Being someone who defaults to avoidant patterns when triggered or under-resourced I had my struggles with having needs and being needy throughout this lifetime.
My system now embraces that we have needs, and that some of them are better or only met with others. This no longer discomforts me or strikes fear into my heart, thankfully it has become something beautiful to be experienced, shared, received and celebrated in relating with beloveds and strangers alike.
What still goes against the grain of some of my parts is neediness – the grasping, stickiness of its energetics and the undercurrent of self degradation that I sense in it. My avoidant protectors feel an instant ickiness at the proximity of such an energy, even more so when the grasping is directed towards my energy or being.
Thankfully I have clarity on what sets these parts off about neediness and how it is distinct from having needs:
First of all having needs does not make a person needy!
There are many who, conditioned towards hyper-independence, cannot differentiate between having needs and being needy. And unfortunately suppress or deny their needs and don’t allow themselves to ask for support. Though I do not share that perspective and experience anymore I sure know it intimately and viscerally.
There is no weakness or lack in having a need or perceiving another as having needs, it is merely one facet of human expression in the moment.
Needs are temporary, consistent or recurrent phenomena we all have to dance with in being embodied. They may shift and change, we may go through periods of being in need of more or less support – none of which defines our value or worthiness. The latter are innate and untouched by life experiences to my mystic’s consciousness.
Neediness, in my current understanding, is a descriptor for an unskillful way someone expresses and attempts to get their needs met. While having a need is about a sensed, felt, experienced reality – it simply is and therefore is neither good nor bad.
We can express and bid for getting our needs met without ever coming close to being/vibrating neediness, in fact verbalizing of needs and requests for support can be incredibly empowered, admirable and magnetic no matter how vulnerable and tender it might feel to us.
I welcome open communication of needs, wants and desires as it invites me onto an equal playing field of relating, where I get to inquire into my state of being resourced, my openness and willingness and my capacities to meet said needs, wants and desires or make a counter offer of what I can provide or alternatively express what I am not available for.
That aligns with my vision of sovereign relating amongst equals, which is my explicit preference.
Neediness happens on a playing field of implicit inequality, assigning to the requesting the one-down position and the requested the one-up position. And it does not approach another with a straight-forward expression of a need and/or bid for support but comes at the other indirectly, often with unconscious and manipulative veneers of wanting to share or “give” to the approached. While there is a strong pulling on the energy of the approached, in some cases even an unconscious vampiristic attempt to utilize the other’s energy in balancing out a perceived lack. There are aspects of learned helplessness, victimhood, etc. which are all predicated on the person giving away their power and asking another to give it back to them, which of course is an impossibility.
I feel compassion for the predicament of living with this conditioning and trauma response, there is love in me for the being that meets me from that energy. And yet I will set very clear and unmovable boundaries with my protective parts, make my energy mercurially in-graspable, while being present with them from the detachment of the indifferent self.
Essentially throwing them back to their own devices where they play hide and seek with themselves. Yet, wherever I am called to support them in facing their true, underlying need and meeting it in more skillful and honest ways, I will gladly be of service.
I am just not available for the ‘song and dance of delusion’ their pattern creates for them and all who will step into the miasma of this distortion. My awareness, presence and energy are way too precious to me to invest, or waste, them in such a senseless way.
On the other side I love to meet straightforwardness and courageous expressions of needs with as much of a *yes* and support as I can muster. Reminding us that having needs is a natural and beautiful aspect of being human we share. And making a point of expressing and embodying that it is a privilege to be of service to them in this now, in order to see them soar and shine in the next.
I happily embrace being a channel the universe uses to support another being, joyfully participating in waves of kindness, compassion and love that ripple and flow through our field of consciousness to the benefit and growth of All That Is.
Neediness is something I am no longer willing to engage with, even less so on its distorting playing field.
