When you don't know & assert your needs, you end up hungry in crumb filled relationships.

If you don’t have a clear view of yourself and are used to suppressing your needs, expectations and wishes by being passive, you will have found yourself in situations, especially relationships, where your needs aren’t met and you’re at conflict with your values. This gives way to potentially busting your own boundaries possibly while others are busting them too.

In order to be in a mutually fulfilling relationship, you need to have enough self-knowledge to understand what you need in order to feel happy and authentic.

You need to know how you want to live – your values. When you neglect to reflect on and live these, you end up lacking the self-awareness to opt into situations that are befitting of you.

You’ll make decisions without understanding if they’re a reflection of you. Without being able to go through the consideration stage of decision-making and evaluate based on self-knowledge as well as possessing the self-trust to listen to you in the first place, you haven’t got very much information to go on.

To make matters worse, you may actually be seeking approval from the other party or even expecting them to fill voids and give you an identity. This puts them on a pedestal where you assume that pleasing them and gaining validation will somehow meet needs, expectations, and wishes that you don’t understand, articulate or even respect.

When you understand your needs, you understand your values.

When you recognise your values they also tell you about what you need. This is for you to work out. When you don’t, it’s why you end up feeling neglected or like something is “missing”.

Attraction and wanting a relationship with someone doesn’t mean that you’ll have a great relationship where your needs are met. When two people are willing to value themselves and meet and respect their own individual needs and values, they’ll be happiest in relationships and situations where they share common values–compatibility.

If you’ve ever been in a relationship where the other person was happy as Larry with the status quo while you’ve been ‘hungry’ on a crumb diet, they’re content. From their perspective, their needs and want are met even if it’s not enough for you. If empathy isn’t their strongest suit, they’ll assume that if it’s alright with them, it’s alright with you.

When you live your life in a way that reflects and respects who you are, it’s harder to ‘wake up’ in situations ‘surprised’ at how hungry or even malnourished you are.

You seek out what you need, you recognise when it isn’t that, and you do the due diligence as a natural part of the process of getting to know someone.

You get a sense of this person as they unfold, and you process the feedback from their actions and words, including missing and mismatched ones. It’s considering your experiences with them over time and then relating them to the ‘data’ you hold on you.

Whatever you’re going to continue in should resonate with your own value system.

When we waver on how we feel about ourselves and don’t believe that we can go after what we deserve or even have needs in the first place, it makes it difficult to listen to the feedback from that data. We might shut down our concerns because we’re worried about ‘losing’ him/her. Next thing, we’re overriding our true selves with what we think that others would prefer us to be or do.

We go “Well I do need that but I have to hold it back because I don’t want to be ‘needy’…”

Losing yourself in your relationships is the bigger problem, not so-called neediness.

When you have an identity dependent on external validation from a specific person, it makes you vulnerable to exploitation.

Life serves you lessons to teach you about where you need to adapt your thinking and behaviour.

As I’ve said before, certain lessons will keep coming back like Michael Myers in Halloween until you’re ready to listen and apply the insights gained. Dates and relationships give you a window into positively understanding yourself further. When they don’t work out, there’s information in there about unmet needs or where you might have been out of alignment with your values. Ultimately, you also get some insight into what you truly need.

When I was ready to listen I realised that my relationship experiences weren’t some damning indictment of my worth as a person. They were, however, telling me that I didn’t really treat myself like a person of worth. I didn’t even think about values or what my needs might be and when I did, it was an afterthought when I was already feeling very invested. It was time to stop daddy hunting. I needed to be and do the things that I expected from others, and I needed to be more proud of who I was instead of morphing, adapting and seeking approval.

How wonderful it would be to get it ‘right’ the first time but in reality, it’s trial and error. And each experience if you take even a little time to positively learn from the insights gained is taking you closer to being in a relationship that’s more befitting of you.

Many people who find themselves ‘hungry’ in their relationships and recognise on some level that there’s a disconnect between each person’s wants go into change mode.

They expect the other person to change so that their needs can be met. This is even if aside from their unmet needs, the person and relationship are at odds with their core values. It’s easy to go “I love them; they should change” or “If they loved me and wanted the relationship, they’d change”. But who they’d have to become would not be who they are and it still wouldn’t make you you. That’s your job.

Being self-sufficient doesn’t mean that you don’t need others. What it does mean is that you’re not deficient without others. Address your relationship with yourself and your relationships, romantic and otherwise, will be more nourishing. Pretending that you don’t have feelings or needs is like trying to pretend that you’re not a person of any worth. That’s not an act that you should be willing to pull off.

Your thoughts?

FavoriteLoadingAdd to favorites