on the planet are codependent. That most people aren’t aware of their own needs. Most people do feel like we NEED each other for happiness, fulfillment and safety OR they are swinging the other way, walling themselves off and trying to be as self contained as possible. Most of us were only modeled codependency. Most of us still FEEL trapped in that childhood state of being dependent upon others for safety, provision and love - where our only agency was our own behavior that did or didn’t elicit the specific responses we wanted from others. 

There’s massive trauma in the human race in general around being in a relationship, due to the fact that we start our lives so deeply incapable of providing for ourselves.

Due to the fact that in our infancy and early childhood we ARE fully dependent upon those around us to care for us, understand us where we can’t understand ourselves and to meet all our needs for us.

Due to the fact that we didn’t have the capacity to express ourselves, nor did we have the capacity to change our circumstances if our circumstances were hurtful or harmful.

We didn’t have the agency to make things better for ourselves as children - we needed others to do it for us.

With this, most of us WERE let down in many ways. We experienced the existential fear that rose up when we felt our caregivers pulling away or being outwardly rejecting because again, if they abandoned us or were upset with us - we were made fully vulnerable.

We experienced deep in our nervous systems that others were our source for all that we needed/for getting out of pain and our one form of 'control' was to alter our behavior so that we would have a hope of being provided for.  We learned that being LIKED and UNDERSTOOD by others was how we got our needs met. To cry out. To act out. To turn in. Be quite. These were the ways we then got fed, changed, supported, validated and so on. We learned that there was a middle man between us and what we wanted and needed - other people and how they thought/felt about us. We couldn't get our own food, understand our own relational needs and so on. And even if we DID we couldn't meet these needs for ourselves. To varying degrees we all learned that behavior modification that led to us being accepted was the WAY to getting needs met. That manipulating ourselves or others into caring for us was the way to be satisfied. That getting what we wanted and needed was ALWAYS gate-kept by someone or something 'out there' and our one way of ensuring we got what was needed was through making someone care for us.

We never learned how to identify what we wanted and needed in truly empowering ways. We never learned how to interact with pain and pleasure in a way that helped us understand ourselves and the world around us. We were never taught how to assess why something hurt, why something did or didn’t work, and how to CHANGE it. We never really LEARNED that we had agency in our adulthood that we didn’t have as children - even if we intellectually can now understand that we can get our own food and be loving towards ourselves - many of us still FEEL and PERCEIVE that we need to be liked by bosses, coworkers, friends, family and society at large in order to be ok because others still hold the keys to us having what we want. This isn't FULLY wrong - and we will get to that later - but in our adulthood we have so much MORE agency and freedom than we ever did as children. Not 100% agency, but much, much more than the 0% we used to have.

Many of us didn’t learn deep in our bodies that now as adults we DO have more control, we can be rejected and let down by others and that this can be ok. That we can get our needs met in other ways. That we can meet our own needs. That we can provide for ourselves things others can’t provide for us.

More importantly, we never learned how to COMMUNICATE our wants and needs with others. We learned that if someone doesn’t automatically align with what we subconsciously or consciously want or need - that this means we either need to change ourselves so that we don’t want/need that thing. We learned that we need to subtly manipulate ourselves and others to try to ‘get them’ to give us what we want and need in a sneaky way, we learned to DEMAND things and then by very disappointed if we aren’t met in our desire. We learned to have SHAME and GUILT around what we want and need - assuming if we’re not being met it’s because there’s something wrong with us.

We never learned how to truly figure out WHAT we want and WHY we want it, then how to interact with real reality (our own capacity and the ways in which we need others to participate just as we participate in the support of others) - rather again we are often motivated by a LACK of awareness - needs and desires we don’t even really understand ourselves - we just know we’re being disappointed and let down and this is triggering all sorts of acting out/lashing out/turning in on ourselves. 

We learned that the only two ways to relate are to be codependent - us trying to be what others expect so that they will love us and provide for us, others having to be what we expect so that we feel safe and like we’re going to have our needs met - or we learned that we have to be independent. That we have to provide for ourselves, that we have to be sovereign in all ways, never making ourselves vulnerable to being let down, hurt or abandoned by someone else.

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Alright friends! Let's take a pause here and come back next week for part two!

<3