Needs vs Strategies
Needs vs. Strategies
Part I: The Problem – Alienation from Ourselves
Today I want to talk about three books and why they helped me describe a topic I have been extremely passionate about: The Art of Love, Nonviolent Communication, and The Body Keeps the Score. The topic is Needs vs. Strategies.
What do I mean by that?
Strategies are requests, desires, wants, and “solutions” to specific actions by specific people. Needs, on the other hand, contain no reference to any particular action; they exist regardless of who or what is available. Some examples of needs are rest, understanding, support, honesty, and meaning.
This topic is so fundamentally hard to talk about, but it transforms everything. I am going to attempt to codify my understanding through this writing. Why? Because strategies disconnect us from our needs.
Stop right there. Some of us can’t even name our needs. We live outside ourselves—and by that I mean we live on external directives rather than from our internal knowledge and needs. We become alienated from our natural state.
All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments are the result of our attention being focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels. Our thinking becomes centered on dehumanizing one another with labels and judgments. Judgments, criticisms, diagnoses, and interpretations of others are all alienated expressions of our needs.
But everything would change if we listened to the feelings and needs behind the message.
Part II: Trauma, Survival, and Strategies
We have an estrangement from feelings and get stuck utilizing survival strategies to assert our needs. This is both an inability to connect with our needs and an inability to assume responsibility for our needs. We put all our energy into protecting ourselves, developing whatever survival strategies we can. We may repress our feelings; we may get furious and plot revenge. We may decide to become so powerful and successful that nobody can ever hurt us again.
Many behaviors that are classified as psychiatric problems—including some obsessions, compulsions, and panic attacks, as well as most self-destructive behaviors—started out as strategies for self-protection.
Biologically, we need to attach to someone. Whether that is a loving and caring someone or a distant, insensitive, rejecting, or abusive someone, we will develop some way to get our needs met. And when your source of survival is also your source of fear, you are stuck with “fright without solution.”
In The Body Keeps the Score it says: “It is much more productive to see aggression or depression, arrogance or passivity as learned behaviors: somewhere along the line, the patient came to believe that he or she could survive only if he or she was tough, invisible, or absent, or that it was safer to give up.”
These adaptations will continue until we feel safe and integrate all the parts of ourselves that are stuck fighting or warding off trauma. Coping takes its toll. For many, it is safer to hate themselves than to risk their relationship by expressing anger or acting out.
They survive by denying, ignoring, and splitting off large chunks of reality: they forget, they suppress, they numb. They reconfigure their minds to live with the worst. They develop defensive strategies to help them survive.
What is unknowable causes anxiety. People need the illusion that everything can be known. Even if in this illusion they are the most hated, it feels safer than the chaos of the unknown.
Part III: Turning Inward – Naming Needs and Affirming Worth
When we live away from our needs within ourselves, our lives become limited by external and alien perspectives, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on our needs.
But when we begin to live from within outward—in touch with the power within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us—then we begin to be responsible to ourselves.
We begin to recognize our deepest feelings. We give up, out of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness that so often seems like the only alternative. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.
To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced.
It requires a concern to know not only external reality but also internal reality—the reality of my needs, feelings, aspirations, and motives—so that I am not a stranger or a mystery to myself. The feeling that joy and fulfillment are my natural birthright.
Part IV: The Affirmations – Owning My Existence
Once you’re able to say:
I am not here on earth to live up to someone else’s expectations; my life belongs to me.
Each person is the owner of his or her life; no one is here on earth to live up to my expectations.
I have a right to exist.
I am of high value to myself.
I have a right to honor my needs and wants, to treat them as important.
I am lovable.
I am admirable.
I will usually be liked and respected by the people I like and respect.
I should deal with others fairly and justly, and others should deal with me fairly and justly.
I deserve to be treated courteously and with respect by everyone.
If people treat me discourteously or disrespectfully, it is a reflection on them, not on me. It is only a reflection on me if I accept their treatment of me as right.
If someone I like does not return my feeling, it may be disappointing or even painful, but it is not a reflection on my personal worth.
No other individual or group has the power to determine how I will think and feel about myself.
I trust my mind.
I see what I see and know what I know.
I am better served by knowing what is true than by making myself “right” at the expense of the facts.
If I persevere, I can understand the things I need to understand.
The more conscious I am of that which bears on my interests, values, needs, and goals, the better my life will work.
To remain effective, I need to keep expanding my knowledge; learning needs to be a way of life. The better I know and understand myself, the better the life I can create. Self-examination is an imperative of a fulfilled existence.
At the most fundamental level, I am for myself.
At the most fundamental level, I accept myself.
Part V: Responsibility and Aloneness
I accept the reality of my thoughts, even when I cannot endorse them and would not choose to act on them; I do not deny or disown them.
I can accept my feelings and emotions without necessarily liking, approving of, or being controlled by them; I do not deny or disown them.
I can accept that I have done what I have done, even when I regret or condemn it. I do not deny or disown my behavior.
I accept that what I think, feel, or do is an expression of myself, at least in the moment it occurs. I am not bound by thoughts, feelings, or actions I cannot sanction, but neither do I evade their reality or pretend they are not mine.
I accept the reality of my problems, but I am not defined by them. My problems are not my essence. My fear, pain, confusion, or mistakes are not my core.
Once you own that:
I am responsible for my existence.
I am responsible for the achievement of my desires.
I am responsible for my choices and actions.
I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my work and other activities.
I am responsible for the level of consciousness I bring to my relationships.
I am responsible for my behavior with other people—co-workers, associates, customers, spouse, children, friends.
I am responsible for how I prioritize my time.
I am responsible for the quality of my communications.
I am responsible for my personal happiness.
I am responsible for choosing or accepting the values by which I live.
I am responsible for raising my self-esteem; no one else can give me self-esteem.
In the ultimate sense, I accept my aloneness. That is, I accept that no one is coming to make my life right, or save me, or redeem my childhood, or rescue me from the consequences of my choices and actions. In specific issues, people may help me, but no one can take over primary responsibility for my existence. Just as no one else can breathe for me, no one else can take over any of my other basic life functions, such as earning the experience of self-efficacy and self-respect.
Part VI: Healing, Neuroplasticity, and Self-Care
In order to play, mate, and nurture , the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. We must identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others.
Drop low-performing strategies and replace them with tested alternatives. Once I could name my needs, I became aware of my strategies—how I cope with the fear of my needs not being met.
I learned to listen for feelings, to express my needs, to accept answers that I didn’t always want to hear. I learned to grow, to accept, to love, to be fulfilled.
The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions. Everything else is secondary. Psychological problems occur when our internal signals don’t work, when our maps don’t lead us where we need to go, when we are too paralyzed to move, when our actions do not correspond to our needs, or when our relationships break down.
The brain is formed in a “use-dependent manner.” This is another way of describing neuroplasticity, the relatively recent discovery that neurons that “fire together, wire together.” This creates the communal, spiritual, and historical contexts that shape our lives.
As we begin to re-experience a visceral reconnection with the needs of our bodies, there is a brand new capacity to warmly love the self. We experience a new quality of authenticity in our caring, which redirects our attention to our health, our diets, our energy, and our time management. This enhanced care for the self arises spontaneously and naturally, not as a response to a “should.”
We are able to experience an immediate and intrinsic pleasure in self-care. The body needs to be restored to a baseline state of safety and relaxation from which it can mobilize to take action in response to real danger. Building up internal resources fosters safe access to sensations and emotions. Feeling the pleasure of taking effective action restores a sense of agency and a sense of being able to actively defend and protect ourselves.
Part VII: The Call – From Survival to Liberation
When we don’t know how to directly and clearly express what we need, we make analyses. Criticism and diagnosis get in the way. Pain can get in the way of our ability to hear clearly.
Translate any message into an expression of a need. Understand the pain.
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