Radical need

It just occurred to me that I should have been surprised, many times over the years, that clients so rarely name a presenting problem of neediness. While it’s reflected in so many of their problems, adults never tell me: “I am so needy for even a single molecule of love that I fall into the first man, any man, who gazes at me.” They never say: “I become sand, I become a still photo that will never move again, when a woman leaves me.” But that’s the immanent truth. It is legion in the world. Symbiotic neediness, to be immersed in another, to have an exclusive held-tight companion for daytime and nighttime ’til death, is literally “second human nature.”

An honest, fragile 15-year-old girl knew it about herself. First knowledge was that she feared her friends disliked her, thought her obnoxious. Second knowledge: Not because she clung to them, but because she had to pull away in the strange mood energy of someone who wants to melt into them, give love, be loved, but knows it’s too needy.

This is not, of course, how it should be. Children should be “filled” with love by their parents, early and ongoingly, to where they now feel fine in themselves, a kind of complete. Then they can see other children, or teens, or twenty-year-old immature “charming” or exciting men, not as salvation but as separate people who may pique their interest, disgust or affection or admiration.

I presented myself (with modulated self-disclosure) as an exemplar of that neediness, where the concept of “motivation” would be a foreign word in every language to me were I not to have my wife. I know about the kind of neediness that one can’t try to indulge because it would be to crash into the first mother-child bond that never happened. This makes neediness angering, and rejecting. It makes (to put it another way) its opposite.

This may be strange therapy, that I might help my teens normalize something that most of them would never want to know. Maybe I’m cultivating the next crop of neurotic therapists.