6 Steps to Meeting Your Needs

How the hell am I supposed to know what I need?

I hear this often from the therapy couch. 

If you grew up in a family system where your primary caregivers weren't attentive to your needs, this question can feel impossible. If you were or are constantly tending to those around you, rather than yourself, this question can feel silly. If you feel shame about being someone who needs things from others, this question can feel preposterous.

When you over-focus on others, or are not accustomed to being focused on, it's difficult to know what you need from yourself, let alone from others.

The good news is that you can learn to tend to yourself. You can learn what you need, over time, and begin meeting those needs yourself, and letting your support-people show up to meet your needs, too.

1) Practice asking yourself "what am I feeling right now?"

Your emotions are often a primary signaler of met or unmet needs. Example: If you're feeling lonely, it is because a need for connection is going unmet.

2) Follow-up that question with "what might I need right now?"

Once you've identified the feeling, you can ask what you need. This might be for soothing, for release, for distraction, for reflection, who knows! Especially early in the process, you might come up with a big blank here. That's okay and to be expected. Ask the question anyway. Part of meeting your needs is just learning how to ask about them.

3) Experiment.

Walk, talk, draw, journal, watch TV, eat a snack, drink some water. Make a big-ass list and try a bunch of things over time. It's okay if this feels random at first.

4) Check in on the impact.

Does the feeling seem more manageable? Do you feel more grounded? Don't expect whatever negative feeling you started with to just go away. That's not the barometer for meeting your needs. Check in whether you have more capacity, if the intensity of the emotion changed, if you feel more able to breathe, etc. This will tell you whether the thing you tried to meet the need actually filled that need, or not.

5) Take mental (or physical) note of what felt helpful and what didn't.

This helps you hone in over time on what you need.

6) Repeat. Over and over again.

The more you try, the more you know. Over time, you might realize that when you're feeling anxious, what you really need is to go outside, play out the worst case scenario ONCE, and then distract with a good book. You might find that when you're depressed, you need to journal and do something productive.

This is an iterative process. Be patient with yourself, and keep asking the questions.

3 Benefits of Acceptance

Acceptance is hard work. Especially during trying times like these.

But, the truth is, we suffer when we don't accept reality as it is. And to be clear, acceptance doesn't mean approving of reality--it just means seeing reality clearly. When you're suffering, you are saying it must be otherwise immediately, or ruminating on how awful it is, or beating yourself up for feeling a certain way about it. I'd put money on this making you feel worse. More angry, more anxious, more shame, more defeated.

It's because you are fighting reality. It's because you're trying to tell yourself that you shouldn't feel this way and to feel other than you feel. This is invalidation at it's most painful. It takes the pain you are already feeling--depression, anxiety, fear, dissatisfaction with your life--and multiplies it by 100. Because now you're feeling the pain of the initial emotion or event, and ALSO the pain of telling yourself how bad it is, how you should feel differently, and how wrong you are for feeling it.

Suffering, right now, might look like “I hate this. I’m sick of being stuck at home. I should feel grateful because others are suffering more than I am. I should be super productive right now. I shouldn’t feel so anxious and afraid. This is never going to end.”

Acceptance, on the other hand, is acknowledging what IS. Years ago, when I was first grappling with acceptance, I wrote the definition in my journal. "To believe or come to recognize as valid or correct." Now, correct does not mean "right" or "good". To me, it just means "true". Acceptance is just seeing the truth of reality.

Acceptance might sound like “this is a collective trauma and it hurts.”

Acceptance helps you:

1) Validate your emotional experience. As it relates to the virus, it makes hella sense why you're afraid, angry, depressed and worried. These are appropriate emotional responses to a global pandemic. You're allowed to feel how you feel. Let's not judge ourselves for having feelings. Acceptance does not mean you are *approving* of the feeling, it just means you're naming it for what it is without all the other junk attached.

2) Give yourself compassion. This is hard. You are not in this alone. What is happening is not okay, but it’s okay that it's hard. Like Brene Brown shared on her podcast recently, this is all of our fucking first time (FFT) in a pandemic. We’re doing our best. It's okay that you're not finishing every project that's been laying around your house. It's okay that you're not creating that masterpiece you've been considering. It's okay if you're eating emotionally, or irritable with your family. Again, all of this makes sense. None of us have been through this before, and it's okay to do what you need to manage and feel safe *enough* right now.

3) Take effective action. When we demand that reality be different than it is or refuse to accept it, we struggle to respond to reality as it is. Take our government, for example. Insisting that the virus "isn't that bad" slowed down the response and kept us from containing it as well as we could have. This is a story that got told: "it shouldn't be that bad, because that would be an awful thing for the economy, etc etc...", which drove an ineffective response. In comparison, if we could have recognized the reality as it is sooner, we would have had a more effective response. When we get the story and the judgement out of the way, we can be far more effective in our responses.

Again, acceptance is not condoning what you're feeling or resigning to the way things are. It is removing judgement so that you can chart a compassionate path forward. 

HOW? I hear you asking.

1) Notice when you're fighting reality. Begin to call attention to the signs that you’re not accepting reality. You'll probably notice physical tension, painful emotions arising, negative self-talk, and lots of stories about what should be happening.

2) Name what you're feeling, and the reality you are fighting. Name this objectively, as though you’re a completely impartial observer. This can help you recognize what is reality, and what is the story you’ve attached to it.

3) Turn your mind towards acceptance (this comes straight from DBT, my friends). Choose acceptance over and over and over again. I found mantras really helpful here. Write down daily the things you are trying to accept.

4) More self-compassion. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others. My mantra here is “it makes sense that…”. It makes sense that I’m feeling afraid in the midst of a pandemic. It makes sense that I’m feeling more on edge. It makes sense that I’m feeling angry about the suffering in the world.

I’m working on this with you right now, fam, because I find myself doing a lot of what-if-ing and ruminating on how I should feel better about things by now. I’m practicing validation, meditation, connection and creating new routines to help me accept the reality of the moment.

How are you, can you, or will you practice acceptance today?

5 Ways to Cultivate Self-Love

Self-love is a game-changer.⁠ Your life radically changes when you start to care for yourself the way you care for those around you. And love is a verb, it comes through actions. You cultivate self-love when you show up for yourself, consistently and with compassion. It takes practice.

What I’ve noticed over time, is that the belief “I am unloveable” begins to shift to a belief that “I am loveable” when people consistently treat themselves as if the latter is true, even when it doesn’t feel that way.

I don't buy the bullshit that says "no one will love you until you love yourself"...because it's just not true. You will still be loved even if you don't love yourself, but that love will be harder to accept and savor. You might find yourself pushing love away, fearing that people will leave you or “find you out”. When you practice loving yourself, you’re more able to be present with the love other people are showing you.

Self-love can come in a lot of forms, but these are five tried and true ways that I know help develop self-love:⁠

1) 🖤Stop judging others.

What you're judging in them is something you reject about yourself, or it's just plain mean and feeding into focusing on the negative about yourself. Stop judging others and notice how much easier it is to be kind to yourself and feel connected in any situation.⁠ This is a practice I adopted several years ago, and it made massive shifts in how I looked at other people and myself.

2) 🕵️‍♀️Observe your inner critic.

Notice the mean shit she's saying to you daily! Would you say that to your best friend? Are those shame-y thoughts helping you get anywhere? NO.⁠

3) 💥Challenge those statements with something that is true, kind AND useful.

Yes, all three. True (because maybe you did fuck that thing up), but how can you say it in a way that is KIND and USEFUL at the same time? Not "you're such a failure, you really messed that up", but instead "that didn't go well, you made a few mistakes, here's how you can do better next time/learn from this". Way kinder.⁠

4) ❓Ask, "what do I feel right now?"

Isn't this how we so often show people we care? We want to know how they're feeling and what's going on in their lives. Get curious about your own experience, without so much judgement. It's amazing what can change just through asking yourself "what do I feel right now?⁠

5) 🌮Ask "what do I really need?"...and give that to yourself!

This is another way we show that we care. We support our loved ones, we try to meet their (reasonable) needs, we do what we can to SHOW UP for them.⁠

How can you show up and show love for yourself today??

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