How to calmly express your needs without getting emotional
By Orit Krug | October 20th, 2020
Why is it so difficult to express your needs to your partner without getting emotional?
The real question is, what old trauma is getting triggered in you when it’s time for you to speak up to your partner about what you need?
When you’re finally in a healthy relationship, but you still get overly emotional when expressing your needs, there’s a good chance that you’re bringing your old trauma into the conversation.
It’s NOT your fault. This happens automatically because your nervous system instinctively protects you from getting royally hurt like you did in the past.
Even though you know in your mind that your current partner is supportive and won’t hurt you, your primitive body reacts as if expressing your needs is going to end in something dangerous or even life-threatening (I’m not being dramatic, this is how our survival system works!)
Understand what trauma is getting triggered when you express your needs to your partner.
My client Marissa used to get VERY emotional every time she expressed her needs to her partner and children.
When she told me about it in our session, she became equally as emotional even though she’d already spent years going over this in talk therapy. She cried and asked me, “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? Why doesn’t anyone respect me?”
In those moments, I could see that her body was giving off the energy of an emotionally neglected 4 year-old. Her BODY showed that she was this little girl begging for love and attention. Talking about it in the mind was pointless for her.
Marissa’s story is that she never felt heard and seen in her childhood. No one gave her the emotional attention she needed as a young girl.
Even though that was over 40 years ago, she carried her trauma of emotional neglect into every single conversation with her partner. This caused her to ask for her needs in a very emotionally intense way with the premature expectation of being neglected, yet again.
It was a pretty vicious catch-22. When you verbally express your needs to your partner, but non-verbally say “You’re gonna disappoint me anyway,” then you’re bound to keep yourself in that victim cycle. Your partner’s going to feel pretty helpless knowing you can’t be satisfied no matter how hard they try.
Especially if your partner is a male. I hate to say it, but they tend to be “fixers” and “heros” – they want to help you feel better as soon as possible. When you’re crying or yelling as you express your needs, they automatically want to find a solution to make it better instead of HEARING the thing you’re actually asking for.
Are you subconsciously asking your partner to heal your trauma?
If expressing your needs comes with all your traumatic baggage from the past, then what you’re doing is subconsciously asking them to heal your trauma. You’re probably not doing it intentionally, but that expectation is inevitably there. I did the same to my husband when we started dating.
This creates a lose-lose situation for both of you. Your partner is not qualified to heal your trauma, and even if they were, it’s NOT their role to do that for you. That role belongs to a therapist OUTSIDE of your romantic relationship.
If the deeper need you’re asking for is to heal your trauma, you’ll inevitably be disappointed since they can’t help you or do it for you.
Let’s say you often ask your partner to come home early from a night out with friends to help you put the kids to sleep. Do you want them to come home simply because you need help or are you also secretly testing if they’re committed to you and your family?
If you have an ulterior motive or expectation that stems from heavy emotional baggage, your partner is going to be a lot more resistant to saying yes.
They may be even more inclined to want more space from you and not meet your needs. Not because they don’t love you, but because you are constantly asking them to heal your emotional trauma which feels like a pretty intense task they can’t realistically achieve.
Heal your trauma to break the vicious cycle of disappointment and calmly express your needs.
If you feel like no one ever pays attention, listens, or respects you, ask yourself: Is that really true? If it is, what part do I play in making this true?
Here’s some tough love: if NO ONE listens to you, it’s a reflection of YOU just as much as the other people in your life who are disappointing you.
Maybe you’re prematurely expecting everyone to disappoint you and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or you’re so scared to REALLY ask others to meet your needs that no one ends up meeting your needs.
You have to take ownership of this cycle for it to change.
I used to play this blame game with many people in my life too, especially my partner. It’s really hard to break the victim cycle when we’ve experienced trauma because the people who were supposed to love and protect us in the past failed to do so.
It’s hard to break the habit of not trusting people and accept healthy attention, love and care instead.
I personally know that it feels ESPECIALLY hard when you’ve already spent so much time in talk therapy or meditating to release your old trauma without experiencing any real change.
You’re not broken or damaged goods. It’s just not possible to fully access the old trauma from the mind or talking. Trauma gets trapped in the body and needs to be released from the body.
Until that happens, you’ll likely stay in a cycle of negative patterns no matter how much you tell yourself to stay calm as you express your needs.
Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.
Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.
Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.
This is NOT true!
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.
My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).
You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.
Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:
- Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
- Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
- An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.
