emotional-needs

Your arms ache to hold someone -- you move in slow motion from one hug to the nextso you won't jostle the warm feeling off your shouldersbefore the next hug comes your way.Your heart feels hollow -- that emptiness screams like an addiction to be filledeven if it means doing hurtful, selfish thingsto get a fix."I understand,"I tell him. "BecauseI've been lonely, too.

We grow in part by confessing our faults and weaknesses to each other (James 5:16; Eccl. 4:10). If we are always being strong and without needs, we are not growing, and we are setting ourselves up for a very dangerous fall.

You aren't alive if you aren't in need.

As a child you received messages from your family to keep your mouth shut and remain invisible. You also learned to become invisible in order to protect yourself. You no longer need to be invisible to survive. If people do not notice you, they may not abuse you, but they also will not love you or attend to your needs. Make yourself and your needs known.

Whatever it was her father wanted, Emma did not know how to provide it. She felt confused by what he did, and imagined the problem was a lack in her, rather than him. And there was something

when a child is ridiculed, shamed, hurt or ignored when she experiences and expresses a legitimate dependency need, she will later be inclined to attach those same affective tones to her dependency. Thus, she will experience her own (and perhaps others_) dependency as ridiculous, shameful, painful, or denied. - Dependency in the Treatment of complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders 2001Authors: Kathy Steele, Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis

Denial of one's need for others is the most common type of defense against bonding. If people come from a situation, whether growing up or later in life, where good, safe relationships were not available to them, they learn to deny that they even want them. Why want what you can't have? They slowly get rid of their awareness of the need.