Your Unmet Needs: The Real Reason You Can’t Stop Self-Sabotaging

Unmet emotional needs are the invisible saboteurs behind some of our most frustrating patterns. 

I'm talking about the stuff where you know exactly what you need to change and you still can't do it. 

In this episode I'm getting into what unmet needs actually are, how they're different from values, and how they've been running my life in ways I didn't see for years. 

I share my own story of years of buying way too much stuff and filling up every room in my house, no matter how many times I tried to stop. I also walk through real examples from my clients and my own family to show you the two signs that a need is in the driver's seat.

Topics covered:

• Why organizing and decluttering never worked for me, and what I was actually trying to solve for
• The difference between needs and values, and why people mix them up
• Two signs an unmet need is running things: behavior you can't stop, and emotional reactions that are way out of proportion to the situation
• How unmet needs show up in sales calls, relationships, and everyday conflict
• Why we lock onto one way to meet a need and act like it's the only option
• Common patterns I see in my clients: overworking, people-pleasing, emotional eating, and relationship conflict
• An exercise to start figuring out your own unmet psychological needs (and when to do this with a therapist or coach, not alone)

Send me a message on LinkedIn if you want to work on your unmet needs together.

Transcript

I have a somewhat embarrassing confession. My house is clutterific chaos, even though I've read books on decluttering and minimalism. I yearn to live a more minimal life, and yet, ten years into my current house, my pantry is too full, my cabinets are overflowing, and for some of my stuff I’ve got 2 or 3 of the same thing. 

For the longest time I thought I just had a clutter problem, like I wasn't organized enough. I was wrong. No matter what I did, it just kept getting worse. Now, today's episode isn't about how to declutter, it's about why we can’t fix these very solvable situations even though we know the steps we’re supposed to take. So if this sounds like you where you've known exactly what you needed to change, and you still couldn't do it... this episode is going to explain why and what to do.

You're listening to This Is How You Think, the show that remodels your mindset. I'm your host Jule Kim. Let's dive in.

I've read books on decluttering, like Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. My friends have come over to help me purge and get rid of things. Every time my husband and I moved from one place to the next, we'd literally donate entire rooms worth of stuff. 

When we moved from our two-bedroom condo into our four bedroom house we live in now, the movers were like, you’re moving into a bigger place, right? Cuz this is a lot. 

I still remember the day after we moved in and I woke up. It was sunny, and our house was empty. I felt so free because here was all this space! I looked around, and I very specifically told myself I'm not gonna do this again - I will not fill up all the space.

But ten years later, here I am. I've somehow managed to reach a state where there's so much stuff I feel like I can't breathe. Now it's not as bad as it used to be in our previous places, because I was able to figure out some things along the way. It took me a long time to realize this wasn't just a decluttering problem, that was way too downstream.

The real issue was that I was over-consuming. I was just buying too much. In any situation I might need something, I wouldn't buy just one, I'd buy three just in case. Because God forbid I don't have something I might need, or even worse that I have to make do. That was the worst feeling in the world for me.

But why? Why was I like this? I thought it was because I needed to be prepared. And that was true a little bit, but it wasn't the real source.

See, I grew up really poor. It's something that people don't really know about me. When my parents moved into the house they still live in today, I was about three, and I remember we had a single mattress on the floor. This was the time of us living on rice, kimchi, and Vienna sausages. We barely had any furniture. My parents thrifted our kitchen dining table and chairs.

We weren't in that house that long when we had a burglary. Whoever they were they came and took what little we had. Like the hubcaps off our car and even our garbage can. It was desperate times.

So I grew up with this perpetual feeling of having nothing. And even after my parents started to do better in life and were actually very comfortably well off, they still watched every single penny, which as a child made me feel like we never had enough.

At some point I finally realized my clutter problem was never about being organized or prepared. It was really about safety, but I didn't know it. I think because I grew up feeling like I didn't have enough, my mind was now trying to compensate by having more stuff so that I could feel safe.

This is what’s called an unmet need. That’s why no amount of Marie Kondo was going to fix that because none of these books ever address anything like that. And let me tell you, the day I learned about unmet needs in one of my coaching programs, it was like everything clicked, because suddenly so much stuff made sense.

In a nutshell, we all have personal needs, things we have to have in order to feel okay. And these aren't the basic survival needs like food and water and shelter. Unmet needs are deeper, like feeling safe, respected, understood, or like you matter, but they can feel survival oriented. Everybody has these needs, but what's really interesting is that they show up in different priority order depending on who you are and how you grew up, especially in your early childhood years.

The crazy thing about these needs is they show up just like how I described my struggle with having too much stuff, where I kept trying to solve the surface problem but it never worked because I wasn’t diagnosing the real issue. Most of us aren't aware of our unmet needs, and the more people I coach the more I’m realizing that much of our recurring challenges often stem from these needs.

And just to be clear, needs and values aren't the same thing even though people use them interchangeably. Needs are not optional. They're already part of who you are today, and you don’t get to choose which needs you have, because they’re shaped by your experiences. Values, on the other hand, are more aspirational. They're about the person you want to be, so these are traits you consciously choose.

If you’re curious, here's a quick way to tell which one you're dealing with. When a need gets met, you often feel relief. But when you act on a value, you feel integrity and alignment, like, yeah, that's the person I want to be. When a need goes unmet, there's a higher level of emotional intensity. But when a value isn’t met, you might feel disappointed but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world.

So back to needs – you might be wondering how do you know when you’ve got one of these needs running amuck? Well, there’s two signs that usually point to a need: 1) whenever you see yourself doing things you know you shouldn't be doing, and you can't stop even though it makes no sense. And 2) there’s a level of emotional intensity or reactivity that seems out of proportion to the situation.

With everything I shared with my clutter and over-buying this is a classic case of sign 1) not being able to stop.

Here’s another example of that from my client files. I’ve had clients who kept asking, "How do I get more leads?" And when I look at their numbers, many of them have plenty of leads but they fail to convert them to a sale. So then I’ll be like, ok, what’s going on. Record your calls so I can listen. 

They give me the recording and that’s when I see they’re talking 80 to 90 percent of the call. I tell them, hey you're talking too much. You literally have no idea what the other person wants and why they want it because you’re just talking about yourself the entire time. No wonder they’re not buying, I wouldn’t either. 

My clients will say oh, I see. Ok, talk less? I say yes, ask more questions and try to talk around 50% of the time, you know, like a real conversation. But then they keep doing the same thing - talking way too much over and over.

At a certain point I finally realized this wasn’t about their skill in sales, even though that’s what it looks like. It’s usually a need for significance or to feel worthy. For them, every sales call turned into a talent show to prove themselves, instead of focusing on the other person and establishing trust. No matter how much I told them to listen more, they couldn’t stop talking about themselves because their need was in the driver’s seat.

Now here’s an example with my mom on sign 2) the emotional reactivity, and this encounter honestly took me years to understand.

So this is back in 2011. My ex and I had visited my parents and we were coming back home. My mom had taken us to the airport, she stopped to buy us Subway sandwiches for lunch. 

She pays, and the cashier gives her the change. My mom looks at the change, notices she was shortchanged, and says so. The cashier doesn’t say anything, and just gives her the rest of the change. My mom gets pissed, and tells the cashier she’s a bad girl. The cashier cops an attitude back, and it escalates. My mom starts raising her voice, the manager comes and tells us to leave. Everyone is staring at us, and I’m super uncomfortable.

My ex is like, sheesh your mom is cray cray. I can’t believe she was yelling about 50 cents.

And that’s probably what everyone else thought. My mom looked completely irrational.

But something about that moment has always stuck with me. I thought I knew why my mom got mad, but I didn't understand the real why until just a few years ago.

What happened is the cashier had corrected the change, but she never acknowledged the mistake, she didn’t say, "oh so sorry about that." She just thrust the change at my mom, it was kind of rude. 

And that’s what triggered my mom. It wasn’t about losing a few cents. My mom has had a lifetime of being dismissed and treated like crap even as a little girl. So in that moment, she was feeling wronged and unseen. That’s when she gets like this, whenever her need to feel seen and heard is triggered, she starts yelling because she needs to be heard. But her reaction looks insane to everyone watching, because they don’t have that context about her. And if my dad tells her to be quiet she just gets louder.

I think a lot of us have seen some version of this play out, right? We watch someone blow up over something that seems trivial or small, or maybe we've been the person who blew up and then afterwards we’re embarrassed and ashamed. But the problem is that’s where our attention stays stuck, and we usually don’t get to the root need so that we can stop reacting like this.

So those are the two signs. 

But there's another thing that happens with needs that I think is just as important. 

Once we find something that meets a need, we tend to behave as if that's the only way to meet the need. It's kinda like saying there's only one route to the grocery store. You take the same road every single time, and if that road is closed, you just don't go. But there are usually multiple ways to get to the grocery store. The same thing is true with your needs. There's almost always more than one way to meet a need.

This reminds me of this TikTok I saw years ago that I still remember. This girl was talking about how she'd broken up with a guy she said was great. And the way she was framing it was all about empowerment and boundaries. She knows what she deserves, she knows her standards, and if he won't bring her flowers then he's not the right person for her.

The guy had explained that he doesn't believe in buying flowers, but he was showing up in other ways. He brought her takeout, and other things to show he cared about her. She ended their relationship anyway.

And she said it was because her dad would always punish her by taking her stuff. So now she was making this relationship about that.

But this was her unmet need, and it wasn't a need for flowers. It was for proof that somebody cared about her enough to give her things instead of taking them away. And the guy was already doing that. But she'd decided flowers was the only way that counted, and was calling it having standards.

And look I get it, needs are really sneaky. I’ve even watched other coaches incorrectly identify their own needs. 

So here are some of the most common patterns I see with my clients, and maybe you recognize yourself in one of them.

There are people who are burned out and can't stop overworking even when it's destroying their health, because of a need to prove themselves or to feel worthy, because they literally don't know who they are if they're not productive.

There are people who say yes to everything, because of a need to feel valued or liked and accepted.

People who can't lose weight no matter what they try, because of a need to feel safe or comfort, by using food as emotional regulation.

I’ve also noticed that men often have a need for respect in their top three, whereas feeling cared for or understood is high on the list for women. That might be why there’s often conflict in relationships between men and women because they prioritize different needs.

Now, the good news is that your needs are satisfiable. For the most part, they don't have to control you forever. I know a lot of us assume or feel like our needs are permanent, like this is just how I'm wired. But that's not true. Once you can accurately identify the need underneath the behavior, you can work on meeting that need directly so that you can make different choices. That’s something a therapist can help you with, and it’s a big part of the work I do as a coach.

But if you want to start today on figuring out what your unmet needs might be, here's the exercise I take my clients through. Before we get into it, this exercise will ask you to think about painful childhood experiences. If you're someone who has significant trauma, please please do this with a therapist or a coach, and not by yourself. Seriously.

So if you’re ready, here’s the exercise.

Think through the most upsetting incidents in your life, especially in your childhood. These are the moments that stand out in your memory, like a heat map. Make a list of these events, and then group them by which ones feel similar. For each group, ask yourself: if you could go back in time and have it turn out positively, what would that have given you? That will be a clue to the need.

Or if you're interested in doing this together with me, send me a message on LinkedIn.

That’s it for this week! If you have questions about any of the stuff I just covered, text the link in the description.

As always, thank you so much for listening. And remember, I believe in you. See you next time.