The ability to stay in the moment without getting stuck in the past or the future has become strongly associated with happiness in recent years. However, not everything is so clear. Sometimes it is necessary to explore, understand and resolve aspects of your past in order to fully live in the present.
Events experienced in childhood and adolescence largely shape a person’s personality. If during this period our basic needs were not sufficiently met, then our deepest beliefs about ourselves, the world and other people were distorted. And now, decades later, they continue to cause psychological problems.
Unmet needs of childhood
Here are five broad categories of unmet needs, each of which can significantly influence our behavior in adulthood. After reading this list, you will be able to identify when something went wrong during your growing up. And this is the first step towards understanding the reasons for many of your actions in the present.
Security
As children, we feel secure when we grow up in a stable family environment where parents or other caring adults are secure and available—both physically and emotionally. It is safety that is the key to the normal development of the child, in which he does not have to spend most of his energy worrying about survival.
For a number of reasons, this need may not be fully met (the child is being abused, the parents leave or die for a long time or there is a threat of such an event, one or both parents suffer from alcoholism or other drug addiction).
Then the child develops a negative belief about the world (“something terrible can happen at any moment”)
He has the same beliefs about himself (“I am not worthy of love”) and about other people (“they are unreliable and can leave me at any moment”).
In adulthood, an unmet need for security will push a person into a relationship with a partner who can take on the role of a parent. Having found it, a person is desperately afraid of losing it. He may feel vulnerable, insecure, unworthy of a relationship and compensate for this by constantly trying to control or manipulate his partner through resentment.
The unmet need for safety can also be expressed in the form of various disorders: anxiety, borderline, eating disorders.
Approval
It is important for a child to receive parental approval. When others see him as a good, worthwhile, interesting, capable person, he eventually begins to feel the same way about himself. Reflecting a positive image of himself, he feels appreciated and begins to appreciate himself.
Children whose parents or caregivers were withdrawn, critical, or unable to adequately express their feelings grow up with an unmet need for approval and recognition from others, both in personal and professional relationships. Their self-image is completely based on the opinions of others, so it becomes critical for them to be good in the eyes of others.
They are afraid to refuse others, strive to please them and hope that they will reciprocate: with kind words or gratitude.
However, this behavior is very tedious. When a person has to constantly work hard just to impress others, he lives in stress because he is afraid of failing. Eventually, these behaviors lead to stress, fatigue, anxiety, depressive symptoms, or anxiety disorders.
Self-affirmation
The need for self-assertion is similar to the need for approval and recognition, since it also manifests itself as a desire to please others. However, a person who needs self-affirmation usually wants more than just approval. He has a strong desire to receive praise, compliments, attention and adoration for his appearance, talents or achievements. As the need grows, it may manifest itself in the desire that others envy or be jealous of him.
A person craves communication and positive feedback from others, even from strangers.
Such personality traits can be seen very often in social networks, especially in young people. The person who posts photo after photo in the hope of getting likes and comments about how good they look most likely has an unmet need for self-assertion.
Control
There are several reasons why an adult needs constant supervision. Most often, this is a consequence of events from childhood, when the child could not control the situation and as a result experienced severe trauma. For example, adults who were once abused fear losing control again and being in a vulnerable position.
Even witnessing a traumatic event by a child (such as parental abuse) can have long-term consequences, including post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as a constant need to control the situation.
A person with a need for control will watch every little detail in the behavior of others, suffer from constant nervousness or irritability. He may also develop compulsive cravings for something: compulsive overeating, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, or substance abuse.
Love
The attitude to love is formed in us already in infancy. Children need to feel loved. The unconditional love of parents, which does not need to be earned and which cannot be lost, is the foundation of a healthy, adequate self-esteem of a person in adulthood, his ability to love himself and respond to the love of others.
A lack of such love may be the root cause of unmet needs for security, approval, self-affirmation, and control.
Parents or caregivers who neglect, abandon, criticize, or abuse children, thereby make them feel that they are not good enough to be loved, or that they are truly unloved.
The real or apparent lack of love in childhood can manifest itself in adults as an overestimation of the importance of relationships, an obsessive search for a partner who would cover this need, jealousy and a desire to constantly receive confirmation of one’s value for a loved one. This is due to the fact that a person is trying to fill the void inside himself — where love should be.
How to close needs?
First, it is important to understand what they are. If one or more of the problems described above sound familiar to you, it is worth analyzing your behavior and honestly answering a few questions for yourself.
In what situations do I behave this way?
Why am I behaving like this?
What does this strategy give me? What benefit do I get from it?
What do I really want to get?
How else could I get it?
Most often, it is very difficult to sort out without a specialist in a tangle of adult and children’s feelings and experiences. But even the first step toward this—recognizing that an unmet need exists—helps us understand how it drives us. And this allows you to act more consciously, make different choices and change.