Set Yourself Free from Emotional Want

Want is the root of all the emotional evil we perpetrate against ourselves. Everything we want that is out of the scope of our having poisons our souls.

Think about all of the people you have ever wanted to possess. Sometimes we meet someone and we immediately fall into infatuation with him or her. Or sometimes we have a good friend and we become too attached. We start depending on her more and we become increasingly clingy. Or we even start wanting him to become more than a friend and we begin fantasizing about being lovers.

Sooner or later our emotional neediness takes us to new heights of want and despair when our friend begins to afford us less time, or it clearly becomes evident that this relationship is never going to enter the realm of romance.

As reality shatters fantasy/denial, we find ourselves sinking deeper into self-loathing and depression. We feel unlovable and worthless. Why? Because we have pinned all of our hopes on having someone or something we want so much, but clearly cannot have.

Wanting what we cannot have is a total losing proposition. For codependents, it’s a two-edged sword. When we want a friend to become a lover—and the want isn’t reciprocal—it has nothing to do with us being unlovable and everything to do with our own misplaced emotional needs.

Unfortunately for many codependents, when we want something we aren’t willing to let go of that want or accept the fact that it’s misplaced. We are desperate to have the circle of our want to fit into the square of reality. And we won’t give up until we have shipwrecked the relationship—and ourselves—on the shores of misery.

Once we reach those shores, we then often pierce ourselves with the other side of the sword. Suddenly, we want all sorts of material things to fill up the empty whole left behind my our failed emotional wanting of another person. So we over-indulge in food or shopping, for example, to fill up the waste barrel of want that has our spirits drowning inside of it.

If this sounds familiar to you, then let’s look at addressing our misplaced wants. First off, is it bad or wrong to fall in love with a friend? No, it’s not. What’s wrong is our demand that the friendship become romantic and our inability to accept the fact that it may not work out the way we want. If we find ourselves becoming romantically attached to a friend, we need to be aware that we cannot control the friendship and force it into being what we “think” we want. We instead need to be open-minded. We need to be able to accept that the relationship may never be anything more than a friendship and then we need to enhance this awareness by being increasingly grateful for this friend. We don’t want to lose a friend to misplaced emotionally neediness.

If we find ourselves becoming too emotionally needy on a friend, we also need to heighten our awareness. Asking ourselves “What’s this really about?” will help. Is it about the fact that we are refusing to love and care for ourselves. Are we increasingly wanting this friend to rescue us the same way a child wants a parent to rescue him/her? Are we trying to make him/her responsible for us and then feeling betrayed and unloved when they refuse? Are we pushing our needs on him/her so much that they are now avoiding us?

If we are doing any of these things, we need to stop. We are sabotaging our own happiness and our friendship by demanding emotional attention that is beyond our right to demand. Once we stop demanding what we want and cannot have, we can turn to our Higher Power for help and we can start taking ownership of our own needs again. We can let our friend off the hook. In doing so, we avoid sabotaging the relationship and we avoid the need to further medicate away our emotional pain through material things.

Give the want and the pain to your Higher Power. Realize that there are many things we want that we just cannot have—and that most of those wants eventually fade away into nothingness. Too often what today we think we will die if we don’t have, tomorrow we don’t give a flip about. So give the desire, or the want to your Higher Power and ask that Power to help you find balance through acceptance and through letting go of whatever is unattainable. Set yourself free from the poison of emotional want!