I’m ready to get back to our needs talk <3
To refresh - this is a part two of a discussion on healing unmet needs, with a ‘behind the scenes’ focus on unpacking how need confusion and deficits arise, with an aim to clarify how an understanding of our need deficit’s origins can help us heal our relationship with our need awareness and fulfillment system.
While unforeseen, but fitting to the Mind + Body basis of this project, this post comes after I took an unexpected writing break so that I could tend more fully to some of my own unrealized needs. Needs that were big and loud and pressing in my outside life, and that made it - despite a persistent, nagging awareness that I was neglecting my self-assigned commitment to contribute to this project once a month - unrealistic for me to carve out the appropriate space that I needed to write.
This challenged me. I felt guilty. I got automatic pushback from myself that said, I was being undisciplined, unfocused, and inconsistent. This might seem harsh or silly given that this is my blog. No one’s making me do this! I’m confident I wouldn’t be hurting anyone by pressing pause on the sharing of my thoughts, or that anyone might even notice for that matter. Still, this was how I felt about my choice to put off writing this article every weekend for the month of April and most of May.
Instead I slept. I was tired.
I travelled. I’d been feeling cooped up and somewhat uninspired for a long time and hadn’t left the country since the start of the pandemic.
I spent time with loved ones. I realized how much time I’d been dedicating to things that were in one form or another work instead of rest or play.
I read and listened to podcasts. I needed to recharge my own meaning and idea well.
And in allowing myself this break, this space, this rest - mentally, emotionally, physically - I know I replenished the energy I needed to return, without fogginess or fighting myself, to a more focused and reflective writing mode.
And it worked. I feel much more refreshed.
I knew on some level, the whole time, that resting was a more immediate priority than an essentially non-binding commitment I’d made to these articles. And I’m glad I took the break I did. But the level of push back I got from myself about not being consistent - reliable was part of it too - a sort of low background hum of mild guilt at roughly weekly intervals in the form of ‘I said I was going to do something and I didn’t do it,’ stood out to me. I realized I was being hard on myself.
As a recovering perfectionist (an article to come at some point on Perfectionism, but for now I’ll clarify that perfectionism does not have to do with being perfect, but rather that a fear of mistake making, or not maintaining commitments ‘perfectly’ in this example, governs one’s choices), when I catch myself being hard on myself, I like to try to figure out what’s going on and why I’m trying to scold a behaviour out of my way.
And so I introspected on this and realized this inconsistency push back I was getting was actually a directly embodied segue back into an understanding of what goes on beneath the surface of our need discernment system. As well as an interesting parallel to the consistency based expectations that most of our needs have of us (in that they need to be continually replenished for us to be ok) and that we understandably often have (consciously or subconsciously) about our resource system’s ability to meet our needs. We want most of our needs to be met consistently. And can get everything from frustrated to distraught to lost when this doesn’t happen. Yet my push back scenario gave me pause to note that this consistency expectation, if non-mindfully applied, can actually create new tensions instead of resolve them - like the inconsistency guilt I was getting after choosing myself over my commitments.
I feel like that was a lot of interwoven ideas all at once so let me try to break down what I mean.
I was aware of a need for consistency about my commitment. And when I didn’t meet that need I felt guilt. I’d say this need and resultant emotion was connected to a higher order selfhood need to live and conduct my affairs in a way that embodies values of trust and reliability. These value needs are important to me, my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those I interact with. So of course I’d like to stand by them as much as possible. Guilt comes in when we feel we’ve trespassed something vital to ours or another’s wellbeing. So it made sense I felt this.
To be clear, I don’t consciously believe I am an untrustworthy person because I skipped a month’s blog post. But the reason we get pain based emotional responses from certain choices or ideas is because at some point that word and what it represented, was connected to a part of our experience that needed to be highlighted with pain so that we’d pay attention to it (and repair it, if possible). Guilt is one of our emotional system’s most effective highlighters. It’s physiologically and psychologically uncomfortable so we won’t not notice it.
The presence of my guilt highlighted an interesting need competition going on in my internal system. And one I needed to be mindful of so that a paradox of consistency in one needs system didn’t effectively lead to a deficit in another more consequential one. Effectively, if I’d held myself to writing last month’s article, against my need for extra rest, I might have actually injured or made worse, a more basic set of my physiological and psychological needs for the sake of a principle or valued based need. But I knew enough that it was more important to stabilize my basics with consistency, than hold myself to consistency for the sake of principle. So I resolved this needs competition by deferring to what I knew would have a greater impact on my wellbeing.
Competing needs aren’t always so easily resolved however. Especially if we don’t actually know that a needs competition is going on. This is often happening when we feel confused and disorganized - or ‘torn’ some might say. It’s often termed executive dysfunction or cognitive or emotional dysregulation - that inner sense of push and pull we get when several important things are calling for our attentional, energetic or time resources simultaneously.
I had the resources available to rest without undue cost to the function and stability of the rest of my life, so was able to resolve my needs competition without too much strain or confusion. But sometimes we won’t be able to reliably experience that one need can be safely deferred to without cost being experienced at another more important level.
This presents an interesting conundrum for our needs system. Because life, and the components of most systems that effect us (internal and external), are not consistent, and often involve competing resources or needs.
So how do we maintain need consistency and know which needs to defer to in the face of an inconsistent environment with frequent parallel pulls on our resource system?
We adapt. And we prioritize. And re-evaluate and re-prioritize. And we keep doing this over an over again until we’ve reach a state that balances out both our needs for growth and stability.
Much of this adaptation happens outside of our conscious awareness. Our instincts have a sense of the priority of our needs, and will naturally try force us to defer to the more vital/survival essential ones, if resource inconsistency exists in or around of us. And our basic needs get pretty loud pretty quickly when not tended to - i.e. thirst, hunger, fatigue, etc.
But some of our needs, when not met, don’t set off alarm bells right away. These are usually the higher order, non-imminent survival based ones, like identity and belonging, and sometimes (if deferred often enough) our emotion based needs. But interestingly, our higher order needs like sense of self, emotional discernment and mattering needs are also the one’s that need to be consistently in place for the whole system to really know what it’s doing or have a reason to do anything at all. If our big picture needs get missed for long enough, eventually the whole system starts to fall apart.
And this needs hierarchy, missed signal delay is where our needs adaptation system can get confused. And where resources can be diverted and drawn away from need areas that actually matter more, but that we might not understand the importance of, at least not until there is a glaring gap that gets our attention. This unmet needs gap is usually pain or a sense of lack or hurt. Overriding our higher order selfhood and identity needs almost always has consequences. But sometimes we either don’t have the power, energy or options to be able to know this or do anything about it even if we did detect this was going on. Until we do, or until we are in so much consistent distress that our nervous system starts acting up on our behalf so that we have no choice but to really look at what’s going on or encounter some now imminent sense of consequence.
To understand where our needs are currently unfulfilled or lacking, as I’ve said we often only need to look towards the painful and or empty seeming parts of our life and what these say about what has not been happening for us (previous article if you need a recap on how to do this!).
In an ideal scenario we might have a proactive sense of our needs and it wouldn’t take until a deficit state was reached for us to notice, repair and fulfill them. This is easiest to do perhaps in regards to our health and basic physiological needs, where consensus around what we need to be healthy and developmentally well is often emphasized in most primary education and healthcare models. Yet when it comes to our identity and higher order wellbeing needs, many forces of socialization from familial and cultural messaging, to gender based expectations, to social, class and race based inequities when it comes access to financial and educational resources, have made it so that knowing our selfhood needs proactively is often a minefield of ‘shoulds’ and either misguided (based on the needs of those in power and privilege) or out of date expectations about who we could be, as opposed to what we in our unique selfhood would actually benefit from developmentally.
That’s why I advocate so strongly for a Mind + Body awareness and self-leadership based approach to getting to know yourself and your needs. You have your ‘what do I need’ answers within your own insight system. It often just takes stopping to listen and listen for what is authentically yours vs say someone else’s idea of our needs and value to hear these answers.
Once we know what we need and want (and it can be a huge re-learning journey to get to this stage of healing alone), once we’ve understood the pieces of life that have been missing in us and our selfhood fulfillment system, then we must discern the resources required to resolve the gaps in our need system and go towards them.
This is where things can get interesting again.
While I’m realizing that I haven’t named it directly yet, resources have always been at the centre of a discussion of needs. But often in a behind the scenes sort of way. I know I said our needs are our fuel, and that in being met they resource us - but this is where we also need to look at where from and how our needs themselves get resourced. I’m aware not all of this happens just inside of us, through the creativity of our imagination and sheer self-determination.
There are things we need that can’t just come from us. We cannot be, despite many people’s efforts to the contrary, be completely self-sufficient. At least not without perpetuating a state of continued compromise.
This was especially true when we were children. Where our relationship with our need system first became of importance, and started to be shaped.
This is too where many of us learned what resources were available to meet our needs. And which needs might not be met consistently. And in turn which of our needs could be important or basic, and which would have to become of secondary or optional importance to match the resources available in our environment or family system. Whether we knew this was happening or not.
This is important, because the intersection of unavailable resources and needs, especially as they developed in childhood, is where a lot of our answers for what is currently not working in our need-meeting system lie. It’s also where we can go for some very meaningful answers on how to heal our needs system, and change the patterns that are not in the service of our needs being met reliably and consistently in the present.
The intersection of resources and needs is too where the practice of need dismissal, suppression and repression to compensate for unavailable resources, first developed. And it’s too where many of our patterns around the validity of, availability for and willingness to meet our needs developed and how our needs system came to be confused in the first place.
I’m willing to stake the claim that most of us were raised under at least some beliefs, assumptions and practices that were out of date by the time they reached us. Beliefs and practices that may have at one time resulted in consistency of need attainment for those who came before us in climes and times of greater danger and unpredictability, say rationing for example, but that by the time they reached us, were not longer matched to our need realities or the resources presently available to meet them. Beliefs and practices grounded in fear and protection are particularly hardwired to last the test of time, even against changing circumstances. Thus many of us were exposed to or experienced the effects of resource scarcity assumptions unconsciously being reproduced through our parents to us, outside of and no longer matched to the contexts in which their necessity arose. This is important to understand because it means that we likely have at least some false, or out of date beliefs about our needs and the resources available to meet them. These intergenerational assumptions and practices eventually create a filter that results in us perceiving our reality around what we believe to be available, vs what truly could be accessed. And our patterns, sense of what is important and willingness to meet our needs forms around this. Until we face that this is going on and dare to consider something different for ourselves.
This part of the discussion may get, or may have already gotten, uncomfortable for some people.
I feel a pang of worthwhile, but present tension anytime I take awareness based discussions back to their developmental or childhood origins.
Talking about the origins of our need deficits and confusions, especially if there is a learned component in childhood (and outside of physical or systems impairment, there usually is), can trigger notions of parental or intergenerational blame and shame.
I emphasize, with genuine compassion, that it is not my intention to blame or shame anyone through what I am sharing. My intention is rather to highlight where opportunity to better understand need awareness and fulfillment patterns that aren’t working exist, in a way that doesn’t lead us, as experiencers of these deficits to blame ourselves, and create further harm to our system. And it’s been demonstrated therapeutically, time and time again, that when we can see where the patterns that are harming us or holding us back come from, and know which pieces of them were never really ours or about us to begin with, our ability to imagine a version of ourselves without them starts to seem not only possible, but necessary. And too, when we realize our need confusions were learned patterns as opposed to fixed givens, or truths about our worth or potential, our very real option to relearn and heal our unmet needs in order to step into a wholer, happier version of ourselves, becomes believable and available.
So I’m going to get direct. A lot of the pain that brings people to counselling is, as I said, related in some way or another to chronically unmet needs. What creates and has sustained this pain, for long enough that it’s become noticeable, is almost always some form of active need Suppression and/or automatic, habitual need Repression. For anyone who’d benefit from a refresher or an explanation of these terms I quite like this video by two Australian Psychologists discussing the terms: Suppression & Repression: What’s the Difference?
Suppression and Repression (S&R) play significant roles in disguising our needs out of awareness, or actively blocking the fulfillment of our needs and at times even the resources to meet our needs. So that we might not fulfill our needs even when we could!
S &R, are regulation strategies that develop through necessity. Basically we wouldn’t default to these strategies unless we’d learned at some point that we had to - or at least that they were the best tools available to make us more ok than not. Suppression and Repression can keep discomfort at bay temporarily or help us make decisions or prioritize around what resources we have and don’t have, or at least our perceptions thereof. Yet understanding more about these two coping mechanisms and recognizing when they are at play in our lives is important, because they can pose meaningful cost to our wellbeing system when used habitually, or used outside of the resource scarcity context in which they developed -the context where we had to choose one need over another, and attempt to get rid of or ‘suppress’ the ones for which it seemed resources did not exist to support - or else suffer in the absence of that need being met.
We learn to suppress certain needs (actively and consciously push them away), because at some point there was a cost to getting that need met. In it’s most impactful form, that cost might have been the disappointment or fear, of finding out the resources to fulfill that need didn’t exist at all. This is the most powerful deterrent for a need - certain and complete unavailability. Say for example, if every time you wanted chocolate, you found it was no longer in stock and the ingredients for it couldn’t be sourced, and not one could tell you when this would change, it wouldn’t make sense for you to keep going to the store to ask for it every week, if this never did in fact get better. Eventually you’d just forget about chocolate and try to find another source of sweetness.
While chocolate isn’t an example of much consequence, resource unavailability is especially impactful to our development if the need presented with non-availability is one that is safety or survival based, growth or development based, emotion based or could in some way connect to our sense of worth or deservedness. Our adaptive survival system responds to needs not met for long periods of time, with repression - of automatically and habitually relegating that need into the background or to our subconscious, so that the discomfort or pain of not getting it met doesn’t become a constant pain that disrupts the consistency of our physiological or conscious wellbeing. Basically we attempt to learn to be ok in spite of that need not having the possibility of being fulfilled.
Inconsistent resource availability or availability with a cost will also result in needs suppression and repression. If the pain or impact of the inconsistency is strong enough, or more significant than the benefits of having that need met, this will present a cue for our system to repress this need out of conscious awareness over time as well.
Let’s get into some illustrations of greater consequence. For example, if when a child is sad or expresses pain, their parent is at times supportive or comforting, but at enough other regular and perhaps in response to more significant or important hurts, dismissive, cold, blame oriented or themselves gets hurt or upset, this child’s need system will become confused. Their need for emotional safety and to experience their parent as trustworthy and capable, might override the need for in the moment comfort or emotional co-regulation (children do not have the neurological infrastructure to regulate many of their own emotions alone, and require the support of a more capable, mature caregiver to return them to baseline of emotional safety) that the present expression of pain pointed to. If this inconsistency is confusing or painful enough, we learn to either selectively show the need in situations we’ve learned are more likely to be safe/reliable, or if it is too unpredictable and difficult to determine need availability, we will stop expressing that need or emotional altogether. Because the cost of expressing that need has become higher than the pain of not getting it met.
Availability with a cost would be that perhaps our expressed need will be met, but in a way that involves an impactful negation or harm as part of getting that need met - in a way that makes the need, as a net experience, ‘not worth it.’ For example if every time you shared something sad with your parent, and they too became sad and indirectly or directly expected you to console them back, you would be in an availability with cost scenario. Maybe that parent was supportive by way of listening or not getting upset with you, but they also took your need request as an opportunity to share their own hurts and burden you in a way that might be unmatched to your developmental ability to process their more powerful adult pain without experiencing fear about your caregiver’s ability to protect you. This would likely be experienced as a net cost in a way that would lead you to experience attempting to meet the need for reassurance or feeling understood as more costly than beneficial.
Let’s say too that this usually happens when a child expresses a certain emotion, that their parent has their own resource scarcity history with, like anger or shame. These two emotions in particular are difficult ones to tolerate or experience somatically and psychologically, and in many generations leading up to now people did not understand how to regulate these emotions without trying to get rid of or suppress them through dismissal, blame, shame or other punishment based responses. If your parent did not know how to regulate emotions on the more uncomfortable side of the spectrum, you would have been dealing with what I’ll term ‘emotional-resource scarcity’ in your family of origin. And for this particular resource scarcity, if enough confusion or hurt happens consistently over regular developmental intervals (when we express a given emotion), we will no longer experience it as healthy, safe or effective to express that emotion. We will then either actively suppress, of after enough practice rounds of this happening effortfully, repress this emotion to avoid having the pain of not having that need met disrupt us and our development further.
We will essentially have learned that there is not a resource available, or at least not in a trustworthy way, to get that (emotional) need met. And since, and this is mostly true in childhood where we are ‘dependents’ and thus limited in our ability to safely get that need met elsewhere, it will become in the interest of our more fundamental needs for safety and internal consistency, to attempt to rid ourselves of the unresourceable need as often as possible. To meet the need ourselves where less costly/available perhaps, but certainly to not keep trying to reduce the tension of an unmet need in a way that actually generates more tension and pain than the original need provoked. This is how patterns of emotional repression develop. And since emotions are our somatic system’s most effective way of highlighting our needs, those of us prone to emotional suppression will often struggle to reliably discern our needs as well.
This is especially true if the resource unavailability and resultant overlooked or unmet needs came to seem like they were not just about behaviours, events or circumstances, but over time, about us as a whole. If these unmet needs built into a sense that we weren’t worthy or deserving of our needs being met, if it seemed personal, or we were treated differently than how this parent treated/met the needs of other people, then not only will the related emotion or need get suppressed, but our sense of self and mattering as whole will start to be pushed out of the way to avoid further injury or rejection.
This is how self esteem and self-worth struggles begin. Either we’ve had or been taught to push so many our of needs aside for so long that we start to have the overall meaning reinforced and reaffirmed that we ourselves, not just our needs, don’t matter and aren’t important. And if this happens for long enough, we may even start to believe that this is not just a matter of some longstanding coping mechanisms colluding to inform our sense of self, but that we truly, as a person don’t matter. And that’s where it starts to get scary. Because we stop even looking for or noticing what resources do exist that could meet at least some of our needs. It’s like a filter just pops up that says, that’s nothing to see here - no needs and nothing for us here. We start to exist outside of that need requiring fulfillment. And eventually a lot of our developmental potential ceases to exist as well.
If you are someone who would describe themselves, or have been described by others, as a ‘people-pleaser,’ ‘needless,’ ‘selfless,’ ‘self-sacrificing,’ ‘generous to a fault’ or finds themselves in caregiver positions or situations where you are frequently putting aside your needs for the sake of other’s, I hope what I’ve just shared will provide a meaningful point of pause and validation for you. Especially if you’ve been feeling worn out, bogged down, burdened or empty due to your lack of need prioritization or fulfillment. Other people might encourage or praise you for these tendencies, and that would make sense as your efforts might be saving them energy and their own efforts or struggle, but please know this simply cannot be, if left unchecked, without consequence or cost to you.
Following the chain of impact of what I’ve just described, it becomes clear, that while S & R might have developed for good, self protective reasons, if left unchecked, or if they become our dominant mode of self-regulating, they start to actually deteriorate us into a state of self-negation and eventually pain. Because with suppressed and repressed needs also comes repressed and missed opportunities for development, growth and fulfillment.
And we know this on some level. Deep down. Remember we are programed for survival and developmental maturation (which requires resource availability and need fulfillment) is an instinctual part of our survival programming. So we start to notice at a point if something’s not happening for us. Especially if we’re not growing in the same core ways as those around us, or we start to experience the sense of emptiness and lack that chronic S & R result in.
If we don’t proactively do the work of recognizing and repairing our needs deficits, that’s ok, because eventually all of these repressed and suppressed needs will catch up with us anyways. I get to see most of that catching up play out in the therapy room where the culmination of unmet needs has started to spill over into work, relationships, sense of self, life direction, substance use (suppression aids) or just a general unavoidable presence of internal pain and emptiness. Because you can’t actually destroy matter. Our unmet needs don’t go away. They just become hidden and looming, building a tension that piles up and piles up the more they are dismissed until they might veritably explode out of us in an attempt to be noticed and reclaimed.
I believe this spilling over is what’s happening when people say they’re having a nervous or ‘mental’ breakdown -the pain of keeping unmet needs at bay, or trying to deal with quantities or qualities of them unfit for the strength of one person alone, eventually pushes them over the edge of awareness to a place they cannot be ignored - to our sense of self and safety in the world.
And our survival system is pretty smart, I’ve noticed, at doing this spilling over for us when the presence of new, and usually unrealized resources for actually meeting our needs, has come into the accessible sphere of our life. Our subconscious usually waits until it’s safe or until we actually could get our needs met, to unearth the buried needs that have been suffocating us in their negation.
And that’s where therapy, self growth work and really at it’s simplest essence, listening to our pain and emptiness and meeting these needs’ calls for what they are, come into play.
If you are interested in learning more about the impacts of longstanding repression and suppression, Gabor Mate has dedicated an entire book to the subject titled “When the Body Says No.” You can find out more about it here: When the Body Says No - Dr. Gabor Maté (drgabormate.com)
Before I close with some thoughts, on the importance of relearning and healing our needs system, I want to highlight the potential that exists to do so, just from recognizing and repairing where we’re using suppression and repression to regulate ourselves. Because we simply hurt less when all our needs are met. Period. Instead we experience stasis or calm, excitement or joy. That’s how our body let’s us know we’re full and ok, and getting enough of what we need to keep growing.
I really like this article from a cool, free mental health resource from Berkley called the Greater Good Magazine, that goes over some non-suppression based options for regulating our emotions, and the same practices can be applied to our other needs as well: How to Regulate Your Emotions Without Suppressing Them
Let’s recap and be clear. S & R provided necessary relief and a pain reduction option for us when they first became regulation instincts. We want to acknowledge this with compassion whenever we are approaching and trying to understand the parts of ourselves impacted by them. Shaming ourselves out of suppression won’t work.
S & R were resources of their own, protective tools if you will, for the generations before us that learned them well enough to pass them on to us. And they tried to and may very well have protected all of us - from the experience of loss, negation, rejection, dismissal, betrayal, and/or abandonment in the face of truly unavailable resources. They helped us stay safe and not risk further harm to our sense of mattering and belonging in the world and in our families, when other resources didn’t exist or were too far out of reach.
But the resources exist now.
If you are reading this, you have likely come to a point, or I invite you to, where you are willing to entertain something beyond outdated forms of safety management. New learning is the first step towards this. Because we actually live in a world that is so resourced now by way of accessible, accurate knowledge, that even if we have come from a place of material, familial, or lack of understanding, that we can repair this need now. Today. Literally from reading things like this on the internet.
We know what our emotions are and mean, for example. Or we can find out. We don’t have to be slaves to outdated forms of emotional regulation that don’t actually work. We don’t have to suffer under emotional resource scarcity from a time before when the science of emotions was not actually well understood or widely available.
And in doing so we can repair our ability to understand our needs, and flexibly and creatively fulfill them and us, instead of negating them. Even if this starts with only the smallest resources accessible to us - until we have grown enough that our resources no longer feel or are small. Until they are believably enough to make us whole.
Getting more whole, not less, was of course always the answer for vanquishing and repairing the hurt, loss and deprivation that followed when we were abandoned to needlessness. This too is how we banish shame and the idea that it was ever because of our worth, value or how much we mattered that our needs were ever pushed aside, criticized or neglected in the first place.
And as we do so, by reclaiming and resourcing our needs in the present, we learn that the resource scarcity that lead us to believe - and our parents or caregivers, and their parents to believe- that there was ever an either or, and that more resources and options could not be created, was never actually a given, fixed or permanent threat.
Sometimes we adapt so well that we forget to re-adapt. This was true for a lot of our ancestors.
Yet in reclaiming and developing our capacity to meet our needs, we do just that, and allow for the sort of self trust and reliability that undoes this painful and out of date self neglect patterning, to create an even more reliable self management strategy. And then we can be more than safe. We can be whole and well and free of the invisible limitations that a legacy of suppression would otherwise cast on us.
When we know better we can do better. We can try smarter instead of just fighting the same pain in the same, reinjuring way over and over again.
Suppression and Repression then gets understood to be an old way. One that we are allowed to evolve and grow beyond.
If pain brought you here and you listened to it, then you carry your ancestors with you in your next steps. They might have only known the pain of fear, shame, dismissal and rejection as a way to keep you and them safe when it came to the hard, uncertain and threatening parts of life. They might have been taught this was their only resource to keep you from going towards things that seemed to contain risk, that could have compromised you or your emotional or physical safety in ways they weren’t sure they had the resources to rectify. But I’d like to think the same intention that lead to the pain of intergenerational trauma, to lineages of need suppression, self sacrifice and selfhood abandonment, that being the intention to protect and preserve, would make them ever proud of every step you take towards emotional, physical, spiritual and personal freedom by healing and upholding your needs now. In doing so you’re growing and freeing not just yourself, but those who came before you from a legacy of continually perpetuated trauma and unhealed suffering. You’re listening to and learning from their pain and yours, and giving their pain a new destiny - one of understanding and healing, instead of continued harm.
And if that’s not reason to embrace with full hearts and open minds, not only the pain of our unmet needs, but the tools for a new future of meeting them, then I don’t know what is.
In reverence and honor of your most well and complete selves,
Carly <3
P.S. I’m finally going to post the Needs Rescue and Repair Framework I mentioned last article after this, I just had to tweak a few things after what I learned in the past month :)
