The Fine Line Between Needing and Neediness

I’m learning that there is a fine line between the desire to lose yourself in someone and the desire to simply be with someone. So, how do we know when we’ve crossed over the line?

We all have the need to be with others, and sometimes that need extends beyond casual friendship. The need can be for someone we feel safe with, someone we can open-up to and talk honestly with, someone we can laugh and cry with; and, ultimately, someone we can simply rest-in knowing that we are always safe and cared for in the arms of that person. The great comfort here is in our knowing that this particular person accepts us and we accept him/her unconditionally. There are no strings attached and thus no need to manipulate each other. And it’s not a matter of getting lost in each other, but rather, in supporting each other.

The sort of “need” I just described is very different from feeling desperately “needy” for someone. And “desperate” may be the key word here. Neediness is driven by a deep ingrained feeling of anxious desperation. In fact, the feeling is so strong that it has the physical power of a horse. In some ways, when we are engulfed in this deep sense of neediness, we may find ourselves physically feeling like an old-fashioned buggy that’s being dragged mercilessly by our desperate neediness (the horse).

As a result, we find ourselves engaged in codependent crazy behavior as we try to calm the great anxiety that is raging within us. We may find ourselves focused on one person in particular—it doesn’t have to be anyone we even know well—and suddenly this person is our lone obsession. We see his face everywhere we look. We hear her voice round every corner we turn. And so we race to hook-up with him or her: We call, we text, we stop by his/her place of work or by his/her home, uninvited. We are driven by an obsessive-compulsive desire to end our desperate anxiety through burying ourselves in this person—this poor, poor person! And nothing can stop us, short of out-and-out rejection by this person.

Should they reject our advances toward taking them hostage, we may immediately feel abandoned, betrayed and less than good enough. Those feelings replace our desperate neediness. The fire is out. But we’re not feeling better. In fact, we may next find ourselves feeling like the biggest fools on earth. Why? Because the other person’s rejection of our need to smother them was like cold water in our faces. It brought us back to reality as it doused the flames of our needy desperation.

At this point, multiple feelings may surface. We may feel like an idiot (and thus be angry with ourselves for falling off the emotionally stable wagon one more time), and we may beat ourselves up for a while. I’d recommend adding some compassion and kindness into the mix. After all, it was a learning experience that will hopefully lead us to fewer and fewer emotions-run-amok buggy rides.

Once a feeling of balance and relief arise inside of us, we can always make things right with the person we attempted to take hostage by apologizing to him/her. We can then sit down and journal about our experience. In the process, we can ask our Higher Power to help us to be aware of, embrace and walk with our needy feelings in the future, instead of allowing ourselves to be controlled by them.

And we can also ask Higher Love to make us ever aware of the difference between needing someone and being needy with someone: The difference being that overpowering feeling of desperation or desperate anxiousness. It’s the key. It tells us that this isn’t just about the need for intimacy. It’s about the need to lose ourselves in someone else as a means of emotionally medicating. If we can be aware of that feeling, we will know that it is about our need to take someone hostage and enmesh in them as a means of running from ourselves.

Once we have that awareness, instead of emotionally stalking someone, we can ask our Higher Power to help us sit with our desperate, needy feeling until it passes through us. We can then free the feeling in a healthy way, which will then place us one step closer to experiencing true intimacy in an equally healthy way.