Tender Needs

Continuing from last week’s blog on Preferences, Demands And Emotional Security, this week Wise Heart defines tender needs – what they are, some common tender needs and support in how to discover some of your tender needs. You can learn more about tender needs, uncovering and healing your relationship to your tender by learning and integrating Mindful Compassionate Dialogue skills, competencies and consciousness. In our next blog, we’ll look at how to Heal Repetitive Reactive Dynamics.

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When a universal need arises and is met with painful or neglectful responses from others more often than with supportive responses, that need begins to be associated with pain.  As a need becomes associated with pain, you develop adaptive strategies to protect against future pain related to that need. These adaptive strategies take a variety of forms such as becoming secretive, tough, endearing, industrious, or simply shutting down around needs and becoming numb.

When the painful context in which these adaptive strategies were born changes, and you find yourself in a supportive context, yet the strategies persist, we call that reactivity. These formerly adaptive strategies of protection now block your ability to receive nourishment around that need.  This is called a nourishment barrier.

When particular needs are linked to reactivity and nourishment barriers, we call these tender needs as a shorthand, but, of course, the need itself is a universal energy and doesn’t shift from person to person.  It’s the relationship to the need that is tender. In addition, because of these tender relationships to needs, it seems like a person has more or less of a particular need.

We all have the same needs that rise and fall according to the flow of aliveness.  It is simply our relationship to the need that has it show up differently with each person. The most common tender needs include: safety, belonging, support, intimacy, authenticity, autonomy, acceptance, to be seen/heard, and inclusion.

Practice

Take a few minutes now to either identify or reflect on your tender needs.  Bring to mind moments when you experienced deep nourishment regarding that need. Identify anything about that experience that could be easily repeated.

If you have not identified your tender need(s), grab your feelings and needs list by signing up HERE and use one or more of the reflection questions below to help you identify your tender need.

  • Identify your most common complaints, wishes, or requests.  Mindfully imagine yourself in those moments when you are making the complaint, wish, or request.  Then look through the needs list and find the needs alive for you in those situations.
  • Mindfully imagine yourself in 2 or 3 of your most reactive interactions in the last year or few years.  Then look through the needs list to find the needs alive for you in those situations.
  • Recall recent times of reactivity.  Then look through the needs list to find the needs alive for you in those situations.
  • Reflect on situations in which you are quick to defend, justify, get angry, or protect.  What needs are alive for you in those moments?
  • Look through the needs list and notice if there is a need you don’t think you have, that is, one that doesn’t ever seem to come up for you.  This may be an exiled tender need.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog.

Thank you for reading, for being here, and for being you.

With love.
Ceferino

If you would like to learn and cultivate the relationship competencies, communication skills and emotional capacity needed to identify your tender needs and reactive patterns, heal them, be less insecure and reactive around them, and instead be more grounded, regulated and centred within yourself, having the confidence and skills to meet your needs or make effective requests to help get them met, have a look at our upcoming Mindful Compassionate Dialogue course.

You are also invited to join our free biweekly Empathy Circle, where you can learn and discover what empathy is, and more importantly, practice giving and receiving empathy, allowing you to be deeply seen and heard in whatever challenge or celebration you’re navigating.

If you’d like to experience a powerful coaching conversation, book a complimentary 1:1 Coaching Call with me.

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