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But I think the hardest part to get over was the feeling of why did I have to ask? If someone really loved me, wouldn’t they care enough to know what I needed? I mean if I had to ask then what I was given wasn’t valid or real, right?

There was a time when we should have had an attuned caregiver identifying and meeting our needs without our having to ask, in fact we didn’t know what we needed or how to ask. They had to teach us that. In that first year of life, we don’t talk, we cry. When we feel some kind of discomfort, we make it known by protesting. And our attachment figure answers that protest and sets about figuring out what is going on. Is our diaper wet and needs changing? Are we scared and need soothing? Are we hungry? Are we tired? and then they meet that need. As we get older, and encounter our emotions, an attuned caregiver will literally identify what is going on for us. “You’re getting really grumpy, you’re tired and need to get some sleep.” So we match what we are experiencing in our body and in our feelings and connect with “oh that’s what grumpy and tired feels like, when I feel that way I need sleep.” If we did not have that consistently, and most abused kids didn’t, we really long for it. To have someone attend to us so closely that we would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we mattered to them.

So having to express our needs can make us feel like it doesn’t count when someone meets them. But learning to take care of ourselves, means taking responsibility to reach out to others and make the need known. The loving response is that when someone hears that need expressed, they move to meet it, to provide for us that which we ask for. So BN quite stubbornly refused to give me something I was capable of asking for, but wouldn’t out of fear. He TRUSTED me to attend to myself. And so he would wait patiently until I could actually express it and then respond swiftly and surely.

I do want to be clear here that taking care of yourself does NOT mean you find everything you need inside yourself. We’re just not built like that, we need our connections and significant relationships to meet our needs, we cannot know ourselves outside of relationship. What it does mean is that you reach out to other people to get your needs met and know you are loved by their willingness to provide that for which you asked.

I think the healing we do in therapy is to learn to recognize that our deep longing for what we didn’t get is NOT wrong. What we are longing for are integral human needs. It’s HEALTHY to long for those things. And to recognize that the needs we still have, to connect, to be understood and to be heard, are also not childish but healthy. And even though we can’t go back into the past and get our needs as children met, we can learn in the present to understand our needs, move closer to other people and get our needs met now. We cannot go back to recover that which was lost, but we can go forward to claim that which is found and thrive.

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Also, many T's feel that by contacting the client to see how they are doing would imply that the client is not doing well or cannot handle life on their own and that the T has no confidence in them.