Learning to meet your unmet needs

We all have some fundamental needs as children. We need to feel safe. We need to feel loved. We need to feel that we are significant and that we belong. There’s a primal craving to have those needs met because that’s how we stay alive.

And if these needs are not met when we are children, we carry on the pattern into adulthood. When we’ve been abandoned emotionally, we continue to abandon ourselves. If our needs were neglected, we continue to neglect ourselves. If we’ve been emotionally abused, we perpetuate the emotional abuse toward ourselves. 

Whether we were mistreated by a caregiver or by a school bully, we invariably make it mean something about us—that we are not enough, not worthy, not deserving. And we internalise the abusive pattern, sinking deeper and deeper into the lie that there’s something wrong with us. 

We then go into adulthood, looking for people or substances to meet our unmet needs. Forgetting that as adults, we are now completely capable of meeting them ourselves. 

Throughout my life, I’ve used people, substances, work, travel and various other mechanisms of numbing or distraction to try and have my needs met. Relationships and friendships, cigarettes, alcohol, food and exercise have been some of the main mechanisms I’ve resorted to garner a sense of love, acceptance and belonging—or rather to distract from the pain of feeling that I wasn’t loved, that I wasn’t accepted and that I didn’t belong. But the inner emptiness I was trying to fill didn’t diminish, it grew progressively. Because neither people, nor substances can ever meet our unmet needs. This is something we, and only we, can do for ourselves.

When I stepped away from the external mechanisms I was using to fill an inner void they were never meant to fill, I had to face a very deep-seated sense of aloneness and isolation. A primordial, heart-level feeling of separation. Thick and visceral. So heavy on my chest and in my throat, it left me gasping for air. 

But the more I opened to the loneliness, separation and inadequacy that I’d been suppressing since childhood, the more relief I felt from them. And that was also the gateway to beginning to meet my own needs. To learning to give to myself that which I’d been asking the world to give to me. 

Our needs for love, belonging, safety, significance and freedom are ours to meet. They can’t ever be fulfilled by anything that’s external to us—other people, substances, addictions, distractions. They are ours only to nurture and satisfy. And they are the path to discovering our true nature. For love and belonging is not something you need, it’s who you already are. And it’s in the absence of this recognition, that we are left gasping for the breath that we are.