Needs

Until your needs are met, you can’t help anyone else, and you won’t be happy or at peace. Meeting your own needs is a complex process that will take you years to master. Learning what your needs are takes time and patient observation, and then learning the skills you will use to meet those needs will challenge you in the most difficult ways.

We all have many needs. There are the things that we need as human animals to stay alive: air, sleep, warmth, food, water, light, human contact, etc. You have probably learned how to take care of those by now. There are also things we need as humans who live together in a society: clothes, education, transportation, money, a place to live, a job, and social groups, to name a few. The work ahead of you is in figuring out your emotional needs, the things you need to be happy, fulfilled, and at peace with yourself and your environment.

For a long time, I stubbornly refused to use the word ‘need’ when talking about anything other than the things I need to survive. I thought that I should just be able to adapt to any situation, and I would be fine as long as I had the air, water and food that I needed to live. This is true in the short term, but the big picture is much more complicated.

In every situation, relationship, or activity you are ever involved in, you and anyone else involved will have needs. Your own needs should be your primary concern, and the needs of anyone else involved should be your secondary concern. Let’s look at a co-habitation example.

You live with a roommate in a small house. In this situation, you and your roommate have needs directly pertaining to the situation- you need things from your roommate, and you need things from the house. One thing you might need is a certain level of cleanliness. After living together for two months, you notice it’s really getting on your nerves when your roommate leaves her dirty socks on the floor. If nothing changes and she continues to leave her socks on the floor, your are going to become progressively more upset and overwhelmed by the situation. You could get to the point of having a nervous break, dissociation, or erupt in anger over something else or with someone else. This is because your need to have the house clean is not being met.

There is only one way to really solve this problem, and that is communication. You have to communicate your need to your roommate. Most likely, your roommate doesn’t even know that it bugs you when she leaves her socks on the floor. You could take a passive aggressive approach and clean up her socks for her everyday, but this would still bug you and you can’t do this every single day and be a happy, fulfilled man. A man who knows how to be happy and fulfilled will initiate a conversation and express his need. He would say something like,

“Hey, it really bugs me when you leave your socks on the floor. Would you make an effort to put them away after you take them off?”

The sooner you do communicate this need, the better. If you put it off (because communication is scary) the problem will only get worse and the conversation will get more awkward.

Your roommate has needs too, and if hers are not met she will be having similar problems. Maybe she gets bugged because she doesn’t think you wash the dishes thoroughly enough. You don’t know this though, you think you wash the dishes just fine. She has been acting weird about things recently, especially when you’re in the kitchen, and she has seemed distant and irritable. She will most likely have no idea that leaving her socks on the floor would bug you, and will be surprised and maybe defensive about it. You can calmly express that you need her to pick her socks up, and you can ask if she needs anything from you, which would open the door for her to tell you that she is bugged by the dishes.

Now, you both have to change your behavior to meet the other person’s needs. You have to learn from her how she wants you to wash the dishes, and then you have to start doing it that way. She has to stop leaving her socks on the floor. It may take a while for you both to modify your behavior, but after you’ve opened the channel of communication about it, it will be much easier to initiate the next conversation. “Hey, remember last month when I told you I needed you to stop leaving your socks on the floor? You’re still doing it, could you make more of an effort to stop?”

You will never live with someone who has exactly the same needs as you, and so this situation will occur, many times, in every living situation that you share with someone else. The sooner you learn to communicate about your needs, the easier the rest of your life will be.

Sometimes, I’m too scared to initiate a conversation with someone about my needs. I may be intimidated by that person, scared of a fierce reaction, or scared of hurting them.

Let’s say in this same example, your roommate is seriously depressed and you’re worried that asking her to pick her socks up will throw her over the edge, and she could hurt herself or others. First of all, this is probably not the case. People who are depressed, and most people in general, crave authentic personal communication. Communicating a need is vulnerable, and if you can be vulnerable to her, it will probably make her feel more connected to you and less alone. If you decide not to communicate your need though, you are making a choice to self-abandon. You are abandoning this need to protect yourself from the thing you are afraid of (communication). This is only sustainable for a short time. You cannot change yourself and make it ok for her to continue leaving her socks on the floor indefinitely. You must eventually take some sort of action to meet your need. The longer you wait, the longer you perpetuate your own misery.

Let me give you some examples of some of my needs that I’ve discovered: I learned when you guys were young that I needed time alone to collect my thoughts. I used to work all day, come home and hang out with you guys until bedtime, then spend the evening with my girlfriend until our bedtime, or go play a gig. I didn’t have any time alone in my days at all, and I was becoming miserable and I didn’t know why. It was years before I was able to articulate this feeling and call it a need, but I did learn that one way I could feel better was going camping alone. I have always tried hard to build in solo camping trips into my schedule- not just because I like nature and want to explore, but because this allowed me to be alone and process my thoughts and feelings. Before I learned how to do this, I would have headaches, panic attacks and nervous break-downs which would render me completely useless. Not having your needs met daily is traumatic, and my body responded with trauma responses (dissociating, shutting down, not being able to speak or act or take control of my body, shaking, being tired all the time, lack of motivation). Meeting this need has been central to my adult life. I still struggle every week to find enough time in my schedule to be alone, I often fail, and I continue to learn new ways that this impacts me negatively. Truly, you will not be happy until you learn to meet your own needs. It is vitally important.

Another example from my life is in learning how to be creative. Being creative and creating things is what my job is all about, and it’s the activity I’ve centered my life around. I need specific conditions to be creative though, I can’t just be creative for 15 mins before I have a meeting, or right when I get home from a gig. For me to be creative, I need a large chunk of time, at least 3 hours, complete privacy, and no distractions. What that looks like right now is that I organize my week to allow creative time during the day when my roommate is at work, I turn my phone notifications off, and I make sure I won’t have anything to do for as long as possible. I need to be creative, and I need these conditions in order to be creative, so I have no choice but to do these things and arrange my life in this way.

I need to be in charge of my own schedule. Working for someone else, having to clock-in at a certain time every day, and not being able to arrange my days how I want are unacceptable to me. I could do it for a short time if I needed a job, but it’s not a sustainable lifestyle for me.

I have a friendship where she and I have contradictory needs, and at the moment we have had to suspend our relationship because we can’t meet each other’s needs. She needs a lot of communication, over phone, text, or email, to feel safe in the relationship, and I need to communicate only in person to feel safe. This is a friendship, but we work closely together and have hurt each other through not expressing our needs in the past, and so a situation has arisen where we can’t safely be friends anymore. Communicating in person triggers her, and over the phone is triggering and overwhelming for me. We will resolve this, but it might take some time for one or both of us to heal enough to meet each other’s needs.

I need a 3-5 hours of exercise a week in order to feel good. Many weeks, I don’t get this much and I don’t feel as good. I have less energy, less motivation, and I feel less strong and capable.

As much as I like to be alone, I also need people and culture. I start getting depressed when I haven’t spent enough time around other people, and I feel drawn to do things like go to a movie, grocery store, museum, or a concert. I’ve spent enough time in the country to know that I feel the absence of culture and I need to get to a city occasionally to see art.

I could list dozens of examples of my needs. Some are specific to a relationship, a job, or a situation, some are general needs that I have in life. The most important and the most difficult are the ones that involve other people. Start paying attention and trying to identify your own needs. If you ever start to feel irritated, angry or upset in any way, it is a sign that one of your needs is not being met. You can then figure out the need, and bravely face the communication that will be required to have your need met.