“Needy” AF — an Intro. Needy and anxious about relationships…
By: The Needy Professor
Tags: Relationships, Anxiety, Neediness, Self Improvement, Stress

Outside Grand Canyon — A calm and beautiful place. You too, can be calm on the inside, just like this.

I’m lonely even though I have friends, desire constant affirmation even though my coddled life stands as an affirmation to everyone looking in, I harbor great distrust to those I love despite having no reason to not trust them and I require enormous amounts of communication and check-ins. A combination of personality traits that gets labelled charitably as “intense” and more pejoratively as “needy”. Everyone loves me as a friend but, once those friendships deepen, I begin to depend deeply on them; sometimes much deeper than those on the other side and quite often for much longer — which commonly doesn’t end well.

Neediness or friendship intensity is very much like hunger. Life is pretty much normal except that relationships aren’t something that come in and out of your consciousness. They are all consuming, taking up hours of “mind-talk” and ruminating. Like eating, it’s something that you consciously work with every-single-day. You get an assurance that you are meaningful to the relationship (“meal”) from someone you care about and the hunger goes away. Maybe you had a good conversation about a book, or you went to a movie together or simply just texted you back a “HAHA” emoji to a joke you made. The activity doesn’t matter, it’s the response — however empty — that fulfills you. After that, you are satisfied, but after a day, a few hours or even a few minutes your worry (“hunger”) about the relationship starts to build — Did they have a good time? Why did they make that comment? Let me ask! Why aren’t they texting me back? I knew I screwed up! Was this the last time we’ll talk? They probably like other people better! I guess we aren’t friends/partners/lovers anymore?!?

Notice it begins to build slowly and then very quickly and towards the end it’s like being “hangry” and you begin to start feeling irrational. You won’t starve in a matter of hours and a friendship won’t fail in the same time frame, but your brain either doesn’t care or doesn’t realize. You are blind to the irrationality of the situation.

At this stage it becomes very, very difficult to not drop off the deep end and call/text/drive by/check in on, etc, etc, etc to get some type of affirmation or reassurance that this person still wants you in their life. You feel like everything depends on that text being responded to, or that phone call being answered. And you will obsess over it until that text or call is returned — which could be days!

Friends, family and lovers can deal with that a little bit, on occasion, but it becomes too much for them. Like a salad bar that you constantly return to, you WILL over time consume all the resources these people have if you need them constantly. You’ve feasted on their goodwill and desire to like you. Once you’ve emptied the “salad bar” the other party begins to feel drained by you. Your gluttony for reassurance begins to exhaust the relationship. This is where relationships begin to fail.

I could spend some time unpacking why I’m needy, but that’s for other discussions. This will be a place for when the anxiety builds and the neediness begins to peak. There will be a series of dialogues that will help talk you down from the rafters and logically deal with the intense feelings of neediness that rise up. To extend the “salad bar” metaphor, let’s create an “online” salad bar of ideas and truths to chew on before we go off and devour our relationships with needs.

We are Needy People, but Good People. We are anxious about things we can’t control because we care so much. We aren’t bad, we bring good things into the world … good for our friends, families and loved ones. We just sometimes need help handling the intensity of our feelings in a world in which being needy and anxious aren’t helpful personality traits. I think we can identify and put into practice approaches and behaviors that will allow us to be the partner/friend/parent/child/spouse that we know we want to be. I hope you join me!

Please follow me on Medium for stories on tackling our neediness issues. Thanks, JD