Difficulty Expressing Needs as a Survival Strategy

(Summary) Difficulty identifying or expressing your needs isn’t always simply a communication problem. If expressing needs during childhood led to anger, criticism, rejection, punishment, or other negative consequences, learning to ignore them could help you stay safer. Over time, you might have learned not only to keep your needs to yourself, but to stop noticing them altogether. This childhood survival strategy can continue into adulthood, making even small needs and preferences difficult to recognize or communicate.

If your usual response is “I don’t know” or “nothing” when you’re asked about what you need, you might believe you have a communication problem. People in your life might even tell you that you have one. I’m going to challenge that. For many of you, you have adopted a survival strategy that looks like a communication problem.

How the strategy develops

Children are wired to communicate their needs. Babies cry when they are hungry or need a clean diaper. A child may cling to an adult’s leg seeking comfort if they are someplace unfamiliar. But for some babies and children, expressing those needs repeatedly leads to:

• anger or punishment
• ridicule or criticism
• rejection
• being treated as demanding or selfish
• being ignored
• escalating an already volatile situation

In these cases, children learn that asking can make things worse. Children adapt to meet the demands of their environment in ways that increase their chances of staying safe and surviving.

What survival may require instead

For these children, adapting to this type of environment may mean:

• Asking for less.
• Drawing less attention to yourself.
• Handling things yourself.
• Paying attention to what other people need instead.

Eventually, it may become safer not just to hide your needs, but to stop noticing them. If you don’t notice that you need something, you can’t ask for it and get punished. This approach means you as a child don’t have to consciously decide each time not to say something. By not noticing at all, the possibility of slipping up and asking for something decreases quite a bit.

Why it continues in adulthood

But now you’re an adult and you still believe you don’t have needs or preferences or that you don’t know what they are. Why is that? You are no longer living in the environment you grew up, but your brain remembers what it learned back then, that:

• Having needs creates problems for yourself.
• Asking puts relationships at risk.
• Other people’s needs are more important than your own.

This is true even when it comes to small requests. Your brain learned that the size of the need was not correlated to the risk, so for safety all needs should be ignored. As an adult, if you are able to identify even a small need, you might experience anxiety, shame, guilt, apologizing, panic, or immediately wanting to take the request back.

Becoming aware of your needs

If you are realizing that this might describe you, you might be wondering what you can do to change this. How can you begin to become more aware of your needs so you even have a choice about whether or not to ask? Next week, I’ll be talking about that.

Why do I have trouble knowing what I need?

If your needs were frequently ignored, criticized, punished, or treated as a problem during childhood, you may have learned to pay less attention to them. Over time, not noticing your needs can become an automatic way of protecting yourself from the consequences you once associated with expressing them.

Can childhood trauma make it difficult to express your needs?

Yes. If expressing needs was unsafe or repeatedly led to negative consequences, you may have learned that asking for things creates problems, threatens relationships, or makes you a burden. Those learned expectations can continue even when your current relationships are much safer.

Why do I feel guilty or anxious when I ask for something?

Your brain may associate expressing needs with risk based on earlier experiences. As a result, even an ordinary request can trigger guilt, anxiety, shame, or an urge to take the request back, despite there being little risk in your current situation.

Why can I recognize other people’s needs but not my own?

In an unpredictable or unsafe childhood environment, paying close attention to other people’s moods and needs may have helped you stay safer. Meanwhile, noticing your own needs may have offered little benefit—or even created additional risk. With enough repetition, attention to others can become much more automatic than attention to yourself.

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