Why Do I Put Other People’s Needs Before Mine?
How early attachment experiences shape our relationships.
3 min read | Illustration by Mayara Lista
It may be no surprise that your early experiences of love and care influence how you anticipate getting your needs met in your relationships. As the psychotherapist Stan Tatkin has written, “We learn to love ourselves precisely because we have experienced being loved by someone. We learn to take care of ourselves because someone has taken care of us.”
But this concept is deceptively simple. Based on the neuroscience of attachment theory and human connectivity, we have a well-known rule that “what fires together, wires together.” We are born wired for human connection, but our neural pathways are also shaped and formed by felt experiences of human connection.
Neural pathways can be thought of as well-travelled roads - the ones that you can drive down without thinking or asking for directions. In your day-to-day life, these pathways reveal themselves in the ways you reflexively anticipate the best or worst out of your relationships.
“These reflexes and the responses they elicit can turn into feedback loops,” according to Tina Tacorian, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy. “For example, if you shy away from asserting your needs with your partner because you’re afraid of being rejected, you may find yourself feeling defeated and ultimately withdrawing from the relationship.” The more you withdraw, the less likely you are to get your needs met, and so on.
“If you shy away from asserting your needs with your partner because you’re afraid of being rejected, you may find yourself feeling defeated and ultimately withdrawing from the relationship.”
“This is a common pattern in anxious attachment styles,” shares Tina, a therapist who specializes in working with people trying to heal their attachment styles. “If early experiences of expressing your feelings were ignored or met with anger, you had to look after yourself by focusing more on your caregiver.”
You may have learned to recede and diminish yourself in order to protect yourself from further hurt and disappointment. As a consequence, you may find that it is easier to take care of other people’s needs, while being less aware of your own. Again, Tina offers some explanation here: “Your neural pathways have been trained to focus outside of yourself out of a fear of abandonment, rejection, or retaliation.”
You might know what other people want, but not know what you want. This is a deeply unsatisfying and unsustainable way of being, at best. At worst, “we can move through the world feeling ashamed or guilty of our needs,” shares Alessandra Mikic, a therapist at Downtown Somatic Therapy who specializes in helping millennial women achieve healthier relationships.
Guilt and shame acts to suppress our needs and the reaction has its own kind of logic: of course we feel ashamed when a person who we love is unable to take care of us. It’s natural to blame ourselves when our needs don’t get met, especially when we’ve never learned to expect it any other way.
“You may have learned to recede and diminish yourself in order to protect yourself from further hurt and disappointment”
The good news is that these patterns aren’t fixed or hard-wired because of your early experiences. The human brain has plasticity throughout the life span, which means that we are capable of growth and change. So, new experiences (like those with a therapist you trust) have the power to override your old ways of expressing your needs.
This innate potential we all have to override old patterns of relating is why therapy works and how therapy works. AEDP therapy believes that we have a natural propensity towards growth and healing through the felt experience of safe and authentic human relationships.
Therapy can help you unlock and heal those parts of yourself that have been so painfully suppressed for so long. Learning to share and “stay with” the embodied feelings of shame, embarrassment, and guilt that come to the surface in a session can help us, together, process the sadness and loneliness of not being met in your times of need. These are the deep wounds that were being masked by shame and guilt all along.
Working in couples therapy is another way people can have a safe experience of communicating their needs while getting assurance from their partner that they won't be made to feel guilty or rejected for having needs. While communicating your needs might feel intimidating or burdensome at first, a kind and affirming therapist can help to slowly ease some of the deep-rooted discomfort and together, help you develop a more authentic connection to yourself and others.