Most couples arrive with some version of the same sentence: my needs aren’t being met. And usually that’s true. Both people are getting more of their wounds triggered than their needs met, and everyone is tired.
Here’s where I do something you might not expect. Before we have the conversation, the one where you tell your partner you need more of this, or less of that, more closeness, more space, I want to go back further than the conversation.
Interdependence is built out of two other things
Healthy interdependence isn’t one skill. It’s made of two: solid dependence and solid independence.
Healthy dependence sounds like: I know how to receive without seeing myself as a burden.
Healthy independence sounds like: I matter. I’m separate from you. I can name my own needs and meet some of them myself. And when what I need bumps into what you need, that’s okay: you’re you and I’m me.
When a couple is stuck, one of those is usually underbuilt. Often both. So before the big conversation, we practice the two things the conversation is standing on.
The ask that comes from empty
This isn’t about not asking. In a healthy relationship you absolutely ask. But there’s a difference between an ask that comes from a full cup and one that comes from a desperate place: I don’t know that I can give this to myself, so I think you might be the only one who can.
That’s an enormous amount of pressure to hand one person. It outsources your own capacity, and it keeps you in a dependent position inside your own relationship.
And it rarely stops there. When your partner can’t meet it, and they won’t always, the pendulum swings the other way. You decide you won’t have needs at all. You stop bringing them up. Or you protest, and judge them for failing a test they didn’t know they were taking.
Yours first
So we practice the other version. Your needs are yours first. Your responsibility first. And then you share them, and invite someone else in to help you meet them.
That’s a different posture than waiting to be noticed, and then quietly keeping score of everything that went unnoticed.
The work is usually slower than people want it to be. First we grieve: these needs have gone unmet in this relationship, and probably for a long time before this relationship existed. Then we go back and rebuild the capacity. Name the need. Learn what it looks like when it’s actually met. Practice sourcing some of it yourself. So that when you do ask, you’re not asking while carrying every year the need went unmet.
Skills that came from lack
None of this is mystical. It’s practice you never got. You already have plenty of practiced skills — they’re just skills you built out of lack, and they aren’t serving the relationship you’re trying to have now. An abundant relationship needs an abundant skill set.
If someone had explained it to me this way back when I needed to hear it, I had enough defenses up that I’m not sure I would have taken it in. But I think I would have felt more validated. And I think I would have gotten curious: maybe the way I’ve been going about this isn’t working, and maybe there’s something else to try.
Related reading
- Why You Keep Recreating the Scarcity You Grew Up In
- When You Become the Therapist in Your Own Relationship
- The Sexless Relationship
If you’re tired of having the same conversation
If you’ve had the needs conversation a dozen times and it keeps landing the same way, the problem might not be how you’re saying it. It might be that both of you are being asked to stand on ground that was never fully built. That’s workable, and it’s a good deal of what we do in couples counseling, not just better conversations, but the capacities underneath them.
You’re not behind. You just never got taught this part.
Greater House Counseling, Arlington, TX and telehealth across Texas. Schedule an appointment.
