The Difference Between Unworthy and Unmet
Needs That Didn’t Fit
When I was young, I experienced needs, feelings, fears, and sensitivities that did not seem to be commonly shared, openly discussed, or well supported.
I seemed to be more affected by things than many of the people around me. I had reactions, worries, questions, and needs that did not appear to have a place within the common experience.
I did not question the environment. I questioned myself.
When Feelings Became Dangerous
What I recall vividly is not the feelings themselves but what followed
If I was hurt, afraid, overwhelmed, hungry, lonely, or needed something that fell outside what was expected or understood, there seemed to be an unspoken cost.
I couldn’t make sense of it at the time, but I learned to associate having a need with danger.
As if the original feeling was not trouble enough. The response to it was the kicker.
I wasn’t just sad. I was afraid and ashamed of my sadness.
I wasn’t just hungry. I was fearful of being hungry.
I wasn’t just anxious. I was anxious about being anxious.
Somewhere along the way, those experiences fused together.
The feeling and the consequence. The vulnerability and the diminidhing and banishing response.
What I Made It Mean
For years, I thought my personality depression and anxiety were the problem.
What I recognize now is that much of my anxiety and despair may have flowed from anticipating what would happen when I had a need, a feeling, a preference, a limit, or a reaction for which there seemd no allowance within the environment around me.
What I was taught to beleive was that there was something wrong with me.
That I was the problem. My existence. Who and how I was.
That I was less deserving of care, understanding, protection, patience, or support than others.
Not because anyone sat me down and said so.
Because it seemed to be the conclusion supported by the evidence available to me.
A Consensus I Could Not Escape
I did not arrive at that conclusion alone. It seemed to fit the rules of the world around me.
Care, belonging, protection, support felt conditional.
And when those things remained absent, the most obvious explanation was that I had somehow failed to qualify for them.
It still feels as though the only thing my family and I agreed on was my lack of value. And once I stopped agreeing to that, the system collapsed and I was said to have opted out.
That structure and experience shaped the way I understood myself, the way I understood relationships. And what I came to expect from other people.
Searching for an Exit
The problem was that I could not stop being myself.
I could not stop feeling what I felt.
I could not stop experiencing the world through the nervous system and sensitivities unique to me.
I attempted EVERY means of escape.
Food. Sex. Alcohol. Drugs.
They solved nothing. They offered interruption.
A way to step away from the exhausting experience of being conscious inside a life built entirely on fear, pain, and loss, which seem to know no end.
Being blacked out, distracted, consumed, or off the grid felt preferable to being fully present.
What If I Wasn’t the Problem?
For most of my life, I assumed the missing piece was worthiness.
I believed that care, understanding, protection, and support existed, and that my task was to become deserving enough to receive them.
What never occurred to me was the possibility that these things might not have been available in the ways I needed them. The possibility that the absence of nourishing care and safety was not evidence of my lack of value.
Unworthy or Unmet?
I don’t have conclusions.
Only questions.
What if I spent years trying to solve the wrong problem?
What if I mistook the absence of something for evidence of my worth?
What if the story was not that I was unworthy?
What if the story was that I was unmet? And I had been baptized in the waters of being unmet by people who would not meet me- and came to think that- was truth, connection, love, and home.
And what if those are not the same thing at all?
