by Amy Chan
There are biological factors that try to keep you in homeostasis, but also social and cultural ones as well. Sometimes it’s the people who’ve known you the longest who are most resistant to your change. They’ve put you in a box that’s comfortable for them. They too have a homeostasis of how and who you are and a familiar way of interacting with you as that person. They know where they stand in relation to you, with the labels and roles that they have assigned you.
When you change, some people in your life may be uncomfortable with your change simply because the shift is too shocking to handle. Some may envy you, and some may be more comfortable with the old you simply because it’s what they’re accustomed to. It’s important that you are aware of these outside factors that can limit your evolution.
* * *
EXERCISE: Name It to Tame It
In this exercise we are going to determine to which emotions you may be addicted. Once we understand this, we can bring awareness to the past experiences that imprinted these emotions and learn how to hack the loop.
PART 1
Reflect on your last few relationships. If you’ve had only one relationship, you can stick to that one. Write down the three emotions you felt consistently in your past relationships. For example, if you were constantly overgiving and not receiving anything back, you might have felt resentful. If you found yourself chasing for more time, more commitment, you might have felt desperate. If you had a lot of fun in your last relationship, perhaps you felt playful. The list doesn’t have to just be negative emotions; if you experienced consistent positive emotions, you can include those too. The point of this exercise is to take stock of the patterns of your past emotional experiences.
Three main emotions you felt with ex #1
* * *
* * *
* * *
Three main emotions you felt with ex #2
* * *
* * *
* * *
Three main emotions you felt with ex #3
* * *
* * *
* * *
Reflect on the words—are any repeating? Ask yourself what emotional states you might be addicted to feeling. How might you be participating in creating situations that enable you to keep feeling those emotions? The words that keep coming up are the emotions you are addicted to, dear reader.
PART 2
Circle any unhelpful or negative emotions that repeated throughout your relationships, and choose one to work with. If each relationship brought up different emotions, you can focus on the emotional experience of your most recent relationship.
Using the sentence stem below, write down how you contributed to the emotional experience. In the second sentence, identify how you can stop the emotional experience from repeating in the future. Repeat this sentence stem multiple times to get a full picture of all the ways you’re accountable for your emotional experience and the choices you can make to stop the pattern from repeating.
For example:
Repeated feeling: resentful
I felt resentful when I kept paying for everything, did all the housework, and kept giving my time and energy without any reciprocation.
To prevent this from happening in the future, I will stop automatically paying for everything and have a conversation about money and boundaries up front.
Your turn:
I felt ___________________________ when _________
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
To prevent this from happening in the future, ___________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I felt ____________________ when ___________
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
To prevent this from happening in the future, ___________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I felt _________________ when ____________
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
To prevent this from happening in the future
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
WHAT YOUR TRIGGERS REVEAL
Our relationships provide insight on what our needs are. If you can meet your own basic survival and emotional needs, you will likely engage in relationships, experiences, and opportunities that are complementary and supportive of where you are. You can vocalize and communicate your needs and boundaries and take appropriate action if your boundaries are crossed. You treat yourself with love, compassion, care, and respect and do not accept less from others.
However, if you experienced neglect, trauma, abuse, or enmeshment as a child, you may have a dysfunctional relationship with your needs. As a reaction to not having your needs met, you might feel anger or entitlement. Like a child throwing a tantrum to get attention, you could resort to drama, passive aggression, or manipulation to get your needs temporarily fulfilled.
Or you may have developed coping mechanisms to train yourself out of having needs. Instead of honoring your needs, you silence them, forget about them, or give up altogether. This manifests as:
People pleasing
Overachieving
Caretaking
Underachieving
Rebelling
Controlling
Submitting
I learned in childhood that the way to survive was by tending to my own needs. I would proudly state that I had no needs, as if it were a badge of honor. But my unmet needs became the basis of repeated fights, passive-aggressive jabs, chronic tension, and a state of anxiety in my relationships. I would argue with my exes about their lack of texting and tried to enforce rules of frequency in communication. Or I’d pick a fight about the lack of romantic gestures and demand more date nights and flowers. Even when the men I dated obliged, I was only temporarily relieved of my frustration and resentment. The same pain would always resurface.
This was a recurring problem, and in retrospect, it was never about the amount of flowers or frequency of calls or texts. Behind my complaints, demands, and criticism of what my partners weren’t doing was a deep, unmet need for connection. I could try troubleshooting the symptoms all I wanted, but without dealing with the root, I would never be addressing the real issue. My real issue. Instead of putting Band-Aids on the problem, I had to have an honest and vulnerable conversation about my need for connection and safety. While I can share what my needs are, ultimately, I am responsible for meeting my own emotional needs.
We all have needs, and each person’s needs are personal and based on their history. Before we begin to address the core needs we each have in relationships, we must first:
Understand what our needs are and have compassion for the needs of others (this does not mean sacrificing our own).
Acknowledge needs by showing/voicing them with honesty (instead of hiding or suppressing them until you explode).
Take responsibility that you are your own primary caregiver and must meet your own needs as much as you are able. You do this through self-care and loving treatment of yourself, having strong boundaries, and surrounding yourself with people who respect your needs. This way you connect with others from a place of wholeness, not starvation and lack.
Understand that your needs are fluid and may shift depending on your life stage, situation, and partner, and that doing regular check-ins with your needs is important.
And remember, your frustration about what others are not giving you is an indicator of what you first need to give to yourself.
Zahra: “I DON’T FEEL SAFE”
ZAHRA WAS A child of a messy divorce. She was ten when her mom found out that her dad was having an affair. After that, her life became unstable, as she was in the middle of a nasty custody battle. When Zahra grew up, she immersed herself in her car
eer and made a lot of money. Financial security was one of the ways that she could create safety for herself. But while she excelled in her corporate life, her relationships were a mess. She was cheated on in two of her relationships and had major trust issues. No matter how much financial success she had, Zahra didn’t feel safe and would keep getting herself into relationships that would reaffirm her safety and trust issues.
When she was at Renew, she was four months into a new, healthy relationship with a secure man. He was showing her in both his actions and words that he was committed and wanted to keep exploring building a partnership with her. But Zahra was traumatized from her past. She felt insecure when her boyfriend didn’t reply to her text messages immediately or call her enough times in a day. She would get mad, and her boyfriend would change his behavior to appease her, only for her to get mad at him again the next week for something else.
Zahra clearly had a need for safety and blamed her boyfriend for not giving it to her.
“He doesn’t make me feel safe,” she confided to the group.
Zahra’s way of coping was to try to control and micromanage her boyfriend. If he obliged to her demands, she would feel “safe” temporarily, until the next issue came up. Her tight grip on control and rigid rules were just putting Band-Aids on the root issue—that she inherently did not feel safe.
Can you relate? Have you tasked other people with making you feel safe, loved, or happy? Our relationships—whether they be romantic, platonic, or professional—can help support us in meeting our needs, but ultimately nobody can give you something that you must feel on your own, even if they do give in to your demands. In the case of Zahra, although her boyfriend abided by all her rules so that she could feel “safe,” eventually she’d focus on the next thing for him to do. Her hunger for safety and her approach to looking outside herself to get it were an insatiable pit that could never be filled.
If you don’t feel safe, you can share that with the people in your life and even provide tips on how they can best support you. They can choose to be compassionate about your need, but at the end of the day, it’s your responsibility to feel inherently safe. The expectation that one person can make you feel safe or loved when you haven’t felt that in decades is unrealistic and a tall order for someone else to take on.
* * *
EXERCISE: Name Your Needs
Go through the list below and on the next page and circle all the needs you did NOT receive growing up or felt you had to suppress. This can provide insight on the needs that you are more sensitive to and need more of as an adult.
Common Emotional Needs
Connection:
acceptance
affection
appreciation
belonging
closeness
communication
community
companionship
compassion
consideration
consistency
cooperation
empathy
inclusion
intimacy
love
mutuality
nurturing
respect/self-respect
safety
security
stability
support
to be understood
to know and be known
to see and be seen
trust
warmth
Physical Well-Being:
food
movement/exercise
rest/sleep
safety
sexual expression
shelter
touch
Honesty:
authenticity
integrity
presence
Play:
humor
joy
Peace:
beauty
communion
ease
equality
harmony
inspiration
order
Autonomy:
choice
freedom
independence
space
spontaneity
Meaning:
awareness
celebration of life
challenge
clarity
competence
consciousness
contribution
creativity
discovery
effectiveness
efficacy
growth
hope
learning
mourning
participation
purpose
self-expression
stimulation
to matter
understanding
Next, in your journal, use the following prompts to evaluate your current or most recent relationship in light of those needs.
How did you react as a child to having these unmet needs met?
Reflect on your last romantic relationship(s). Write down all the needs your ex(es) did not fulfill. What actions did you take to get these unmet needs met?
What are the parallels? What are the contradictions? How have the unmet needs of your childhood affected your adult relationships?
How are you attempting to get your needs met now? How do you react when they aren’t met? Is this serving you?
For every unmet need that is causing pain or discomfort today, list ways you can meet those needs yourself. This does not mean you must have all your needs met in isolation. Brainstorm different sources where you can start meeting your needs. For example, if connection is an important need for you, the following action items are examples of how to create a sense of connection within yourself:
For example:
Need: connection
I can get my need for connection met by incorporating a daily guided meditation on self-compassion and abundance (connection with self).
I can get my need for connection met by having dinner with girlfriends once a week (connection with friends).
I can get my need for connection met by doing one act of random kindness each day (connection with humanity).
I can get my need for connection met by signing up for a dance class with friends even though it’s out of my comfort zone (connection with self and community).
I can get my need for connection met by joining a women’s group or book club (connection with community).
Your turn:
I can get my need for _____________________ met by_______
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I can get my need for _____________________ met by_______
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I can get my need for _____________________ met by_______
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I can get my need for _____________________ met by_______
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
I can get my need for _____________________ met by_______
_________________________________________________________________________________________.
Being responsible for meeting your needs doesn’t mean that you can’t or won’t be in a relationship where you and your partner mutually support, respect, and honor each other’s needs. Whether you’re single, coupled, or anything in between, ultimately, you’re responsi ble for communicating your needs, limits, and boundaries. Next we’re going to learn how to do this in a healthy way.
When “Little You” Wreaks Havoc
If you’re hysterical, it’s historical.
AA maxim
It’s the undertone of trauma that causes us to react when people or situations trigger us. For some, this may be obvious trauma, like experiencing abuse or neglect. For others, the trauma may be more subtle and chronic, experienced as being criticized, pres
sured to be “perfect,” or taking on the role of caretaker. When we’re children, we do not have the capacity to comprehend or communicate our emotions, which is why we turn to the only way we know how to express them, putting them visually on display through screaming, crying, pouting, or hiding. To survive, we adopt coping mechanisms to protect ourselves, and through time, the repeated behavior becomes ingrained. Perhaps you became the mood-boosting mascot in your family and use humor to avoid vulnerability. Or you played the hero and now find yourself always saving someone. Maybe you were validated for being “good” only if you got top grades and adapted to become an overachiever, obsessing over perfection in order to feel enough. These adaptations then become so normalized that their root becomes invisible.
But these mutations and coping mechanisms often don’t serve us as adults and get in the way of creating the relationships we want with ourselves and with others. And when we get hurt, we often “age regress.”
Pia Mellody, author of Facing Codependence, explains that when we are emotionally overwhelmed, we can default into a childhood state, as either a wounded child or an adaptive adolescent. This happens especially in our romantic relationships because we are so emotionally connected and they are where we are most vulnerable.3