I had a strong yet very liberating insight just an hour or so ago. Talking with a good friend of mine about how certain circumstances and events from my childhood affected my persona and how I am still, somewhere within the depths of my mind, carrying with me automatisms and patterns of thinking from that time, I suddenly realized that I had, in my childhood as well as later, almost never really expressed my needs. My needs have been very much kept locked up and suppressed for most of my life.
I can remember shutting down, bit by bit, every time my expression of a need was being met by an evaluation. When, as a child, I expressed I needed some respect, I was being told that not only I was not good enough to get respect, but that I was not good enough to even have the right to need respect. I was not important enough to even have the right to need attention, let alone to get it. I never worked enough to have the right to need rest.
Yes, it really seemed that one firstly needed to gain the right to have needs. And I did not seem to have succeeded in gaining this right. So I learned to not have needs.
After internalizing this in a form of a heavy duty self-evaluation, I soon found myself fully judging my needs as a sign of weakness and dependency. I thought having needs was utterly immature and unspiritual. I learned to even feel guilty for having needs, since this was so selfish. You know, how can I even think of talking about my own needs, when there is so much suffering everywhere.
Yes, sometimes it is so darn hard to just allow myself to feel my needs and just let them be, without trying to suppress them, fix them, evaluate them, sort them out, manipulate them…
Oh well, oh well…
After this realization I now feel incredibly content and have a good deal of clarity inside my being. Yes, I have had needs in my past and these needs were often totally ignored, denied, neglected and not even considered at all. Both, by me and by others. And consequentially I felt lonely, very very lonely.
And I have a lot of needs now. For acceptance, freedom, appreciation, autonomy, celebration, meaning, consideration, sexual expression, peace, trust, understanding, joy, rest, relaxation… Right now, having all these needs seems not only OK, but actually beautiful.
Needs I am having seem to be the most alive aspect of me.
The proof of me being alive.
