It Felt Like Love

When being needed is convoluted with being loved, we run the great risk of faulty programming. As the oldest daughter in a family with nine children, being needed was an everyday part of life from age 6 on, pretty much.

As good as it was (regarding having good life skills and adaptability), it set me up to be willingly used and abused as an adult. I would do anything, anything at all, to feel useful and needed. Because that meant I would be loved, right?

The problem with that is this: There is never just one side to the story. It is never black and white, all good or all bad.

My parents really did love me. And my mom really did need me. It wasn’t the same thing, but it was all a big pot ‘o mush in my childhood brain. I had no idea where one stopped and the other started. How could I?

The people who needed me the most loved me the most. Maybe. My grandparents loved the shit out me. I played violin for gramma and her friends. I helped my other grams with her gardens. I felt needed. But, looking back, I don’t think they needed me. They enjoyed me. They wanted my company. But my perception was skewed.

What if the paradigm shifted and we just enjoyed those that we loved…we didn’t NEED them?

I know my parents enjoyed me as well…okay, they enjoyed certain things about me. They didn’t enjoy me having stories to tell them about my everyday assaults at school by boys. They didn’t enjoy my stomach pains, my migraines, my panic attacks.

They did enjoy my singing, my violin playing, and my lack of nervousness while speaking in public. They enjoyed that I got good grades and had a great rapport with my teachers and other parents.

They didn’t enjoy my lack of girlfriends and my having boyfriends and boys who were friends, instead. They didn’t enjoy my raging hormones.

This could go on and on. But one thing I know about how my brain processed love, is that it wasn’t “right”. I left my house at age 17 not knowing that I needed to feel needed. Even if it irritated me, I needed to feel needed.

During freshman year, some of my roommates had no idea how to clean or cook. They could barely dress themselves. So, what did I do? I either did the work alone or took turns with the roommates who did know how. I hated being needed but craved it… a vicious cycle.

I found a man-child who “needed” me. He had no idea what he would do with his life. Thus…my life had meaning. I was needed. I supported his ventures, his education, his going after a job with the CIA (a 1.5-year-long process), and his hobbies, so he could be happy.

But he was not happy. My hard work and love were never enough. So I worked harder so he would feel loved, so he would be happy.

It was never about me and my happiness. My happiness depended on his happiness. My happiness was connected to everyone in my life’s happiness. My mom’s happiness was my happiness as a child. When mama was happy, I could breathe. I literally never thought about my own, personal happiness.

If I had free time, I might go read a book or work on my cross-stitching. (no, I wasn’t Amish. I just loved quiet hobbies.) I could maybe go on a bike ride or go throw rocks in the creek. Those made me happy. But I didn’t really think about it. I just did those things to get away from people.

But Mom was often happy. My hard work paid off there. Yes, I willingly gave her my childhood, unknowingly, but she did her part as well.

But it did teach me a very, very faulty principle. That the “other person” in the relationship could be influenced by my love, my hard work, and my intentions for them. They can, of course, but in the end, it’s up to them. And mom was good at regulating her own emotions. Her default emotion was happiness. I was taught by one of the best.

But that “their happiness is up to them” piece is the tricky bastard. To be loved is NOT to be needed. To be loved is to be respected, accepted, and enjoyed for who you are, not what you can do.

Strangely, it’s kinda like the whole faith-works quandary that Christians find themselves in. Faith is all we need, right? But works are the direct consequence of that faith. We DO things because we LOVE God. We DO things because we LOVE people.

But loving, respecting, and accepting them truly is enough, just like faith is enough.

Had I known this, I would have been able to let myself sleep for more than a few hours a night from the age of 19 to 44. I would not have needed to work myself to the bone, and nearly to death. I would have respected myself and my own limitations.

To be needed is wonderful. But it is not love. Being needed can play into the whole savior complex issue many of us have. We all want to save someone, right? If we feel needed, we know we are helping someone. That someone may or may not even want our help, frankly.

So, what does it mean to be enjoyed, not needed? What does it mean to love without the confusion of neediness?

I am working on it because I haven’t figured it out yet. I want to be needed still. Maybe it’s a balance between the two that is asking to be found. And that’s usually the case. When something is haunting me, it’s not a black and white thing. I am usually being asked to find the gray area that works.

But deprogramming the traumatized child’s mind is hard work. There are a lot of stories to tease apart and make sense of. We each have this work to do. Thanks for being with me as I do mine.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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