If You Don’t Feel Loved, It’s Probably Because These 3 Needs Aren’t Being Met
If you feel unloved, chances are these three essentials are missing.
Grace Hilty | Unsplash We all have expectations. And depending upon where we are on the confidence scale, having expectations can be a slippery slope, Sisyphus notwithstanding. Expectations are rooted in needs.
When I look back to when I started my journey of self-discovery fourteen years ago, the number one book that kick-started my healing was written by author Susan Piver. Her book, How Not To Be Afraid Of Your Own Life, changed my life. I love her profound statement: “From the moment we arrive, we are instinctively drawn toward warmth, closeness, and acceptance.”
Once you identify which needs in your life aren't being fulfilled, you gain the ability to communicate them to the people in your life. Feeling unloved doesn't always mean the people around you don't care; sometimes it means something subtly different is happening beneath the surface.
If you don’t feel loved, it’s probably because these 3 needs aren’t being met:
1. Warmth
A partner who is inconsistent with their displays of warmth can be particularly damaging to a person's sense of being loved. When a partner is not predictably warm, their actions might cause the other person to feel insecure and pull back emotionally to protect themselves from potential rejection.
Research refers to this feeling as affection deprivation. When this need is unmet, a person can experience a variety of negative mental health consequences, including stress, loneliness, and depression.
2. Closeness
Individuals with an anxious attachment style tend to have a fear of rejection that makes them worry their partners do not love them enough. Research on loneliness explained that they constantly seek validation and reassurance, and a partner's perceived emotional distance can cause them to feel unloved and clingy.
When emotional needs for closeness are not met, it can lead to resentment between partners. This can cause low self-esteem, as individuals may question their own worthiness of love and affection.
3. Acceptance
The need to belong is a fundamental human need. A history of feeling unloved can lead to people-pleasing as a survival mechanism, sacrificing one's own needs to gain approval from others.
Research has shown that the pain of social rejection activates the same areas of the brain as physical pain. This response is an evolutionary product meant to ensure survival by keeping people attuned to their need for acceptance within a social group.
My father is 101 years old, and he wants the same things. What happens when our basic emotional needs are not met?
- We end up in therapy.
- We keep looking for warmth.
- We keep searching for closeness.
- We keep needing acceptance.
- We keep having expectations.
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All of our drives keep our expectations on alert, and sometimes on high alert. Growing up in my house was a constant battle for attention.
I was the youngest and the most mischievous one. I was a prankster. The goal at dinner time was to get my father’s attention.
One time, I dressed our German Shepherd in my sister’s two-piece red bathing suit, complete with a diving mask on his head. My father almost fell out of his chair laughing. My sister was furious, my brother kept looking for the exit, and my mother was trying to track down the peas my dad had spilled.
But I won. Won what? My father’s attention for 10 minutes then vaporized, leaving me with the hope and expectation that someday I would get more than 10 minutes — someday I would get him to hug me and tell me he loved me.
That, my friend, is what expectations are built on; hoping our need — our fantasy — will materialize. Imagine my shock when I realized that those two forces don’t necessarily connect: attention and love.
As it is true that the most profound form of love is attention, children crave time with their parents and older siblings. Toys are for time alone.
But the reverse is not always true. Ask an abused adult what attention meant in their home growing up.
That adult/child has a different meaning of the word expectations. Fear is their association. As there are many shades of grey, there are 50 forms of abuse.
The form of abuse that was most personal to me was being ignored. Of course, there are objectively worse forms of abuse. My roommate in college, for instance, had been physically abused, which to me was much worse than being ignored.
Ironically, I felt guilty most of my life because I was not yelled at, never hit, and never anything inappropriate. But it still hurt. It took years to understand that pain is pain regardless of its source.
What can we do to keep ourselves intact and yet feel a yearning to connect and be loved? Follow these six steps to center yourself when experiencing a need that isn't being met:
- Take a step back
- Take a deep, slow inhale and hold for 5 seconds
- Put your hand on your heart and feel the beat [if you are on the subway or in someone’s car and have no privacy, imagine it]
- Label the feeling … really. As soon as you can identify what you feel, you are starting to take back control of the expectation.
- Why do you feel it is the monkey’s wrench?
- Twist it as many times as necessary to free the truth.
Now you will understand, painful as it is, your inner child and how best to protect her, and not slip into an expectation that can so easily shift into an argument or worse, which by now, you can forecast.
Pegi Burdick is a certified financial coach specializing in helping people turn around their stress and shame to get back control of their lives. Her articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, Forbes, The Daily Worth, MSN, and many others.
