Insight #3
“Self-development programs often concentrate on helping people to distinguish between their “needs” and “wants”. Wants are minimized as something that we have control over and that can be changed via discipline, insight, character improvement, etc. Needs, however, are seldom questioned. When people want to make changes in their lives, they are asked to distinguish between wants and needs such that people focus on their wants and end up paying far less attention to their needs.
But needs (with very few exceptions such as food and oxygen) are also self-constructions. They just don’t seem like it because they appear to us to be crucial to the very foundations of our being. And in some cases, they probably are, but this doesn’t mean that we are going to wither away and die if we challenge them. It does mean, however, that we are going to have to change, oftentimes dramatically, and in ways that are distinctly uncomfortable for us.”
This was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to work on. In fact, it was a particularly hard area of self-deception for me to even identify. By the time we reach adulthood, we have built an identity that is based on assumptions about what we “need”. This identity (and the assumptions) are the result of life experiences (both positive and damaging, examined and unexamined). The trouble is, while these things may well be “needed” by us, they aren’t necessarily good for us. In order to get healthy (spiritually, physically, mentally, etc) we are going to need to change, and part of that change is going to have to be questioning and (in some cases) dismissing our “needs”.
This is hard to do because we have deceived ourselves into not questioning our “needs” because they are so ingrained in our psyche. Consequently, we think that not feeding a “need” will result in our crumbling into a million little pieces. We also believe that we are entitled to have our “needs” met, even if meeting these “needs” has consistently resulted in negative consequences for ourselves and others. Finally, even if we decide that we are not going to feed a need, or to (gasp) admit that it isn’t a need after all, we are going to be in for some rough times.
Some very rough times indeed.
