The Exhaustion of Endless Needs

Question: I have a question based on what we discussed today. We are trying to meet our needs and that of our children. I feel that sometime the needs are endless. No matter what one does for the child, there is endless expectations to meet their needs. There need to be something more that just meeting the needs. Any thoughts on this? 

Response:

Needs are under the ground, like the roots of a tree. While they cannot be seen, they are the root cause of all human behavior and feelings. The list of human needs is large, but finite. 

What is infinite are the strategies we can use to meet needs. This key distinction between needs and strategies is very helpful in discerning how to empathize with our children. For example, one day, our child might demand to have a pet. Another day, they want a playdate with a friend. On another day, they express their disappointment at how busy we are all day with work meetings. What is important to note is that these are all strategies, because they are attached to a specific person, object, location, thing, etc. To find the need underneath the strategy, NVC trains us to ask the question internally, “If my child had that, then what would they have?”

The need underlying all these strategies - a pet, playdate, parent's attention - is the same; connection! One could also name the need as love or to matter. When we can identify the needs behind their strategies, it enhances our ability to empathize with our children, hence the possibility that they experience understanding and relief in their bodies. We don't so much get caught up in the complexity of their strategies.

Here are two key premises of NVC:

“Our world offers abundant (not infinite) resources for meeting needs. When human beings are committed to valuing everyone’s needs and have regained their skills for fostering connection and their creativity about sharing resources, we can overcome our current crisis of imagination and find ways to attend to everyone’s basic needs.” 

And,

"Our capacity for peace is not dependent on having our needs met."

So when we talk of “meet” needs in NVC, we refer to acknowledging and getting in touch with them. Imagine shaking hands with our children's needs, “Hello beautiful need, I see you, I acknowledge you, and sometimes, I mourn that you are not met.” 

NVC empowers us to sit in empathy with the pain of unmet needs. I have found time and time again that even when it is not possible to meet everyone’s needs in the family, acknowledging and mourning unmet needs allows us to hold the sweet pain of the unmet need together. It is this experience of togetherness that is critical in family connection. Not being able to empathize with our children's needs creates separateness.

My experience repeatedly, over a prolonged period of time, is that my children, at the deepest level, can live with unmet needs, but not with the experience that their needs don't matter. If I can sit with my children’s pain, in empathy, not to “fix it”, or “cheer them up”, or show them how privileged they already are, my children can come to a feeling of being held with care, knowing that their needs matter, even when they are not met.

Srila Prabhupada explains that this material world is a hospital, not a hotel. So, by default, it is not a place where all our children's needs are meant to be met. What is important is that we "meet" needs with compassion, i.e., we acknowledge the beauty of our children's needs. We express care for their needs, through dialogue and discussion. Then, even if some of their needs are unmet, we have togetherness in mourning.

One powerful tool is to imagine, with our children, the experience of that need being met. "Wouldn't it be so nice to have a fuzzy pet that you could cuddle with all the time. Would it mean a lot to you to know that you matter dearly to this being, when you come home and they wag their tail and get excited?" I am giving this example because my children, in the past have wanted a pet. And while we tried to have a puppy, it didn't meet other needs, so we gave him to a friend. By imagining the needs that would be met if we still had our puppy, it validates the child's needs. 

NVC is not a process of focusing our energy on trying to satisfy all the needs of our child. It's a process that gives us tools to help our children find internal peace, through being empathized with, even in the midst of many unmet needs.