Having Needs Is Human: A Therapist Grapples With Deceptions, Estrangements, and the Denial of Needs in 'Maestro'
March 25, 2024
“I don’t need!”: Having needs is an essential part of being human
[caption id="attachment_7040" align="alignleft" width="300"] Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre discusses her needs (or lack thereof) in Maestro (Courtesy of Netflix)[/caption]
I can’t stop thinking about a scene from Maestro in which Carey Mulligan’s Felicia Montealegre addresses her husband’s deceptions and estrangements. She says, “It’s just so ironic; I would look at everyone—even my own children—with such pity because of their longing for his attention. It was sort of a banner I wore so proudly: I don’t need! I don’t need! And…look at me now. Who’s the one who hasn’t been honest?” What keeps me chewing on this scene is its novel perspective on a particular question in relationships: Who is ultimately responsible for meeting our needs?
In Felicia’s time, it was the default role of women to cater to men’s needs in exchange for security. While we have come a long way in disrupting restrictive notions of gender, Felicia’s determination to deny her own needs is still relatable to many people-pleasers and caretakers of any gender. Having needs is inherent to our concept of a person—it’s part of being human. There is, then, a denial happening when people shape themselves, like Felicia, into a person without needs. An antidote to this urge to become this over-edited, over-contained “person without needs” is to acknowledge the full weight of our humanity, our desires, our hungers, and our needs.
Hiding behind having no needs can be an attempt at self-protection
Needs are always in a state of being met or unmet. They oscillate between satisfaction and frustration. This is not just the case with a partner, family members, and other loved ones but with life and its inherent inconsistency, unpredictability, and seasonality. More often than not, the drive to seem like a person without needs is a response to real signals in your environment, either in the past or present, that have taught you needs can’t be met or worse, that having them brings about serious consequences. There’s a fear that if you acknowledge your needs, they may still not be met, and then what? The disappointment of being let down in the course of loving relationships can be difficult to cope with. Denying needs becomes a way to find protection and safety.
For instance, some individuals learn to subsume themselves into ideals of goodness and sacrifice as a way of coping with a chaotic family life. Others internalize messages about race, gender, sexuality, and class that lead them to compare whose needs matter more in a zero-sum calculus that somehow always winds up with them coming last. Yet others give in to pressure to be perceived as low maintenance in order to be lovable in romantic relationships (See: “needy” as an insult). These all rest on a fundamental assumption that you can get by without tending to yourself.
While denying needs may seem to initially protect you from disappointment and hurt, it also keeps you profoundly disconnected from your own experiences. People who deny needs long enough become cut off from their humanity, their aliveness, and their capacity to truly connect with other people and be loved as and for who they are. The tragedy is many who contort themselves to seem without needs do so in service of love and connection yet it often gets in the way of these things.
The first step is acknowledging how hungry you are to have your needs met
Many patients come to therapy just on the cusp of fully grasping how long they’ve gone without. Granted, it can be painful to sit with unmet needs. Therapy can provide an invitation to explore how it was unsafe to have needs in the past and how it’s impacting the present.
The first step is to realize how hungry you are and have been for connection and intimacy, as well as relating compassionately to that hunger without judging it as “too much” or impossible to satiate. After initially looking at areas of your life and relationships that are less than satisfying, you can learn to sit with what needs can be met and what ones can’t while taking seriously that you’re worthy of having them. Connecting with that deep worthiness can be especially transformative. Therapy can serve as a space of permission—permission to need, to feel fully, to grieve, to expect more, and to integrate the parts of yourself that have been ignored.
Reconnecting with needs means creating a shared language with loved ones about meeting them
Often reconnecting with the worthiness of having needs brings you to a point of confrontation with yourself and your preferences, which may mean having to make tough changes like ending a relationship that is no longer working or moving on from a way of being and relating that is no longer tenable. Of course, where obstacles to getting your needs taken seriously can be identified and removed, they should be. But it’s not, nor should it be, the only part of the work. Much of the effort lies in creating a shared language with which to communicate needs and collaborate with loved ones in meeting them.
Take, for instance, the need to feel connected to a partner. There is a common fallacy that connection is simply a matter of choosing the right partner, that something essential about the other person means they’re uniquely able to meet your needs and soothe your anxieties. You should be in a process of assessing the fit with a partner, but there is more to it than that. The challenge is to first sit with the validity of your need to feel connected, naming that clearly first to yourself and then your loved one. Once you’ve expressed your need, it’s up to the other person to figure out a way to meet it that is authentic to them. It’s then your job to discern whether their response feels good or not. This process of differentiating your experience from the other person’s, as well as starting from what you think and feel without ascribing fear-based assumptions about the other person’s thoughts and feelings, builds a relationship guided by emotional safety and collaboration rather than a fraught battle of wills.
There is a curious paradox that when you take your needs seriously, they become less urgent. You become less rigid in how they might be met. Trusting others to care for us is inevitably tied to trusting ourselves: that we have our backs, that we won’t accept poor treatment or unjust conditions, and that we’re worthy of the struggle to love and grow.
