The Tragic Futility of Relationships Driven by Unmet Childhood Needs

Here's the sad fucking truth - the people who need something the most are the least likely to get it from others. The more we reek of desperation, the less likely we are to have our needs met, and the more likely we are to be exploited, with our needs treated as weaknesses and points of ingress for abusers. It's almost as if those in need emit a distress flare that only serves to attract the blood-suckers in the night.

And there is a certain logic to it. After all, people external to ourselves can never really meet out needs. They can only temporarily pacify them, or distract us from them. But fundamentally our desperate need for company, our fear of loneliness - these cannot be met by others. Not once we are adults anyway, for these needs arise from our dysfunctional childhoods. When we were children, these needs should have been met by our parents, but if they weren't - and for the majority of us they weren't, then we're left painfully grasping at straws as we seek other adults to satisfy unmet childhood needs. Of course, there is no possible way for a need born when we were infants or young children to be satisfied by the meeting of a similar need now. The original need yet remains unmet, stifled somewhere in our past, deep within our subconscious.

No adult relationship can ever extricate these needs and fulfil them, nor is it at all fair to lump such expectations on other unsuspecting adults, or worse, your own children. For parents often have children (who by their vulnerability are forcibly bound to their parents regardless of their own wishes) to satisfy the needs that were left unsatisfied when they were kids themselves. The idea that one's own children can fulfil the role that was never fulfilled by one's parents is a mad thought, yet it drives many to selfishly think of only themselves as they procreate. And once they do, they are so preoccupied with meeting their own needs that they scarcely have any time, or indeed desire, to try and meet the needs of their children. And thus the cycle continues, revolving anew. Another notch in the tearful and bloody history of families' relationship to its most vulnerable members. Another generation of emptied souls.

No, at the end of the day, only you yourself can meet your needs. How is a different question, and indeed it is no easy feat, but its difficulty does not detract from its worth, and rather adds to it, culminating in an internal peace, external efficacy, and unrivaled potential for two adults with met needs to build a healthy and functional relationship.

This is not to say that no needs at all can be met by another's company, for after all relationships are mutual alliances in selfishness. Or at least they should be. But for a relationship to satisfy such a definition, both parties must be able to not only take, but also give. It is hardly possible for an adult child acting on their childhood traumas to build a functional give and take relationship with another adult. They are craving - wanting, for what they never had. Their heart is an empty reservoir, begging to be drenched in love. One who has so little to drink that they are dying of thirst, cannot share their water with another. Nor do they normally have a desire to, for at this stage of their emotional development it feels akin to suicide.

Only a heart filled, and overflowing, can begin to give to another, and if that other can return in kind, here is where the mutually beneficial relationship can arise.