TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of neediness. Neediness being unresolved historical childhood need that is now playing out in the life of an adult, leaking into one’s relationships in one way or another, sometimes in really extreme ways.
I thought about it when I was formulating this video, and I thought a good way to do it would be to explore the subject of need through different types of relationships. And I thought, well, probably the best, most obvious place to start is romance. Romance, a place where people often play out their most intense versions of neediness, sometimes to very destructive ends.
I think of so many relationships I’ve seen, been in myself, where someone comes in and just expects the other person to meet their unresolved childhood needs. Unresolved childhood needs, which often they are unconscious of, unaware of. So basically, they don’t know where this intense feeling of need that they have is coming from. All they think is, “I have these needs, and I want this other person, my romantic partner or my potential romantic partner, to meet my needs.”
A lot of times what I’ve seen is when healthier people get someone else’s neediness put on them, they think, “Ah, red flag! Get away from this. I don’t really want this. This isn’t my responsibility. It’s not my responsibility to fulfill somebody’s neediness. It’s not my responsibility to be the parent that they never had, that maybe they’re not even aware of that they didn’t have, and maybe that they’re not even aware of that they want me to be.” And so yes, often it ends relationships pretty quickly when someone’s extreme neediness comes out. But not always, because then what I’ve seen is there are certain people out there in the world, sadly, I think of my mom being one, who have radar looking for other people’s neediness, and they capitalize on it.
That was the relationship between my mom and my dad. My dad was a profoundly overtly needy person, a very, very deprived child when he was young. His parents didn’t love him. His mother overtly didn’t want him. She had him because she couldn’t have an abortion, and he was raised just being not cared about, being sent away a lot, being humiliated and put down. And it stunted him. It stunted him to a very young age in a lot of ways. In some ways, he was able to go forward in life and become a functional adult, working citizen, a working professional. But on an emotional level, he was still about four years old. He was a very, very needy child in an adult body.
And my mom picked up on that because my mom, incidentally, was not so dissimilar. She was just a bit more psychologically sophisticated, and she learned to hide her neediness. And so what she did was she took on a role that I think part of it was unconscious and part of it was conscious. And she, so in part, it was kind of pretend in a way, but she pretended to meet my dad’s needs. She pretended to be the perfect object for his neediness, constantly complimenting him and cleaning up after him and looking after him and mothering him and telling him all the time how great he was.
I heard it as a child. It was kind of normal when I was young because it was all I knew, my parents being my primary society. But as I got older, I started thinking, “Ew, it’s kind of gross hearing my dad be so needy with my mom.” “Hey, am I handsome?” “Oh yes, you’re so handsome!” That kind of thing. “Who’s the smartest guy you know?” “Oh, it’s you! It’s you!” Literally, these kind of conversations I heard regularly. Also, an expectation from my dad toward my mom that she always be there for him, that she listened to him. They were open about it also about her being sexually available to his needs.
And an attitude I remember when he started going to therapy when I was a teenager, and it even made it worse because his therapist, well, kind of bullshitted him in a way and told him, “Your needs are good. It’s good to have your needs.” And I remember my dad coming home and saying, “I have needs, and I have a right to have people meet my needs.” He was like a raging four-year-old who hadn’t been loved and playing it out through, well, through the body and life of a 40-some-year-old man.
My mom, also needy, and she was trying to pretend to meet my dad’s needs so that actually he would meet hers in return, be there for her, be stable for her, be her rock in a way, provide for her financially, provide a social structure, provide that relationship that made her look good to society at large.
I think a lot of couples are like this in one way or another, where both members of the couple are very needy, but they find different ways to plug up each other’s neediness. They don’t heal it. You can’t heal someone else’s neediness. Neediness is something that needs to be healed from within, finding out what the ancient historical needs were, finding out how one can become one’s own parent through the emotional healing process, through the process of healing the traumas that caused the neediness, finding out how to love oneself and grieving all those ancient historical losses, all the losses of one’s parents, figuring out really detailing who one’s parents were, what their limitations were, what they didn’t do for one that stunted one along the way. That’s the way to heal from neediness.
But most people don’t do that, not even remotely. And a lot of people, well, when they get in these stable relationships, they find ways to balance out the neediness relationally. Or another thing is people, a lot of times what I see are very, very needy, but they’ve learned through the painful experience of adult life that most people won’t even remotely try to meet your needs and can’t. And it’s hard to find someone like my mom who will even pretend to meet your needs. So what people do is they push down their neediness. They’re basically like very repressed needy people just below the surface, but they don’t let other people know it because they’ve learned it’s a good strategy to hide your neediness, keep it out of sight, even keep it out of your own sight, because it can be so painful for needy people to go through life discovering again and again that, “Oh my God, nothing works. Nobody can meet my neediness.”
I think a lot of couples are like that. Sort of on an emotional level, you have two very, very needy people, but their neediness is so pushed down that effectively they’re kind of emotionally dead. And their relationships, although they might be very stable, might be very long-lasting, emotionally none of the neediness comes out, and they’re kind of dead. They’re not looking at themselves. They’re not playing this out relationally with each other. They’re not looking for each other to be much of a replacement parent. Instead, they just have kind of a dead business relationship.
But let me get into a different type of relationship, and that is psychotherapy. I was a psychotherapist for 10 years, did my 15,000 sessions or however many that I did. I was also a psychotherapy client, and from both sides, I saw again and again how neediness can play out in this relationship.
Well, to compare psychotherapy to romance, what I would say is psychotherapy is an appropriate place for clients to express their neediness, even to play it out relationally, to show the dynamics of what their unmet ancient historical needs are, to show the therapist by actually hoping that the therapist will meet those needs. That is a normal and actually healthy and appropriate thing for a client to do.
Now, people might say that’s not appropriate, that’s not ever appropriate. Well, part of why people, I think, often say it’s not appropriate, and even therapists often don’t like it, really detest it when clients become needy toward them, to me what that shows is how ineffective the therapists are. And I would say for myself, having been a therapist, to say it isn’t easy to have a client play out their neediness, but it’s vital. It’s vital for them to be needy toward the therapist and then for the therapist to say, “Look, this is you showing what you didn’t get. This is the map for you to trace right back to what failed you, how your parents didn’t meet your needs, all the different ways in which they failed you.”
Your neediness toward me as a therapist, what you didn’t get, the problem is I can’t fix it. But we can look at it. We can explore it. This is a perfect opportunity for us to explore your historical childhood traumas, the deficiencies of your parents. And through the process of therapy, by looking at it, by me walking with you on this path, path being a guide to the degree that I’m able, I can help you, and you can figure out how to help yourself learn to meet those needs. Because that’s what I’ve seen as a therapist again and again. And I had to learn it as a client too, and I had to learn it in my relationship with myself. Nobody aside from me, the healthiest, strongest, most mature parts of me can help assuage my neediness, can meet my ancient historical needs. It’s really not appropriate for anyone else to meet those needs or even to try to. But it is appropriate in therapy for people to show their therapist their neediness and to even hope for their therapist to be that person. Though the therapist, of course, has to redirect it back to the client for the client’s own healing process.
But what I see is a lot of therapists, most therapists, have really very, very little ability to guide a client toward healing their own neediness because the therapists haven’t done it themselves in their own lives. The therapists are deficient at doing it. And I think along the way, I’ve seen a number of therapists, they’ve been very overt about, “I despise needy male clients. I despise needy female clients.” When clients come in with all this neediness, “Get away from me. Go find somewhere else to deal with this. This isn’t my job.” And it’s like, no, it is your job to be the recipient of this, and it’s your job to help the client figure out where it’s coming from.
But then there’s another type of therapist, and I’ve seen a lot of these types, and these, well, I was going to say disgust. Honestly, it is disgusting. They disgust me just as much as the therapists who just totally outright reject the clients for their neediness. These are the therapists who, kind of like my mom, have radar for needy clients and like them and use it to hook clients, especially hook clients who have a lot of money. And what the therapists do is they try to gratify the neediness of the clients. They try to be that parent the client never had, and they do all these different things to be there for the client and be this idealized parental figure and even pretend to meet all these unresolved needs of the client so that the client will keep coming back forever and keep paying and paying and paying and paying. And the client feels like, “Oh my God, I finally found the person who sees me and loves me and makes up for all the things that I never got.” And the therapist really pretends to be that perfect parent, and the relationship can go on for years and years and years and years. And fundamentally, the client never grows, never changes. Instead, they just become dependent on this pseudo parental figure.
Now, I think of myself when I was a client in therapy. I expressed some of that neediness, that ancient unresolved historical need from my childhood, on my therapists. And what I found pretty much was they were useless, really useless. Didn’t know how to help me explore my childhood, didn’t know how to help me explore my parents. Parents often, in fact, defended my parents because they were probably defending their own traumatizing parents. And for all I know, these therapists themselves were very deficient parents who had not met their children’s needs, had created neediness in their children, and were in denial of it. So they were really pretty much useless at the process of helping me resolve my neediness.
What helped me was a massive amount of journaling, self-reflection, doing a deep and found self-therapy process that, as I will say, is ongoing because I still have some neediness in me. I see it in various ways. It comes out from time to time, and it’s like when it comes out, it’s not pleasant relationally. But right away, I’m like, “There it is, there it is.” And I use it as a chance in my self-reflective process to trace what I didn’t get when I was a child. And now I recognize it’s no one’s responsibility except for me to figure it out and to explore it and to explore the dynamics of it and to explore my historical feelings around it, feelings which are still to one degree or other locked inside of me, very, very early stuff in my life. Now, I think I’ve healed most of it down probably to the age of one or two, but some of that very early stuff is still there. I think it’s the hardest stuff to heal. That’s what I found so far.
Final Relational Dynamic: The Parent-Child Dynamic
Well, the final relational dynamic that I would like to explore is the parent-child dynamic. What I’ve seen with a lot of parents in relation to their children, and I saw it in my own parents’ relationship with me when I was young, even into my adulthood, was that a lot of parents have children to meet the parents’ unresolved childhood needs. The parents play out their neediness in relationship to their own children. To me, this is the most twisted because actually the job of a parent is to meet the actual age-appropriate needs of their babies, of their infants, of their toddlers, of their children. But instead, most parents, perhaps all parents to one degree or other, and some parents to very extreme degrees, have created their children to meet their own needs. They want their child to become a parent to them.
I mean, in society and even in the world of psychology, it’s called, you know, the child becomes the parentified child. But it goes way beyond that. Really, what it is is the parents want the child to love them, and it’s not the child’s job to love the parent. It’s the parent’s job to love the child. And when parents play out their neediness toward their children, and they do it in a million different ways, that causes neediness in the children. The children grow up with this relational expectation that they have to be there for other people. They have to push down their own needs, subjugate their own needs even, and figure out how to love the people whose job it is to love them. And then maybe if they love the parent enough, they’ll get a few crumbs of love in return.
And I think, well, I know it. I’ve seen a number of parents who actually consider this kind of fair, this attitude. “Well, you have to love me before I’ll give you anything. I won’t give you anything until you love me.” And a lot of parents are really even deluded by this. They say, “Oh, you don’t even know what love is until you’ve become a parent, until you feel the unconditional love from your child.” And it’s like, no, no, no, that is totally backward. And those kind of parents profoundly create needy children.
Now, what I have seen is that when some children grow up, children of such kinds of parents, to one degree or other, and their neediness remains into their adulthood, sometimes, well, they can want their parents still to make up for what they didn’t get. I did this to some degree, I think more in my 20s and into my 30s. Now, I’ve done get away from my parents. They cannot do this for me. But I see a lot of people do this, adults do this, still having the hope, even the expectation that the parents will come clean, be honest, be fair, make up for what the parents’ failures were once upon a time, and finally love their now adult children properly. And it doesn’t work that way because even if, well, years or even decades after childhood is done, it’s no longer the parents’ job to parent their children in that way.
Now, as in all cases, it is the job of the now grown child to figure out what he didn’t get, to confront the parent, even potentially externally to the parent face or internally in their own mind, in their own memories, in their own journal, perhaps to figure out what they didn’t get and to figure out how to grow enough to take care.
Of themselves to practice enough self-care to be their own parent. And in so doing, to work progressively to cure their own neediness.
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