Reflecting On Neediness

A few Sundays ago, a friend of mine was speaking with my housemate Brian and told him that he was not feeling well. Brian offered to take him to urgent care. I was frustrated with this because I feel it is important to help people, in some situations, by forcing them to help themselves. This is the way of my earthly father. Teach them to be self-sufficient by leaving them to do for themselves. While this can be an effective way to help people grow, it can also be detrimental to the one who is aggressively helping the other in this way.

This approach to helping others aligns closely with how I interact with Brian, who can be forgetful and sloppy at times. He made me aware of this before we moved in together, but knowing it and experiencing it are quite different. My way of helping him is similar to what I described above. Leave the mess for him to clean up. Don’t remind him of the appointment, so he will learn to remember on his own. And when this doesn’t work gently, or not so gently, remind again...and again.

When none of this works, my frustration grows. This frustration leads me to reflect on its source. Why does this bother me so much? Is it control? Yes. Is it a desire for order? Yes. Is it coming from a knowledge that discipline leads to the order that allows Christ to better operate? Yes. But what else? Why does it make me angry? While showering this morning, the answer came to me. Their neediness reflects mine, and I hate my neediness.

Reflecting further, I realize that many of my needs were not met as a child and young adult by family, people in positions of power, and by peers. It made me so sad to feel I could not turn to these people for love, support, and camaraderie, and I came to hate feeling sad, and so came to hate the need behind the sadness.  

Because of this, anyone who reminds me of my neediness and of the wounds I carry caused by it, I strike out at in some way. Internally, they cause me great discomfort. They hold up a mirror to me that I have long avoided. A mirror that growing children often hold up to their parents, sometimes resulting in the same anger and desire to be treated roughly that I experience and did experience with my dad and many other men.

Despite these challenges, there's an upside. Through this, I can see that the neediness of others, which is a spiritual gift to me, is also a psychological gift, reminding me that I am a tender-hearted man. It reminds me of the crust I developed on my heart that has slowly had to be chipped away through allowing emotion on my part. And having men like these two brothers in my life aids in the chipping, so long as I don’t run them off with my sometimes too rough love.

Human-Written AI Spell-Checked 5/17/21 AD

Image from WIX AI