Top Psychologist: UNMET Emotional Needs Will Destroy Your Relationship

When our needs are unmet, whether it's physical or emotional.

When we're not showing up in service in that way, our body will register threat, a lack of safety will drop into that survival brain, all of those different reactive moments that we spoke about conditioned ways of being.

And we won't be able to show up as responsive to connected, attuned partners for anyone else. So if the listeners, any, you know, men out there listening, who have had, who believe that to be true.

Urging you to, to question and perhaps begin to understand that that belief came from the lived experience where your emotions did not have the space and the validity that they inherently do. Emotions are physiological messengers. It's incredibly important to be connected to our emotional, to our physical bodies and therefore our emotional selves, because our emotions give us important information as to how we're navigating or experiencing our environments. And when we shut ourselves off from them, not only do we shut ourself off from that guidance, we shut ourself off from a whole aspect of who we are and our energetic self expression. And when we do that and drop back into survival mode, we can't show up in service of our loved ones, of our families, of our businesses, of whatever it is that is important to us because we will be solely focused, even if it's out of our awareness that we're doing this in survival. And many of us will be driven in that survival mode to repeat habitual adaptive patterns that don't often have our own and our loved one's best interest.

It's interesting because I said to a client the other day who had posed this. He'd grown up in a specific type of household and his emotions were not welcome. They just were not welcome. When he was young and he heard some of those messages of men, don't cry and those types of things, but it was more, it was much more specific than that, right? It was like, shut up, don't cry, those types of things. And so he really was and has been struggling. And one of the reasons why he came to work with me is that his marriage is not in a good place because his emotions have never had a seat at the table of his relationship. And he point blank asked me, why does it matter for me to have emotional needs in my marriage? Why does that even matter if I'm providing, if I'm making the money, if I'm doing these things, if I'm planning dates for my wife, why does it even matter? And I said, well, do you have emotions? And he said yes. And I said, okay. So because you have emotions, they need to have a spot in your relationship. Otherwise you will always feel like there is a huge part of who you actually are that is not welcome in your relationship, and that will breed resentment. I said, have you been resentful towards your wife? And he's like, yeah. I was like, there it is. Right? So when we don't have this space to bring this part of us into our life, that resentment is there. I'm curious if you can speak a little bit to the impact and. And the role that resentment has within relationships and intimacy, because I see that.

Quite a bit resentment is, I mean, your beautiful teaching even there. To that client, Connor, Resentment is a byproduct of anger. And anger evolutionarily is an emotion that indicates when our needs are unmet, in this case of the client, right? Our emotional self expression, this whole other aspect of our being, and. Or when our boundaries are being violated or overstepped, and when we're not looking at the role we're playing.

In those unmet needs by thinking and acting as if we don't have emotions when we do, or in other circumstances, right? By not putting up a boundary, creating a boundary and standing firm in that boundary. If and when we're experiencing a violation, what will happen is exactly as it has for your client. We will become resentful of the person or circumstance, even some of us at the world around us, very globally, at what we believe is the cause.

Of our very legitimate anger. And I think it might have been.

John Gottman. I'm not totally sure, though I know in marriage research, I believe it was him, he studied that contempt is the number one emotional indicator of a marriage divorce coming to an end or coming to a separation or of a divorce. And in my opinion, this is just like all of the spectrum, right, of anger at root, which is very legitimate. So anyone who's listening and is in that evolution to resentment, it's you who's causing me to not feel fully belonged or seen or to not have space for my needs to be met. Or maybe it's even evolved into contempt, where we are just so much anger boiled to the surface, possibly even having caused a separation or on the brink of causing one. I think the most empowering shift we can begin to make for ourselves in the possible future for these relationships around us, is to begin to see this deep, deep role that we're playing. All of the moments where we are enacting an unmet need, we are keeping part of ourself down because it can, I mean, result from anything, from explosive arguments, complete disconnection, living like strangers just in a home, sharing space. There can just being double life, having a whole world outside of a world and in the home as an outlet for whatever that looks like, whether it's virtual online or other relationships in general. All of these ways, you know, that we've. We're adapting and dealing with the anger that's very legitimate and or our continued attempts at trying to create space in some other aspect of our world or environment to meet these unmet needs.

Can you give some advice maybe for individuals who have had resentment creep up in themselves and in their relationship, whether in the past or the present, and how they can start to navigate through that? Because I think it's so common and I don't know if there's a lot of very good resourcing out there to help people with that.

I think resentment first acknowledging awareness that you have become present to this energetic expression of your body of anger, of a legitimate circumstance.

And not to kind of shame that realization and that awareness because that then can become an opportunity for you to create or begin to find space.

Within yourself to explore these unmet needs, these emotional expressions, and then ultimately within bringing to the t them to the table within your relationship. And something I do want to emphasize is it as I think most things in a healing journey, it takes time. And to also at the same time emphasize the energetic expression of anger, resentment, of contempt originates in our physiological body. So on that journey of curiosity, of expanding our space so that we can become more and more aware of what our needs are and then of our practice, vulnerable practice, in expressing whatever they might be, making sure that foundationally the body is included in that journey. Right. Exploring those pillars in terms of how are you physically caring for yourself? Do you have outlets for your energetic expression of this emotion? Because again, until our body can learn how to regulate, we will rely on those old ways that we've dealt with that anger, that resentment.

Yeah, I was going to say why is because you have a whole chapter on harnessing the wisdom of your body in the book. And I don't think that the majority of people when they think about being in a great relationship are super focused in on like got to make sure that I'm tuning into the wisdom of my body. So why. Why is that so important? And can you add some context for the people that are listening in terms of what that actually means and what aspects or elements of the connection to our body do we need to bring into a relationship?

Again, I keep going back Connor to this concept of belongings. It really just kind of is a pillar around all of this. To feel belonged and in a relationship and connected to one that's foundationally and bodied experience. Emotional attunement happens right when there's an energetic self expression of an individual and when there's a presence in another individual enough, not in their own mind, not thinking of how they're going to react or respond or correct what it was that they're hearing, not distracted or overwhelmed by now what's happening in their body, right? Their ability to stay calm and grounded and receptive to what they're hearing. So that at some point, energetically, even there can be a shared. This is kind of what empathy is, a shared vibration. That's what if I want to describe in somewhat scientific terms what, you know, emotional attunement is, it's like a form of entrainment, energetic entrainment. And so to feel this authentic connection, a belongedness in our relationship, to truly allow ourselves to be emotionally supported. And I think a lot of times we feel the contradiction of this when we're sharing or someone we love is sharing their emotional experience.

And we either receive or offer practical advice what we would do, we move out of that shared resonance, which in reality is what most of us, if not all of us are looking for to be seen and heard. As I shared earlier, one of those core needs in that emotional experience and all of that to be embodied begins with a safe and secure connection to a physical body. For some of us, that means, right? Removing our attentional focus from our thinking minds, our analyzing minds, our problem solving minds, or maybe our external focus to all the things we have to do and all the ways we have to show up for everyone else around us and beginning to pay consistent attention to our physical bodies. Because again, if our needs are unmet, we'll be in that reactive nervous system response because our bodies will feel threatened to enter that level of entrainment or attunement, to be able to give and offer the emotional support and knowing that we're all desiring, we have to be embodied in our emotional experience, which happens again in our bodies. So I think yes, and as most of my work is the case, you're going to meet some conversation about the relationship to our body, even in a relationship book, because it is so foundational in terms of creating the connection that so many of us are deeply desiring and often is laying at the root at so much of the disconnection and active conflict and reactivity and dehumanization. That many of us might be living in or experiencing and seeing in the world around us.

What you are saying, I think aligns a lot with what I am usually talking to men about, which is some version of your aim in your relationship. What I usually say is because some guys are very tactical. They're like, what's the one thing that I can do to make my relationship better? And so my response is always the same. Which is the one thing that you could do to improve your relationship is to learn how to out regulate your partner. And if you can, or even just learning how to regulate your body. But if you want to, you know, sometimes I like to gamify things. If you wanted to gamify it or create an aim or a goal or whatever it is, then out regulate your partner. And if you can figure out how to do that in a genuine way, not in a suppressive way, not repressing what you're feeling, none of those things, but you genuinely learn how to regulate your system, then your relationship and the contours of it and the volatility of it are all going to dramatically shift because you will disrupt the homeostasis of the relationship itself.