Learning to name and express our needs is one area that most people do not understand or acknowledge as part of what it means to be a healthy adult.<\/p>\n
We are human and therefore, we are needy beings. <\/strong><\/p>\n When we learn to name our needs and express our needs, we can find help for those needs. And when we can all agree that we have and should have<\/em> needs, it becomes easier for us to accept that other people have needs as well.<\/p>\n In fact, it is good for us to clearly state our needs to other people and have honest conversations about the realistic needs of both parties. We have needs and other people have needs \u2014 plain and simple. <\/strong>And as Lysa TerKeurst states so eloquently, \u201cBoundaries help us walk in the middle.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n In truth, when we can name and express our needs, we can look for ways to meet our own needs.<\/strong> We understand that we are responsible FOR our own lives. This becomes important in our efforts to “meet in the middle” \u2014 to not demand that someone else must be responsible to meet our needs.<\/p>\n When we learn to meet our own needs, we can:<\/p>\n Learning to name, acknowledge, regulate, and meet our needs is important work. <\/strong><\/em>Below is a list of needs that we often bring into relationship with others:<\/p>\n I encourage you to identify some needs from the above list and spend some time in personal reflection. It might help to print out this page and circle them \u2014 putting pen to paper. I realize, thinking through this is hard, but this is a way you can learn to ask some healthy questions to help you meet people in the middle.<\/p>\n It can be easy to lose our self-worth when our needs are out of balance. <\/strong>We can start to believe that \u201cI must be\u201d and instead think \u201cI want to be.\u201d And we can learn to question why. “I want to be” is driven by desire, while “I must be” is driven by a demand. When our wants shift to demands we can get caught in a serious form of people pleasing.<\/p>\n Here are some additional questions to ponder:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n I encourage you to spend today thinking about WHAT you need, WHY you need it and HOW you can go about resolving this need. The above information comes from the book Good <\/em>Boundaries and Goodbyes<\/em><\/a> by Lysa TerKeurst<\/a> in the chapter entitled: \u201cWhy I am so afraid\u201d.<\/p>\n\n
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