Five Powerful Solutions for Neediness

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My previous post was on the stiff price of adult neediness and dependency. This follow-up post is on how to avoid this inordinate cost. And frankly, it’s not that easy.

Anything that’s become habitual to you—as in, a well-established habit—is already an essential part of your innermost programming. And similar to obsolete psychological defenses, such programming doesn’t change on its own. By definition, it’s largely unconscious, automatic, and unthinking.

If your outmoded programming is to be altered, two criteria must be met beforehand. First, you have to become aware of it, recognizing it for what it is. And second, you have to be sufficiently motivated to overcome the oppressive defenses that have enabled it to endure. Even then you may need some professional help to change stubbornly resistant programming.

For most of us, our defenses can be traced back to childhood. This was a time when you felt especially vulnerable to various outside influences—whether immediately from your family or neighborhood, or more generally from your educational, economic, religious, or cultural surroundings.

These contingent factors constitute a necessary qualification, since they’ve typically been omitted from the many articles written on overcoming excess neediness and dependency.

However, out of consciousness, in growing up you couldn’t help but develop all sorts of self-protective mechanisms to safeguard your welfare—or whatever you perceived as your welfare.

These defenses may now be woefully out of date, yet they’ll continue to control your behavior until you’re made aware of their inappropriateness. Originally, they may have been adaptive. But presently they’re dysfunctional, operating as impediments to your growth and wisdom.

The term trauma has become so trendy that it may seem exaggerated to use it to describe the various fear-evoking circumstances that occurred during your upbringing. Nonetheless, anything that at the time felt mortally threatening to your safety and security can be depicted as, indeed, having been traumatic for you, the child—quite regardless of whether it was.

Getting Beyond the Defenses Now Impairing Your Most Intimate Relationship

Remnants of normal childhood neediness reflect areas of your personality that never “matured” to the point that you can consistently feel secure within yourself. So each of the remedies below involves comfortably becoming less dependent on others—most notably your partner (assuming you’re in a long-term, committed relationship).

1. Cultivate greater patience—both with yourself and your partner.

When you were growing up, if you wanted or needed something, you had to have it right away. Your ability to deal with the frustrations of waiting was at best limited, at worst non-existent.

But now can you realize that lacking patience will lead to acting-out behavior likely to irritate your spouse? If so, you’ll be in a good position to discipline yourself into achieving the patience never parentally taught to you earlier.

Additionally, if you’ve depended on your partner to handle something because you hadn’t yet developed that skill set, can you kindly give yourself as much time as needed to begin manifesting this capability? Doing so will raise your self-esteem, as well as help you feel more self-reliant.

2. Become less critical of your partner—and yourself.

Few things jeopardize the well-being of intimate relationships more than repeatedly judging your most significant other to their face.

Not only are frequent adverse judgments likely to offend and alienate them (i.e., make you an unsafe person to be with, or confide in), but genuine emotional intimacy isn’t possible if you can’t be trusted to respond empathetically when they’re divulging their flaws and shortcomings.

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Moreover, if you’re constantly criticizing your behavior, that practice is likely to alienate you from yourself, too. Plus, such self-negativity is hardly likely to endear yourself to your partner either. Much research has confirmed that we’re far more attracted to people on good terms with themselves than to those who routinely disparage themselves as “unacceptable.”

3. Make alone time more of a priority, since being by yourself fosters introspection, a vital prerequisite for productive change.

It may be that you’ve experienced being alone as tantamount to loneliness, rejection, or abandonment. If so, you may have labored to fill this inner void with outward stimulation and companionship. And that would hamper you from cultivating a more positive relationship with yourself.

Only rarely may you have considered who you are apart from your ties to others. Frankly, that may just have felt too scary. Thus, you may now need to confront your only dimly recognized fears about the fundamental acceptability of your identity. Here you’ll need to allow yourself the time and space to reflect on the legitimacy of your fundamental nature—with all its inquisitiveness, interests, and ideals.

You must reassess your natural predilections as nothing you need to hide, whether from yourself, your partner, or anyone else.

4. Develop a forgiving, self-compassionate, and loving attitude toward yourself.

That challenging feat is generally accomplished by making a positive self-connection your highest priority. Without being oblivious to the feelings and needs of others (specifically, your partner’s), demonstrate greater honor and respect for your preferences—unashamedly providing yourself with the nurturing you didn’t experience enough of when growing up.

It’s high time to learn to depend on yourself—and, unassisted, be enough for yourself. And that’s tenable only after you grasp that as a grown-up it’s no one’s responsibility but your own to confidently address your needs and desires.

Remember that although we all have a healthy need to feel attached to others, it’s all too easy for our external attachments to degrade into a much less healthy dependency. Ask whether your relationship with yourself would benefit from moderating your level of attachment to those around you—most significantly, your partner.

5. Gradually, think your way to unconditional self-acceptance—rather than supremacy over others.

Since we all harbor innate limitations, your frailties hardly need to define you as inadequate. While striving for excellence in selected professional pursuits is laudatory, indiscriminately demanding perfection of yourself to feel good enough is unnecessary—and defeatist.

Returning to my introduction, if your original caretakers noticed, appreciated, or validated you only when your performance was superlative, you may have internalized the perfectionist criteria laid on you. This is why the ultimate solution to fully accept yourself is to replace their far-fetched or inhumane standards with your own more charitable ones.

Being made to feel “just average” (or less) may over the years have gotten linked to feelings of incompetence, leaving you with serious problems trusting your judgment. In turn, your worrisome self-doubt could have led you to lean on your partner to make decisions for you, rather than developing the self-assurance to comfortably make them on your own.

Such dependency will handicap you from making decisions autonomously—particularly when they’re about deciding what’s personally best for you, independent of anyone else’s opinions or biases.

You certainly don’t need to ask your partner’s permission to do things that don’t affect them. For the sake of your relationship, as well as your own, you need to see yourself as their equal, with your undeniable strengths.

After all, your partner isn’t, can’t, and shouldn’t, be your parent. It’s you who must now caringly “parent” the self-doubting child that lives inside you, healing their old wounds by continuing to “message” them lovingly and reassuringly.

And once you’re able to come into your adult authority, your accepting yourself is now your choice alone. So even if you can’t reach the heights you aspire to, that’s no justification to emotionally censure yourself. Just as it benefits you to be kind to others, being kind to yourself is intimately related to living a happier, more gratifying, and fulfilling life.

© 2023 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.