From Giver to Receiver: Embracing Your Emotional Needs

If your emotional needs aren’t being met in your primary relationship, it could be because they weren’t a priority during your upbringing, so you imprinted that it’s normal to be a giver, not a receiver.

Let's talk more about how this imprinting happened, and then in a moment I'll share one way to change it so that your relationship can change too.

People who have an easy time giving quality attention and sensing into another person are using a skill called attunement. Attunement refers to the ability to deeply understand and connect with the emotions, feelings, and needs of another person. It involves being sensitive and responsive to their emotional cues, creating a sense of emotional harmony, resonance and connection.

Some people are really good at providing attunement, but aren’t necessary good at getting it. Why is that?

It goes back to how you were raised. An upbringing that undervalued your emotional needs and required you to be a parent to your parent/s in some way (being a parent’s primary listener or confidant, managing a parent’s illness, etc.) will teach you to give attunement, rather than receive it.

If you grew up in an environment where your emotional needs were not prioritized, you likely have exceptional skills in sensing and understanding others' feelings and needs but struggle to recognize and address your own emotional needs.

You may even view being the emotional caregiver as so normal that you may not realize you’re giving so much, or you don’t expect others to reciprocate what you so easily give, unknowingly perpetuating this pattern in your relationships.

Having unmet emotional needs has a bad impact on mental well-being, self-esteem, and overall relationship satisfaction but addressing these needs can lead to more fulfilling and intimate connections.

One powerful way to get your emotional needs met requires you to repair the wounds of the inner child. This is reparenting work and looks like imagining yourself now going back to the little version of you, possibly at different ages and in different memory scenarios, and giving that child the safety, validation, and emotional attunement it needed.

Imagine connecting with your wounded inner child and creating a safe and nurturing space for them. You build trust by listening attentively to their needs and emotions. Whether they yearn for a comforting hug and reassurance of safety or simply want you to remove them from a distressing situation, you respond with attuned care.

As you embrace the role of the loving and supportive parent, you provide the emotional care and support that your inner child longed for during those challenging moments. Offering the comfort they need, you reassure them that you have their back, and they are safe now. You understand the importance of being present and offering the love and protection they may have missed during difficult times in their past.

Through this profound practice of reparenting, you develop a deep bond of trust with your inner child, providing them with the attuned care and understanding they need to feel whole, healed and completed.

This inner healing and connection empower you to face life's challenges with a newfound sense of self-compassion and emotional resilience. As you nurture this relationship with your little one, you cultivate a loving foundation from within, enabling you to foster healthier and more fulfilling relationships with others in your life, especially your partner.

Reparenting work gives your essential self the emotionally attuned emotional care that it has always needed and still longs for. By doing this, you integrate into a person who receives tender loving care, and it begins by you giving it to yourself!

By validating these painful past experiences and providing the needed attention to those past hurts, you start to grow past the pattern that was imprinted from childhood. You literally become a different person, one who is used to receiving quality attunement.

You will naturally bring this new growth into your relationship dynamics as a result and it eventually leads to you feeling very clear and comfortable with your needs so you can start communicating them to your partner from a secure, loving and loved place inside.

Helping you reparent your inner child is just one of the things I do in my 3-month 1-on-1 program. I also help you connect to your feelings, needs, desires and boundaries by learning to listen to the sensations that arise in your body that are constantly providing you with information about yourself (a somatic approach).

We also work on translating all the healing and growth you’re doing into new and effective ways to communicate with your romantic partner (or people you’re dating) to improve the connection and how you get your needs met in your relationships.

It's all aimed at helping caring and attention people improve their current romantic relationship or to attract a new partner from a more healed, whole and integrated place. DM me if interested and we'll chat to see if it's a good fit.