Building Positive Relationships Through Sharing Needs

Building Positive Relationships Through Sharing Needs

When forging deeper connections with others, open and honest communication about our fundamental human needs can make a significant difference. Needs reflect the core of our psychological and physical wellbeing – things like feeling loved, respected, and secure. By courageously sharing our needs with others, we create space for greater understanding, empathy, and opportunities to meet those needs in healthy ways within our relationships.

The Power of Vulnerability

Laying our needs on the table takes vulnerability, as it exposes the tender parts of ourselves that can feel weak or needy. However, this openness displays strength and provides the pathway to having our needs met, and attending to the needs of others. When we stay silent about our needs, for fear of judgment or rejection, they most likely go unmet, leading to frustration, resentment, and emotional disconnection over time.

Attending to Needs Fosters Closeness

On the other hand, when we share our needs respectfully with others and they respond with compassion, it allows bonding experiences that function as the bread and butter of positive relationships. Perhaps your need involves quality time together, words of affirmation, or simply feeling heard and understood. By bringing your needs to light, you give your peers, partner, friend, or colleage the chance to step up and attend to them, which generates a lovely cycle of feeling cared for and appreciated.

The Dangers of Focusing Only on Wants

While needs find their basis in our core values and persist continuously, wants represent more fleeting and situational aspects. Wants act as temporary cravings, material desires, or cravings for novelty and spontaneity. Discussing wants in a relationship can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment, not to mention a superficial connection that lacks warmth, meaning, depth and longevity.

Prioritising Wants Misses the Point

While sharing our passing desires and cravings with others may seem harmless on the surface, it can actually do our relationships a disservice. Wants, by their very nature, tend to be based more in impulsivity, superficiality, materialism, or chasing novelty for novelty’s sake. They represent the superficial fringes of our psyches rather than our deeper core selves.

When we prioritise discussing our more trivial, fleeting wants over candidly sharing our authentic needs, we miss out on opportunities for greater empathy and mutual understanding. Wants might include new experiences like luxury vacations, accumulating trendy possessions, or indulging our every whim and fancy. While providing jolts of temporary gratification, these cravings often lack the substance and staying power to create truly fulfilling relationships.

Needs, on the other hand, get to the heart of our fundamental human requisites for feeling loved, secure, understood, and able to grow in meaningful ways. Discussing our real needs with those closest to us – whether for quality time, words of affirmation, or feeling seen and valued – allows those people to show up for us on a deeper level. This vulnerable exchange forms the bedrock for trust, acceptance, empathy, and positive rapport to blossom.

By all means, it’s healthy to share some of our lighter wants and aspirations with those close to us, from time to time. But continually prioritising these fleeting cravings over exploring our core needs sells both parties short. It keeps the relationship dynamics surface-level and unstable, missing out on mining the realer intimacies that make connections sustainable long-term.

Confusing Wants With Needs

It’s easy for people to confuse wants with deeper needs. For example, someone may say they need the latest smartphone, when in reality what they need may nvolve feeling successful, stimulated, and part of the modern world. By focusing the conversation on the superficial want rather than the underlying need, we miss the opportunity to get to the heart of the issue and find more fulfilling solutions.

Nurturing Your Relationships

The path to healthier, longer-lasting relationships lies in getting skilled at teasing apart needs from wants, and prioritising the open-hearted sharing of our core needs with others. For in the vulnerable revealing of our fundamental human needs – not the insatiable pursuit of wants – the seeds of closeness, trust, and positive bonds find their sowing. NB. See also: the #AntimatterPrinciple.