Conversations with myself - (4) - The neediness that plagues us — YouTube from the CEC Library

Imagine neediness assailing your life. When you are needy, you become bad-tempered and resentful toward people because they do not fulfill what you want, always thinking that the other person is deceiving you. You fill yourself with emotional weapons that never end, which means suffering. I consider neediness costly because it has a twin sister: frustration, which is anger's closest relative.

When you are needy, you become frustrated because you cannot want everyone to be what you want, give you what you want, or life to give you what you want. Frustration brings anger, and anger can expand. Emotional things are harder to reduce; their natural sequence is to increase because you need to cast them out, and to do that you need a greater emotion. Imagine a couple arguing and insulting each other: the husband shouts at the wife and pushes her, and the wife throws something at him. After this firefight, they reach into the chest of unhappiness for everything from the past and throw it in each other's faces, in an emotional nuclear explosion. They then go to bed together, make love, and say "I love you." The greater emotion of passion and sexuality expended all of that, and they say they love each other, as though that were love.

Neediness is a black hole, a bottomless pit. Up to a point you can resolve it, but doing so requires a search; afterward you will need an auxiliary ego, which may be a male or female friend, sibling, uncle, father, or someone who understands behavior. Neediness must not be allowed to grow until it becomes an insoluble pathology. It operates in affective, sexual, and food-related areas and in compulsive shopping. There are countless compulsions, such as a compulsion for chocolate: saying that one eats a little chocolate once in a while may mean every day. The same is true of someone who says they drink socially but drinks at lunch and dinner.

When someone asks me a question, I think I must have about 200 answers. Anyone can have 200 answers if they have a good imagination and good preparation, but how many are useful? When one intends to say something useful, the number of possible answers is roughly the number of approaches one can take in responding.