Validate Your Needs - they are the great Teacher

There are needs, then there is “needy”. I make a distinction.
Depending on your childhood, your needs could be a fearful set of liabilities or
a regular opportunity to express your creativity, negotiation and flexibility
with interacting with the rest of the world.

When you haven’t been taught that its ok to have needs
and how to take care of them for yourself, you’re stuck never being able to do
the most basic foundations for yourself.  Needs get a bad rap even from the best
of us and it seems like the few who can have their needs AND the permission to
own getting them met with self responsibility can sometimes get all the
glory/the goods. Men tend to have a lot more cultural permission to meet their
needs than women but that isn’t always true either.

When you can’t honor your own needs because they are a “weakness”
or you weren’t empowered (or disempowered for that matter) to take care of and
meet your own needs, this gap happens. Your needs can never be met or you can
never help get your needs met. So now it is up to someone else to quench the
unquenchable thirst and your needs have now become the monster/enemy/hurt child
frozen in time. Only you can truly get your needs met because only you can
fully have them.

Getting a need met with or through someone or something else is
fine, not just fine but normal, not just normal but how we evolved as a
collective species of mammals – its core to what made us more successful than
reptiles and our reptilian brains. It is what we call society. We are not
islands we are humans. It is our collective interaction and collaborative
sharing on multiple sophisticated levels that makes us unique among all mammals.
We have become these incredibly isolated islands in modern culture; and so have
become needier than ever.

So celebrate and welcome your needs as valid. By listening to
yourself and letting yourself have and honor your needs, it makes it much more
satisfying and positive to go about filling and providing for them …instead of
say a bother or boring or intimidating.  

A lot of folks talk about how we’re supposed to be whole and
complete first before looking for relationships with others. I don’t agree. If
I was a complete island then why would I need you or anyone for that matter and
I can go and have my monk in the cave existence.

Needs expressed in a mature clean way (no pre-expectation or
assumption on the statement, e.g. the leading question) can become a way of
sharing, collaborating, learning and growing. And not just for the individual
but for the group, be it a group of two or seven billion. Needs can be your
friend and teacher on how to move through the world and build the character of
yourself.

-Trella