Having a dire need to be needed is a sure set up for a slow fall down a painful slope. It's a dangerous thing to live your life desperately wanting someone to embrace you.
I'm not speaking of anything I heard or researched, this is indeed what I know, what I've lived.
At one point - and even now at times - I wrestled with this disease of needing to be needed. I needed people to call me for the job. I thought less of myself if my phone never rang with someone soliciting my ideas or input. God forbid if there was something happening that I had the skills for but wasn't asked to participate in. You see, I convinced myself that my ultimate worth was built on what others needed from me. Consequently, if I ever got the impression that I wasn't needed, I immediately discredited my existence. Yeah, it's that dangerous.
Here's Step 1 to conquer this disease: Realize that you have worth independent of relationships and what you have to offer. What you bring to the table adds to your worth, it doesn't determine your worth. When I realized I mattered even if no one ever needed me, I collided with freedom.
Another danger with this disease is the habit of creating dependability to ensure that you're always needed. This means, you do everything in your power to be sure you're being counted on....even if it involves positioning yourself to be misused and taken advantage of. When you're hungry for acceptance, you become addicted to compromise and foolish investments; and eventually, you become severely numb to abuse and mistreatment, mistaking it for love and acceptance.
If you haven't already figured it out, dependability is a monster; it's the cousin of dysfunction. And dysfunction is a bigger beast than the disease of needing to be needed. Entertain it long enough and you're bound to destroy the most precious assets that exist in your life.
Here's Step 2: Settle in your spirit that you can be successful at getting someone to depend on you, yet fail at getting them to love you. It's so key to understand that being depended on doesn't automatically translate into appreciation or love.
If we're to be candid for a quick second, wanting to be loved is the primary underlying motive of forcing dependency. We figure that it's a 2-for-1 special, totally oblivious to the truth that, what we think is a cure is actually a curse.
You know what the greatest danger of all is when it comes to having a need to be needed? The lost of self. Eventually, you will lose yourself trying to fit in places void of the capacity to hold you. The mindset that we have to adopt is,"I won't be needed everywhere, but I'm necessary somewhere." Your love, gifts, presence, and purpose belong and they matter. Value them too much to force them where they don't fit. We were designed to be everything everywhere and to everyone.
