How To Finally Stop Being Needy

Have an issue with coming across needy and feel like you've tried to hide it in a million different ways and tried all kinds of advice on the internet to make yourself seem more confident or like you don't care?! This episode is for you. <3

https://beacons.ai/justinavictoria

Transcript

 Welcome to  the So Hard podcast. I'm Justina Victoria.  I am a psychosexual expert for men and couples  and today we're going to be chatting about neediness.  So it seems to be quite a hot topic  over the last couple of years I'd say.  A lot of  tools and techniques and methods  out there to help people stop seeming so needy,  stop being perceived as so needy. 

And I have a pretty radically different approach to neediness, that I have not seen thus far.  ANd  I want to share that with you today. We're going to break this down into two pieces. So the first piece is  how  unmet needs create neediness in the first place  and how neediness is exacerbated by destructive narratives. 

So, 

You know me, I'm always bringing it back to childhood. It's what I like to do, because I like people to see  the whole picture. Not just get little  snippets of things and go off that, but I like things to make sense. I like things to be able to be simple.  So we go back to the beginning. If you had parents who didn't meet your connection needs well. 

And for some of you, you may be like, what does that even mean?  So our connection needs are things like feeling seen, feeling heard, feeling like you matter being shown affection, praise physical touch, intimacy, right? That feeling of being at home, knowing where you belong. Having people that you can count on being able to go to your parents when  you know you're in a sticky situation or a difficult situation and knowing that they will be there or that they will  trust you or that they'll take your side.

These are all of the things that we really need as children. We need to we need to feel supported.  Emotionally, and we need to feel connected to the people in our family, in our tribe.  So if that's interrupted or it's not developed as a child with your parents or caregivers,  then we're in a deficit. 

So I want you to think about this in a different frame.  You know, if you, if you have hunger pain, right, it means that you have an unmet need for food because our feelings are always telling us what we need.  But if you're taught  that every time you ask for food,  there's like a negative consequence that comes along with that. 

Then over time you're going to have an unsafe or painful association to, Food, to the need of eating food, to the feeling of hunger,  and  then you start to repress that need.  What happens is, is you become more hungry, right?  So if you had hunger pain,  but you believed that asking for food was shameful or wrong,  then you'd repress your need for food. 

And if you continue repressing your need for food You become more hungry and you start to become starved.  And then when someone is eating in front of you, you're telling yourself that  you shouldn't be hungry.  You don't want to look hungry in front of them.  You don't want them to know that you're hungry. 

So you get further and further away from meeting your need of eating.  You become more starved and more desperate over time  and  you have this story now that you've also created this narrative.  So not only do we not get our need met growing up for food, but also as an adult, we're perpetuating that unmet need because it was never modeled to us, right?

We were never taught  when you're hungry, just eat. What we were taught instead was when you're hungry, you should feel bad about it. When you're hungry, you're inconveniencing somebody. When you're hungry, you're wrong, you're bad there's something wrong with you, you're defective et cetera.  So we grow up into an adult who believes that eating is  like something that's going to have consequences.

It's going to get us further away from other things that we need, like connection.  So we repress that, but you can only repress it for so long before the body kicks into, you know, hyperdrive and causes you so much pain that you have to eat something, right? So  you  get a meal, right? You eat it very quickly  and you still feel hungry afterwards  and then you go back to starving  because  You never feed yourself enough  because you think it's wrong.

You think there's something wrong with eating.  Think it means something about you  if you're hungry.  And this is the same relationship that a lot of people have to their connection needs, that there's something wrong with them. If they, If they need touch, if they're starved for affection, if they're starved for intimacy, for spending time with somebody, for a hug and  here we are, right?

We have this  story, this modeling that we experienced as children.  About what it means when we asked to get our connection needs met  or what happened  when our connection needs were met or not met, right?  And we bring that into adulthood with us  and we continue to believe in that story that  There's something wrong with me.

I need more connection. I need more than most people. When in reality you just never got enough, which is why you're hungry.  And so  then there becomes this  second piece, right, the narrative,  and that's where  we kind of double down on.  The connection, right? So when we do get that meal, we do get that bit of connection. 

It's like my precious, right? From Lord of the Rings. It's like, I need to,  I need to protect this. I need to keep this. I need to figure out how to get this to stay, to keep it going to whatever I need to do in order to just not rock the boat, not allow this person to leave, abandon or reject me. And we have all these  strange behaviors that come from this, right?

So one thing you may have heard me say in the past is that your thinking, feeling, and behaving is based on the story that you're telling yourself or the story that is programmed in you and the one that you believe, right? So if you believe that you don't get enough connection, that you're needy and people go away when you do want to connect that you're off putting, that you're going to be rejected, that you're going to be abandoned, that you're going to be cheated on. 

We will think, feel, and behave in alignment with that.  So this is really what creates It's what people call a self fulfilling prophecy,  thinking, feeling, and behaving in alignment with the narrative that we are carrying with us. So if we believe that we're going to be cheated on, right, then,  then something very interesting happens, right? 

So you're either repressing the need or. Asking for the need to get met  or trying to get the need met in a manipulative way.  And the manipulation that I am talking about here when I use the word manipulation, I mean that the nervous system is coming up with maladaptive strategies in order to get needs met without alerting the person that you're trying to get the need met through or with.

So.  The first piece is, you know, if we repress our needs, right, we continue starving. And then we have to pretend like we're not hungry. We have to pretend like we're not needing intimacy or connection, right? So we're repressing, we're stuffing that down. That never works. We're energetic beings. So people can always perceive and feel whether or not you are hungry for connection or not. 

And then we have  the tangibly asking for needs to get met. But if we're running that program that people don't want to meet our needs, or I'm going to be cheated on, or, you know I'm going to be rejected in some way, the way that we ask for the need gets interrupted.  And that interruption looks like.

People pleasing. So you might say, Oh, Hey, you know what? I would love to spend time later together. But you know, it's, it's not really that big of a deal. You know, if you're busy or whatever, like it's totally okay.  Or we may go the opposite end of the spectrum, which is like very, very rigid. Like I need you to do X, Y, and Z.

I need you to not ever speak to your guy friend ever again, or I need you to spend every Thursday evening with me, right?  It's like we can be kind of controlling or demanding from this place. We can see how the need is still not  able to get met because now we are not either tangibly asking and following through with the need or we're being so rigid that we're not taking into account what the other person might need in order to feel good in this dynamic or in this relationship. 

And then manipulating, right? This is where we try to get the need met without having to ask for it or to signal to the other person. Like we're trying to get the need met of connection under the radar without them noticing that they're connecting with us or they're giving us what we want, right? And so this looks like for example, let's say you're trying to make your partner jealous, right?

Like, you know what, I can't hang out tonight because I'm actually going to go out with so and so. And yeah, maybe we could hang out, like, tomorrow or something. So it's kind of like you're playing it cool, but you're also doing something that you know would make you jealous.  to them in hopes that it will close the gap.

So we create all of these maladaptive or manipulative strategies. Again, this is subconscious. We're not doing this on purpose. In order to close the gap, to create more connection, to create more closeness, right? In order to sort of freak that person out. Or make them feel the way that we feel, like starve them a little bit, cause them to want to come closer.

But the problem is, is that not everyone is starved for connection.  So when we use these strategies, it doesn't necessarily compute into the same experience that we have, right? So if somebody felt like their connection needs were really abundantly met, if you were going to skip out on them one evening you know, to try to make them jealous, it likely would not work.

And these strategies never work anyway. In fact, I have actually tried. Every strategy I could ever find on the internet  for neediness to see if there's something out there that could really conquer this within myself, within my clients and all I ever found were strategies that created more starvation. 

In fact  it's kind of interesting that I had planned to do this topic. Today because I had a friend text me a link to a Tik Tok of a woman who is like, I don't know if she's giving like dating advice or what, but  she essentially, I watched a couple of her quick videos and they were all very much like,  you just need to play the part, right? 

You know, if he asks you what you want,  avoid the question.  Don't tell him what you want because then he'll take advantage of that, right? He doesn't need to know all this kind of like crazy stuff. And I'm just like, what  is not what a relationship is built on. A healthy relationship is built on trust, validating each other's feelings, meeting each other's needs and respecting each other's boundaries. 

And also being very aware of the narratives that are causing us to think, feel, and behave out of alignment with the destination that we want that relationship to go.  So so if you ever struggle with feeling needy, right, and maybe you feel like you've tried everything to get beyond this, to change, to hide,  well,  even though it feels like you're doing something different.

Right? All these different strategies you employ,  they all lead to the same outcome, which is not getting the need met. So how do we actually get our need for connection met without coming across needy?  This is going to sound really interesting, I think, to a lot of you because it's going to be sort of paradoxical,  which most of the work that I do.

Is quite paradoxical. That is that we just own it.  We own where we're at and what we need as something that is very matter of fact.  And then we ask for that need to get met  in a matter of fact way.  So how do we do this? What, what, how, how can we kind of How can we decipher this? How can we understand this?

Right? Because I'm sure that you have tried to not come across needy when you're asking to get your needs met.  And what it comes down to is the relationship that we have with the need.  Let's go back to the example of hunger.  If you're hungry and you're feeling hunger pains, it's very matter of fact. You just go, I'm hungry.

I have to eat.  And you just eat.  If you had an impaired relationship to your hunger, right? One that was of shame, one that was of, you know  fear, one that was of, of consequence, right? If you're, if you eat or you're hungry, there's a consequence to that.  Well, then you getting that need met is going to be really compromised and it's going to be very, it's going to come from a very desperate place. 

So, if  your relationship to hunger is very matter of fact, there's no story around it, there's no consequence of being hungry, it's just like, I'm hungry, you just need to eat something. Period. End of story. This is the same relationship that we work to cultivate when it comes to our connection needs. That we see our connection needs as valid.

We see our connection needs as normal. We release the shame around them. We just make them very black and white matter of fact. So when we tangibly ask somebody to meet our needs, we don't go,  you better meet this need for me.  We don't go,  so like, if it's good for you, like maybe we could like,  Hang out and like, you know, like I could really like use a hug and like to chat with somebody but like, you know If you're busy, it's like really not a big deal.

We don't do either of those things. We just go hey, I really love to hang out I'm I'm really needing some quality time with somebody  And I would really appreciate if we could spend some time together. Like when are you free?  You see how that doesn't It doesn't force somebody to do something. It also doesn't  let somebody off the hook, right, and being like, I'm not important.

You shouldn't make me important either. It's just really matter of fact, Hey, I need this thing.  Could you meet that need? Are you available for that?  Very very matter of fact, and if that person says, Oh no, I'm busy or whatever, like. Okay, no problem. And you move on to another person.  And this is the following through that's really important.

We have to work at meeting our needs.  If you're hungry, you don't just go, well,  there's not anything to eat in the house and you know what? I just, it's too much work. I'm just going to skip eating.  No, you have to get up and go get something to eat. Like that's just the way this works. And it's the same thing with your connection needs. 

What you'll find is that the more you start to meet your connection needs, even 1 percent at a time, the more full your cup becomes, the less needy you become.  And it's a self feeding cycle. In addition to that, with  Repairing the relationship that you have with that need to begin with, right? So we start to see connection as just very matter of fact, I just have to spend time with somebody.

I just have to spend time with my partner.  And see how that is not being run by a, I have to be with this person because I need to monitor what they're doing so that they don't reject me, so that they don't abandon me, so that they don't cheat on me.  And it's also not, I need this person to do this, otherwise I'm going to break up with them. 

Very rigid,  right? It, it allows that person to have room to be themselves, right? So the people pleasing version of that gives complete autonomy to somebody else. The rigid version gives no autonomy to somebody else. We just want to be in the middle, just very matter of fact.  If you ask somebody for something to eat because you were hungry,  you wouldn't feel shame over that because everybody has to eat and they're all eating three times a day.

And we have just a regular neutral relationship to that.  So we're just going, Oh, you eat, I eat, we need to eat. You got something to eat. Yeah, sure. Here you go.  But with connection, it's like, Oh my God, I'm the only person. And on this earth, who needs to connect with somebody else?  It's just simply not true.

We're hardwired for connection. We need co regulation. Our nervous systems are literally hardwired  for tribe. We are pack animals.  So we must get those connection needs met.  So let's simplify  today's episode. Okay.  All you have to do  is notice the relationship that you have with your connection needs. 

And whether or not it's one that perpetuates  starvation,  or it's just very matter of fact, black and white, I just need to connect, I'm gonna go do that.  And whether or not you have a destructive narrative that perpetuates starvation, And creates a self fulfilling prophecy, right, of, of starvation. Things like, I don't matter, nobody likes me, I'm gonna be alone forever, my partner's gonna leave, my partner's gonna cheat on me she doesn't like me anyway, etc.

I'm not good enough.  Those narratives have to be rewired. Because your thinking, feeling, and behaving It stems from the story that you tell yourself, the story that you believe about yourself.  So that narrative has to be in alignment with what it is that you actually want to experience.  So I hope you enjoyed this episode today.

I like to talk about things that I feel most people are not talking about, especially when it comes to men.  If you are interested in some of my offerings, I have my boys club where I do deep dive into  relationship dynamics, masculine energy, seduction, sexuality and eroticism, healthy relationships and insecure attachment and nervous system regulation and really everything that you could ever possibly need or want to learn as a man.

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