Neediness for Love

“Let people go by releasing your neediness for their love. 
Love yourself instead!”

David Elliott, Healing

I have often wanted people to give me the love that I felt my parents did not give me. It seems it’s that maternal/paternal wound that often haunts us well into adulthood. We may be grown men or women but we still ache inside for the love we were denied as small children: We want to be told “I love you;” we want to be held and hugged; we want to feel the warmth of a mother’s or father’s love. And, unfortunately, we often project this need (or neediness) onto others.

More often than not, the people we choose to project our need for maternal/paternal love onto are equally as emotionally unavailable to us as our moms and dads were. We subconsciously choose men and women whose personalities resemble those of our parents. Then we proceed in trying to secure from these people the love we were unable to receive from our parents. And nine times out of 10 our success rate is equal to that which we experienced with our parents: Zero.

We then feel neglected, abused and abandoned by these people we have subconsciously chosen to be our surrogate parents. We get angry with them and we blame them when in fact they are really faultless because, like our parents, they never had the ability to give us what we were demanding from them.

After all, WE had a neediness for their love; a love we assumed could replace the love we never received from mom and dad. WE tried to force them to give us the love our parents were never able to give us. And so we have no one to blame aside from ourselves for our inability to manipulate these people.

And we don’t even have to blame ourselves. Most of us didn’t have any idea as to what was really going on within us. We didn’t initially “get it” that these people we had chosen were actually stand-ins for our parents. We didn’t “get it” that we were trying to force them to make part of our failed childhood past into a successful adult present moment. And we didn’t get the fact that we were wanting them to give us the very thing that only we ourselves and God can give us: LOVE.

Now that we understand what’s really going on with us, we can let go of these people by releasing them from our own personal neediness for their love; something that they were never capable of giving us; and something that they were never responsible for giving us. We can then focus on allowing God to love us better and we can work on loving ourselves better.