Emotional Needs

My therapy homework was to make a list of my emotional needs. Looking back at my childhood, I can identify my emotional needs weren’t met; however, identifying a list of my emotional needs isn’t quite so simple

In my childhood, I was raised in an environment where asking for my emotional needs to be met was uncomfortable and regularly discouraged. It was highly uncomfortable. I would either be dismissed or even chastised for asking for my emotional needs to be met. As a child I was feeling more and more depleted and without hope for a better future. By the time I hit fifth grade, I encountered suicidal ideation. Having no outlets for my emotions, I learned to burry my feelings. Dismissing my emotional feelings didn’t diminish them though, it just buried them deeper.

Over time, I learned to be the emotional caretaker in my family, addressing the emotional needs of my sister and my mom every time there was a fight. Any time I caught my mom crying, or when there was a blowout between my biological mother and sister, I was there to pick up the pieces. I would go up to my sister’s room, knock on her door that she had slammed shut, and try to get her to talk to me – sometimes through the door she refused to open. My sister and biological mother would go on to describe me as the “rock” of the family. I was taking care of everyone else’s emotional needs while no one was taking care of mine. My emotional needs were always put last

As an adult, I was praised for being “easy going.” In reality, I was just used to putting my needs last. I continued to feel more and more depleted, more and more hopeless. This started to show up in other ways. Disconnection, disassociation, burnout, and anxiety to name a few. I tried to manage this myself, knowing I needed to take a step back when I encountered apathy; however, this only managed my problems – it didn’t solve anything. By the time I had passed beyond the suicidal ideation phase to actually make a suicidal gesture, I had hit rock bottom. I had become so disconnected from myself and my needs. I was lost.

After being hospitalized for two weeks, I was released with a determination to heal. It was time to make some changes in my life. I had learned to silence my needs in order to feel safe. With tremendous fear, I timidly began to make changes in my life. It was incredibly difficult for me to identify what I was even feeling, let alone express these feelings to anyone else. I’ve gotten better at expressing my feelings, but still struggle with this and identifying my emotional needs.

Feeling as though I’m emotionally being heard is an emotional need of mine. As a child, my emotional needs were summarily dismissed. When I told my parents I was depressed and wanted to see a therapist, I wasn’t even asked why. Instead I was given a lecture about mental health being a scam. Instead of being heard, my needs were discarded. After several attempts of attempting to get my needs met in this manner, I withdrew inward. In my journey of healing from CPTSD, I recognize that the internalizing and suppression of feelings isn’t healthy. Feelings are meant to be expressed through healthy means. They’re not meant to be buried and left to fester in a mental compost heap.

Another emotional need of mine is having emotional connections to people. Deep conversations are very meaningful to me, as emotional bonds develop. As my emotions run deep, having no emotional bonds as a child left me feeling suffocated and abandoned. When this aspect of conversing is neglected, I resort to feelings of emotional abandonment and feel like my emotional needs aren’t being met.

To be anything less than who and what I am erodes my sense of self. My ideal self wouldn’t stand for it. This is why another emotional need of mine is to know that love and validation are not conditional. As a kid, I was emotionally abandoned. My partner’s family has expressed sadness when I told them that I had become accustomed to being alone. I wore a mask for so long and I have no intention of ever putting one back on. I’d rather be completely alone than to ever deal with the emotional firestorm wrought by keeping people in my live who believe love and acceptance are conditional. My parents were only one example of this. I gave my parents numerous chances before cutting them out of my life. I even gave them yet another when my partner (unaware of what they were really like) said, “You only get one set of parents.” After I briefly started talking with my biological parents again, I was informed they prayed for me to no longer identify as transgender. For the sake of my partner, I swallowed it. I wanted my partner to understand what they were really like behind closed doors. My biological parents eventually blew this chance at reconnecting, calling my partner a “gold digger”. After I showed my partner the text messages, they stopped pushing for me to have a relationship with my biological parents. I cut them off again. They won’t get another chance. They’ve had too many chances already. Enough was enough. They never accepted who I really was. Their love and validation was conditional upon conforming to their expectations, bending to their will, and the expectation that I’d remain imprisoned in their own twisted sense of how the world works.

Standing up for who I am and what I believe in is something relatively new to me in life. It took a long time for me to gather up the pieces of my broken psyche from childhood and start rebuilding myself piece by piece. It’s why in the new life I’m building for myself, I refuse to accept anything that degrades my sense of self.

An emotional need I’ve had since childhood was non-sexual physical intimacy. As a child, I did not receive many hugs as my biological parents were emotionally distant. As it turns out, I love hugs and cuddles. I even had a non-sexual cuddle buddy back in college. We both liked cuddling – it never went any further. My partner’s mind just about exploded in disbelief. In the past, I have even had Human Resources at my workplace speak to me about the length of my hugs – apparently the duration of my hugs at work were making people uncomfortable. Nowadays, I have my “hug-meter” filled daily with about dozen hugs. This is an emotional need of mine. Non-sexual physical intimacy is vitally important to my emotional wellbeing.

Looking back, I feel like all of my emotional needs weren’t met as a child. It’s probably what led me to experience suicidal ideation by the time I was fifth grade. It’s probably what led me to build an emotional wall to protect myself to feel numb – it was simply too painful to endure otherwise. Since then, I’ve come a long way. I’ve become a lot better at identifying and expressing my needs. I am actively working on this

#FeedTheGoodWolf