Have you been told “You’re Needy”?
If you have, what was your reaction to it?
A gut punch, a squirm, anger, or even a shout of denial “No I’m not”?
THIS IS THE UNDERESTIMATED POWER OF NEEDINESS
It has a lot of power over you, because it generally is perceived as a weakness or dependency, leading to negative connotations and discomfort with the term.
When you reject something, you give it power to impact you.
Take a moment and reflect on what your reaction or response is to the phrases ‘you are needy’ and ‘you are driven by neediness.’
Traditionally, my reaction mirrored that of many others: ‘No, I’m not needy; I’m independent. I don’t need anyone.’
A family member often expresses discomfort with the word, saying, ‘Oh, I hate that word,‘ and visibly squirms upon hearing it.
For most of us, neediness is viewed as a weakness, even as being pathetic, clingy, and dependent.
However, neediness is a universal experience. While the focus of our neediness may differ on the surface, it often boils down to two or three common areas that we all seek and experience at a deeper level.
NEEDINESS IS ONE OF THE LEAST TALKED-ABOUT HUMAN PROCESSES
Why? Because people are uncomfortable with it; it makes them squirm.
Yet, neediness holds immense power over us. It's often unrecognized, yet strongly felt within us, and its influence is vastly underestimated.
NEEDINESS IS ONE OF THE MOST POTENT INFLUENCES ON OUR PERCEPTIONS, INTERPRETATIONS, EMOTIONS AND BEHAVIORS.
It dictates what we see, hear, feel, and are drawn to, as well as what we reach out for, cling to, and rely on for decision-making.
You might be saying to yourself right now, ‘I am not needy.’ But perhaps there’s more to explore.
ARE YOU NEEDY?
For you to check where your neediness is, here are some questions for you to ponder on, and observe what your reaction or response is?
- How often do you check your phone and social media?
- What are you looking for when you check your phone?
- Do you check to see if anybody has liked your posts?
- Do you check to see if anybody has phoned you?
- Do you check your emails reguarly? If so why?
Perhaps you find yourself engaging in certain behaviors because you need to know if the person you’re waiting for has contacted you. Or maybe it’s because you need reassurance that you’re important enough to someone for them to reach out to you.
Feeling valued by others can lead to a sense of worth, and feeling loved can contribute to feeling safe and secure within yourself.
More questions to consider:
- Do you fight or argue a point?
- Do you have to be heard?
- Do you have to get your opinion across?
- Why?
Consider…
- Are you someone who says “Is that right?” at the end of their sentences.
- Or do you say “Know what I mean?”
- Or “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
These are often subconscious comments, ones that people say, that they are not even aware of saying. They are evidence that a person has a need— a need to be reassured, heard, and understood.
Recognizing and acknowledging these needs is essential because neediness is one of the five key processes that often emerge as prominent drivers in our lives.
Until we build a relationship with our neediness and understand its influence, it can significantly shape our experiences and existence.
NEEDINESS IS INTERTWINED WITH OTHER EMOTIONAL PROCESSES
Due to emotionally impactful experiences throughout your life, you will find yourself experiencing a “lack of” and going without in various aspects of your life.
This lacking gives rise to feelings of neediness, which are often accompanied by a host of other emotions stemming from these situations.
One of the most prominent emotions that partners with neediness as a result of these experiences is vulnerability.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability arises from the process of being and expressing your true self and others not accepting aspects of who you naturally are.
You express your truth and emotional responses, only to have them not accepted by others. You are judged and rejected for being you, the true you and it creates a profound feeling of vulnerability.
This experience teaches you that revealing your true self and expressing your innermost thoughts and feelings is not safe or secure, and that hurts.
The fear of judgment and rejection becomes deeply ingrained, leading to wariness in sharing your true self for fear of experiencing that hurt again.
Our experiences condition us to believe this will happen again.
You go without what you truly and naturally deserve and that is your right to experience – acceptance of who we truly are, love, understanding and care.
You believe you are undeserving of the things you have gone without.
This lack of, creates emotional holes of neediness within you.
The neediness emerges from an emotional attachment to filling these emotional holes, leading you to seek reassurance, acceptance, safety and security from external sources like people, objects, substances, and more.
The external focus to fill these needs, stems from self-doubt about your ability to fill them yourself.
Self-Doubt
You also doubt your ability to be your true and natural self, because of previous experiences where you were criticized and made wrong for being you, the true you.
The moment this self-doubt surfaces, the neediness will drive you to seek out reassurance, and validation from others.
You seek reassurance as a means to feel safe and secure, and quell the feelings of vulnerabilities and self-doubt. So, you rely on the external validation as temporary relief to affirm your worth and capability.
Admist this cycle, you experience another influential emotion, partnering with your neediness.
A Lack Of Self-Belief
Disconnected from your true self, you lose touch with your innate trust and knowing—the voice of your soul. You become disconnected from the qualities and attributes that define your true essence and the belief you had in yourself is eroded.
In the absence of these inherent qualities, which were made wrong by external judgment, your neediness fuels your search to experience feelings of lovability, acceptance, and validation through others. Thus, neediness becomes ingrained in our journey once more.
The absence of connection to your true self and self-acceptance drives you to fill your emotional holes with external validation and acceptance from others.
Check Out The IMAD Podcast On Self-Belief, And Journey A Bit Deeper
A Lack Of Self-Worth
“A lack of” speaks of the presence of emotional holes within your self-worth. Wherever there’s an emotional void, neediness will emerge in an attempt to fill it.
You can find yourself craving importance, recognition, and validation from others, seeking your worth and value externally.
This search for external validation stems from a desire to feel safe and secure (vulnerability), as your sense of worth is often tied to how others perceive and treat you.
NEEDINESS DOES NOT EXIST ON IT’S OWN!
Neediness is intricately linked to these fundamental processes that arise from experiences of rejection, non-acceptance, self-protection, self-rejection, and disconnection from your true self. They are part of your human self journey.
Interestingly, WHAT YOU SEEK THROUGH NEEDINESS—validation, worth, and security—IS INHERENTLY WITHIN YOU. In an ideal world, you would naturally be your true self, and there would be no neediness, vulnerability, self-doubt, lack of self-belief and lack of self-worth.
THE POWER OF NEEDINESS
The power of neediness is comparable to the craving of food when you are hungry. You feel if you don’t get the nourishment you are needing, you will won’t cope.
Instead of needing food, you crave what you are emotionally needy of. Driven by an intense emotional attachment to filling your internal emotional holes.
Different levels of intensity in our neediness can trigger you to take action, driving you to seek external sources to fill these emotional voids.
It was external things that resulted in you not receiving what you rightfully deserved. It was the people around you as you were growing up due to their vulnerability, neediness, and lack of self-worth, that contributed to you experiencing a ‘lack of’.
As a result, you unconsciously seek fulfillment from others, believing that someone else may be able to provide what you lacked. In the process, you forget how to fulfill your own needs and remain connected to your true self.
THE IMPACTING POWER OF NEEDINESS
The power of neediness can indeed be overwhelming, often consuming our thoughts and actions with its intense energy.
Growing up, I lacked physical affection and connection, especially from my father. I received beatings instead of nurturing embraces.
I went without having a nurturing, safe, physical space, that every child should naturally expect to receive from a father. I experienced the opposite of that and this had a profound impact on me – it left a large gapping emotional hole within me.
in my adult relationships, the moment I received affection, and the moment I received some comfort and hugs, and I felt safe, my neediness would start pouring out of me and oozing from my pores.
I yearned for more and more affection because the young girl within me, from around the age of 10 or 11, who had been deprived of what she deserved, was desperately seeking that nurturing connection. I found myself seeking from the men in my life what my father had failed to provide.
That’s where we often project onto our partners the roles our parents should have filled. We expect them to provide emotional safety, love, and validation, filling the voids left by our childhood experiences of lack.
BUT THEY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR PARENTING US
This dynamic often leads to codependent relationships, characterized by suspicion, paranoia, and a deep fear of abandonment.
You become terrified of losing what you rely on to fill your emotional needs, perpetuating a cycle of dependency and insecurity.
You believe that if people leave your life or if they don’t give you what you’re needy of, then you are going to go without for the rest of your life. And that is terrifying.
I’ve encountered men and women whose partners incessantly text them throughout the day, seeking constant reassurance and validation. This behavior stems from their intense need to feel safe and secure in their relationships.
They feel a uncontrollable need to ensure their partner’s constant presence, love, and care, seeking reassurance through frequent communication.
I myself experienced this need for several years.
What’s truly sad is the extent to which many of us have lacked these fundamental emotional needs. Unfortunately, this can lead to suffocating our partners, friends, and family with our incessant demands for validation, reassurance, acceptance and security.
Other people can even consciously or unconsciously exploit someone else’s neediness to foster greater dependency.
This behavior often stems from their own deeper insecurities, and their neediness.
THIS IS THE POWER OF NEEDINESS
THE TRUE PURE AND UNTAPPED POWER OF NEEDINESS
When you truly surrender to your neediness, you come to realize that external sources cannot fill the emotional voids within you—only you can heal and fulfill these needs. By accepting and embracing your neediness, you acknowledge the lack you’ve experienced and nurture self-acceptance and love for your vulnerabilities.
This illustrates the profound power of neediness. When you embrace your neediness, you courageously confront the raw depths of your being. You’re willing to acknowledge the hurt and face the absolute truth of your inner landscape.
To achieve this, you remove any blinkers and discard the rose-tinted glasses of neediness. By doing so, you uncover truths you may have been avoiding. And as you confront these truths head-on, you surrender to the emotions attached to the parts of you from the past that went without and you experience a gentle healing process.
You are ready to embrace your truth, to embrace yourself, with love and acceptance, including your neediness.
You have the power to nurture the boy and girl you were, who is within you who experienced lack, providing them with the care and attention they’ve longed for. By acknowledging and tending to these neglected parts of yourself, you offer the healing and support they’ve been craving for.
Explore More About The Power Of Neediness
YOU BEGIN TO RECEIVE WHAT YOU ARE NEEDY OF FROM OTHERS, BECAUSE YOU DESERVE TO
When you shift the focus of your neediness from seeking external validation to internal fulfillment, you transition from grasping, clinging, and pushing people away. Instead, you create space for genuine connection and allow others to share with you because you naturally deserve it.
You no longer need to go without, as you once did. By addressing your neediness internally, you give to yourself what you once believed you needed from others. As you fulfill your own needs, you’ll find that you naturally receive the care and attention you once craved from external sources.
Embracing my uniqueness and recognizing its worth without seeking validation from others marked a significant turning point for me. As I began to appreciate and value my own distinctiveness, I noticed a profound shift within myself. The emotional wounds stemming from past experiences of lack, began to heal, replaced by a newfound sense of abundance in value and worth. By fully embracing my neediness and accepting it as part of myself, I found that it no longer held power over me. Instead, I discovered joy and fulfillment in embracing more of my true self.
Joy in being able to go up to my partner and even my work colleagues and say, “Hey, I am needy and would love some reassurance right now because I’m not trusting my knowing and gut feeling. Are you happy to help me out here?”
And if they said, ‘Yes’, fantastic. It wasn’t about them filling the emotional hole within me, instead, it was about experiencing something I deserved to experience, support and help from others.
If I didn’t receive what I needed, it didn’t emotionally impact me because I trusted myself to process my thoughts and feelings. Even if it took some time, I knew I could reassure myself and find resolution internally.
When You Are Needy Of Others, You Give Them Power Over You
The power of neediness is while you are dependent on other things and other people for your wellbeing and your happiness, and for them to fill what you’re needy of, you give them your personal power.
You are easily impacted by what they do, say, and do not do and say. They have the power over you to make you feel terrible or to make you feel wonderful because you have become reliant on them because you gave them the responsibility to be your parent.
You gave them responsibility for your emotional well-being.
TAKE BACK YOUR PERSONAL POWER
It’s TIME TO RECLAIM YOUR PERSONAL POWER and embrace independence while remaining open to receiving what you truly deserve.
Being able to acknowledge and voice your neediness without shame is essential. Instead of judging yourself as weak or clingy, it’s about owning your neediness as a part of your journey.
Rather than projecting your neediness onto others, empower yourself to fulfill your own needs. By recognizing and fulfilling your own neediness, you will grow your self-reliance and inner fulfillment.
As you work with your neediness, you can support others who are needy of you to address their own needs. You can encourage their own independence and healing process.
We then encourage relationships of independence but acknowledge and accept our interdependence.
In these relationships, we share responsibilities while still caring for and expressing love to one another. However, these actions stem from a place of self-worth and abundance, rather than a sense of lack. Ultimately, our connections become sources of richness and fullness.
OWN YOUR NEEDINESS
I invite you to join me in a moment of reflection. On the count of three, let’s say out loud, ‘I am needy.’
This exercise is designed to help you embrace and accept your neediness, fostering greater comfort and familiarity with this aspect of yourself.
When you can openly own and accept your neediness, free from shame or self-judgment, you empower yourself to work through and heal these aspects of yourself with great ease and effectiveness.
As you grow more comfortable embracing your own neediness, you create space for others to do the same, supporting a culture of acceptance and self-awareness.
On 3 – 1, 2, 3, “I am needy”
I AM NEEDY AND I OWN IT AND I LOVE IT
There is immense power in taking ownership of your neediness.
Take back your personal power by taking responsibility for your emotional well-being.
Look inward to understand how you can fulfill your own needs, nurture your emotional wounds, and overcome feelings of lack.
Embracing your neediness can lead to profound healing and transformation.
Melinda Cates
Founder and creator of I Make a Difference and your true self empowerment facilitator. If you are interested in delving into the processes within you that require your attention for healing, unraveling and reconnecting on your journey back to your true self, then make sure you join the I Make a Difference community – Connect Now!
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