The Healthy Value in Learning to “Need” Other People

“If it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true.” –Shunryu Suzuki

Being human, we must accept that we need others. Paradoxically, we must also learn not to need others. With healthy parent-child attachments, there is room for both dynamics to exist and exist simultaneously. The child can reach out for and receive comfort from an important other when needed. And the child is supported in her natural impulses to find ways to meet her own needs competently. It can be a fairly seamless dance between the two polarities when parents are tuned in to the child.

With children who had to manage complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), that early seamless dance not only did not occur, any response to the child’s needs went sideways and upside down. The balance between needing and not needing tipped toward the child learning not to need anything. Ever. With CPTSD, not needing was not about feeling healthy, self-sufficient, and competent. Not needing became about surviving without much support.

Tipped towards “not needing”

To survive not having consistent, healthy support, these children learned: “Get small, fly under the radar, take care of yourself and your own needs. Be subservient and pleasant. Your dilemmas, preferences, and boundaries are of no interest to anyone.”

As I wrote in a previous post, these are people who can become uber competent, responsible, and ultimately, leaders and initiators. They look “good” and successful. In many ways, they are.

But, because their parents were preoccupied, depressed, substance-addicted, personality disordered (often narcissistic), abusive, or entirely absent, they had to turn to themselves to provide any certainty of having their needs met. And, they learned that by not needing anything, they might, at least, be acceptable to the adults from whom they sought a scintilla of connection.

They also learned it was emotionally dangerous and precarious to need much because of the certainty of being let down. Repeatedly. And then to have to face, each time, the painful wince of the humiliation and powerlessness of not mattering to an important parent. “Better to be not caught out,” they tell themselves. “Shut down needing anything, figure it out for yourself or go without.” This continues into adulthood.

Psychotherapy has different words describing our strategies to stay in connection without needing – fawn, codependent, and people-pleaser. At times, they’re invoked as if they carry a malodorous scent of dysfunction. I see them as rather brilliant coping strategies ensuring our existence through trauma. It’s the best we could come up with as children, and they worked in some fashion if you’re still hear to talk about it.

Fawn, codependent, and people-pleaser are all words that describe a certain way we check ourselves at the door, focus on being pleasant, subservient, and of no trouble in order to stay in connection while keeping ourselves small, uninteresting, and safe.

Adults with CPTSD understand the half of the paradox that teaches us not to need anything; be self-reliant and self-sufficient. In the next post, I’ll explore more about the aspects of this dynamic, and how to shift this balance to enjoy healthy, mutual relating.