Becoming Less 'Needy'

Neediness is both a feeling and an action.

We all get the feeling at times but we behave differently in response to the feeling.

So the first step in becoming less needy is to give yourself permission to feel needy.  Neediness comes from a desire to be loved and a fear of rejection. These are core parts of being human. Refusing to allow yourself to have these feelings is rejecting your own vulnerable humanity. People who refuse to acknowledge these feelings in themselves can have a tendency to act them out - perhaps by being rejecting, arrogant, demanding or manipulative. It isn't pretty.

The next step is to get a sense of whether your feelings of neediness are out of porportion to the threat in the situation. It might be perfectly reasonable to feel needy if your partner rarely wants to spend time with you and repeatedly compares you unfavourably to a co-worker. This is where you get a chance to test the quality of your friendships. If you ask genuine friends for their honest opinion, they will tell you when you are being unreasonable. If you decide that your needs are reasonable then ask in a straightforward way. Don't drop hints. Don't use it as a test. Just ask directly with kindness and self respect.

'Our relationship is really important to me, I know that you are very busy but I am missing you. Can we come up with a plan so we get to spend more time together?'


Accept that sometimes others can't meet our legitimate needs. But if it is a repetitive pattern, you may need to set some boundaries. For example:

'This is the second time you have cancelled a date at the last minute because you needed to work late with Kelly. I understand that you are busy and under a lot of pressure at the moment but if you don't give me enough notice of the change in plans it is hard for me to make other arrangements. Are you able to either keep your commitments to me or give me more notice of a change in plan? If not, then I think it might be best for me to make my own plans for the weekend without you.If we both happen to be free then we can see each other. I don't want to do that, as I really enjoy being with you but I can't think of another option. '

If, however, you come to the conclusion that your expectations of the other person are unreasonable then you may need to accept the needy feelings without acting on them. Instead, lean in to yourself with compassion and see if you can mindfully let the feelings rise and fall like waves and see if you can find other ways of getting your need for love and companionship met.

Dealing with The Valentines Day Blues

Valentines Day almost inevitably draws our attention to our romantic relationships. All the hearts and flowers and hoopla have the tendency to make our minds compare the current level of romance in our lives with what we want that part of our life to be like.

If there is a gap between what we want and what we are experiencing then we feel sad, hurt, sometimes even angry.

So how to deal with that pain? Here are some tips:

1. Acknowledge that it is reasonable to feel pain when an important aspect of your life isn't the way you want it to be. This doesn't mean you are weak or don't have the right attitude. It means that you are human.
2. Be very kind to yourself. This is a time for self compassion. And when you are ready...
3. Spend some time thinking about what you want. But here is an important twist. Instead of focussing on what you want Prince or Princess Charming to be like, focus on what qualities you want to bring to a relationship.  What sort of partner do you want to be?
4. Now think about how you could live at least some of those values straight away. See if you can keep gently bringing your attention back to the question 'Am I living my values?' rather than 'Is my life the way I want it to be?'
5. And when you do find a possible Prince or Princess Charming, notice whether being around them seems to make it easier or harder to be the person you want to be. If living those values is really difficult with this particular person, then, for you, they may just be a frog. 

Here is an excerpt from my own romantic relationship values statement:

I want to be affectionate, kind, authentic and curious. I want to laugh easily and look for opportunities to have fun with my partner. I want to resolve disagreements with grace. I want to express my wants and needs directly and accept that sometimes my partner will need to say 'no' to meeting those wants and needs. I want to look for opportunities to do things that are likely to make my partner happy and also I want to know when I need to say 'no' (and say it gracefully). I want to be mindful.....

Do I live those values all the time? Nope.  Do I find that using those statements as a compass to guide my behaviour helps me to more often be the person I want to be? Absolutely. And has that made my life better? Well, so far, so good.

What Would The Very First Step Look Like?

Many of my fellow Queenslanders are dealing with the aftermath of the recent terrible flooding.  I am intensely proud of the courage, grace and generosity of the people in my adopted state.  And I have some 'survivor guilt' about my own clean, dry house.

Friends have told me about returning to homes thick with sticky, smelly mud - everything ruined.

So what did they do when overwhelmed by the enormity of the task in front of them?  They started with the first step.

Solution focussed therapy uses this approach - when trying to do something hard, break it down into tiny, tiny steps and then just focus on doing the very first step.

Carrying Our Battle Scars with a Swagger

Clarissa Pinkola Estes encourage women to make a 'scapecoat' that represents all the wounds, scars, insults and trauma they have endured through their life.  To somehow record all the times when they have made poor choices or felt overwhelmed and without hope. She expected women to want to destroy this symbol of so much pain and shame but she discovered that, instead, women want to keep them as 'proof of the endurance, the failures and the victories'. She hung her own scapecoat in her hallway and whenever she walked past it she found herself:

'Admiring the ovarios of the woman who could wear such a coat and still be walking foursquare, singing, creating, and wagging her tail'

 Clarissa Pinkola Estes is highlighting a choice here - to hunch over and protect our old wounds or to acknowledge them as part of our rich history and walk with a swagger.  I would ask you to add a liberal dose of compassion to either of those choices - it is important to honour our pain.

If you want to be happy, become more extroverted

People who score highly for extroversion are more likely to have increases in life satisfaction over time.  People who score highly for neuroticism are more likely to have decreases in life satisfaction over time (Headey,2009).

People who are extroverted have a tendency towards: warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, enthusiasm and feeling energised in company. Whereas people with high Neuroticism scores have a tendency to experience more feelings of anxiety, anger, depression and guilt than those low in neuroticism. People high in neuroticism tend to feel overwhelmed in stressful circumstances; interpret ordinary situations as threatening and have difficulty not acting on urges.

Headey suggests that these differences in life satisfaction as life progresses are because extroverted personality traits are associated with experiencing more positive life events and neurotic personality traits with more adverse life events. Extroverted people tend to build relationships.  Being part of a supportive network of people is strongly associated with happiness, so extroverted behaviour makes life better. Whereas, neurotic people tend to get overwhelmed by their painful emotions and often start to avoid challenging situations. Their lives becomes progressively more narrow.

Our personality may not be as fixed as we thought, on average we tend to become less neurotic and less extroverted with age.

So, assuming we want to be happy with our lives, what might this suggest we should do?  Here are my suggestions:

1. Take the free IPIP Neo test to see how you currently score
2. If you are low in extroversion - accept that you do need time alone to recharge but don't hide away from the world.  Introverts who push themselves to become more social become happier. Work out what your values are around relationships with others. Then try to say 'yes' more often to experiences with others that align with those values. 
3. If you are high in neuroticism - practice mindfulness, get good at noticing what is really happening in the world rather than what your mind is telling you is happening.  Get good at noticing urges to act in 'neurotic' ways and see if you can sit with the urge and instead act in line with your values.  
4. Show yourself compassion - this stuff is harder for you than for happy-go-lucky, bubbly extroverts. 

My personal experience with this?  I have been practising ACT (the approach that much of this blog rests on) for several years now and my neuroticism scores have fallen. This is anecdotal - but I am pretty pleased!

More Benefits of Journalling

King (2001) The health benefits of writing about life goals - GenerallyThinking Psychology Research Database

In this study, undergraduate students were asked to write for 20 minutes a day, for 4 days, on either:  

• their most traumatic life event
• their best possible future self
• both of the above
• a neutral topic (the control group)

Writing about trauma was initially upsetting whereas writing about their 'best possible self' lifted feelings of well being.  The researchers collected health centre data for the students for 5 months.  The authors found that:

'writing about trauma, one’s best possible self, or both were associated with decreased illness compared with controls.'

I am a big fan of journalling.  This study suggests that it has significant health benefits.  There is a growing body of research suggesting that identifying our values (who we want to be in the world, what we want our life to stand for or, in this case, exploring what our 'best possible future self' would be like) is good for our emotional and physical well being.


This study also suggests that although writing about a traumatic memory is painful, it is also good for our health.    Writing about a trauma helps us to look at the memory from a distance, it helps us to see when we are caught in grinding the same thoughts over and over without moving forward, it can help us to create a coherent story of the event with a sense of meaning.  It can also help us make peace with those memories so they have less power to 'hook' us.

My Aunt Mary was a Doctor.  Her journey to qualifying in medicine is pretty impressive.

Mary was a very bright lady. When she was in primary school her teacher told my grandmother that Mary was the cleverest child she had ever taught.  But academic success wasn't easy for Mary. She was a teenager in the 1940's, when my grandparents were very poor.  Mary had a single set of clothes which was her school uniform.  She had to wear it to go to school, work on the farm and play with her brother (my father). So she was usually grubby, and perhaps rather smelly at times. Most of her teachers looked upon her neglected state as a sign of idleness and were not encouraging towards her.  However her parents were very encouraging towards both of their children, my father describes his father calling out to his mother, on many occasions;

'Madge!  Come and look at what this child has done!  The child is a genius!'

My grandmother was a quiet but determined feminist.

When Mary was around 15, her grandmother, who lived with the family, had a stroke and became bedfast.  Mary had to stop her schooling to help her mother care for her sick grandmother.  But Mary was determined to pursue her studies. She got a copy of the curriculum and worked on her own at home.  She had to fight with the school in order to be allowed to take her 'O' levels (the exams UK children took when they were 16 years old).

She didn't hear from the school about her exam results and assumed that she must have failed. So she got a job as a telephonist to help support the family.  Some months later she bumped into a girl who had gone to school with her.  The young woman remarked to Mary 'You must have been so pleased to get all those prizes'.  Mary contacted the school and discovered that she had passed and had achieved some prizes.

She came home and told her parents that she wanted to become a doctor.  My father, Peter, who was 2 years younger than Mary but had left school early without any qualifications, thought that it was a great idea and decided he wanted to become a doctor as well. Mary was at first disconcerted because she thought Peter would help her financially.  My grandparents encouraged them - even though they had no money.  Mary and Peter went to night school and part time college to complete their high schooling and then Mary got a place at Belfast University and my father at Birmingham University.

My father told me this story quite recently.  I had never known how profoundly my Aunt had affected my life.  The example she set my father meant that I was brought up a middle class doctor's daughter, with all the financial, social and psychological privileges that go with that. I am very grateful to her.

School Gardening Boosts Children's Wellbeing And Development

A new study suggests that incorporating gardening into the education children receive at school boosts their wellbeing, learning and development and helps equip them for many of the challenges of adult life.

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of spending Saturday afternoons gardening with my father - reading this study makes me think I should have been a little more persuasive about getting my own children to join me in the garden.