When you find yourself feeling self-doubt—a widespread challenge for HSPs—identifying and honoring your needs is a powerful way to restore your equanimity.
This is the glory time of year for our dahlias. The plants respond to the cooler nights with a riot of blooms, like the glorious final burst of a fireworks display.
Why, then, have I featured a picture of shriveled brown objects, rather than our photogenic flowers? Good question. Homely and unassuming as they may look, each of these tubers—some no bigger than a man’s thumb—will grow into a plant taller than me. In other words, they are the source of all the blooming beauty we are seeing now.
Our needs play a similar role. Needs aren’t spectacular and preoccupying like feelings can be. “Contribution” doesn’t grab your attention the way anxiety does. “Self-respect” seems abstract next to the whole-body unpleasantness of feeling overwhelmed.
Yet in reality, our needs are the “tubers” from which our feelings grow. When our needs are met, we feel good feelings. When our needs aren’t met, we feel “bad” or painful feelings.
It might surprise you to hear this, given our reputation for “all the feels, all the time”, but highly sensitive people (HSPs) can be surprisingly illiterate when it comes to our feelings, let alone our needs. Identifying and connecting the two takes practice, as Marshall Rosenberg taught in his pioneering Nonviolent Communication work.
As we improve our “feelings and needs literacy”, we create a new depth of self-connection. For HSPs, this is particularly good news. Why? Because needs-based self-connection provides a powerful antidote to one of our most dreaded afflictions.
Self-doubt: the HSP plague
In Psychotherapy and the Highly Sensitive Person, Dr. Elaine Aron writes that in addition to a tendency to overarousal and stronger emotional reactions, low self-esteem is a problem “common to almost every highly sensitive person.” (p. 72). When your self-esteem is low, you become prone to self-doubt.
It’s perhaps easier to see this if you externalize it. Imagine you are the parent of a young child. She is learning to tie her shoes. You say to her, “I sincerely doubt you can do that.” (I know this sounds painful and ridiculous; the things we say to ourselves often are, and we can see it more clearly if we imagine saying them to someone else.)
If your child’s self-esteem is intact, she might respond with a puzzled look at you. However, she will then resume trying to tie her shoe. However, if she has already learned to doubt herself—by having been doubted by others, or by watching them doubt themselves—she might start to cry and give up.
Similarly, as adults, we can paralyze ourselves with doubt. This paralysis makes us anxious. When we’re anxious, we can’t focus well, and we don’t do our best. This reinforces our self-doubt, creating a vicious cycle.
That word “vicious” fits, too, doesn’t it? The inner criticism we can heap on ourselves when we are in a place of self-doubt can be truly terrible. We need reliable ways to transform our self-doubt.
Befriending your inner critic, and practicing self-appreciation as described in this thoughtful article, may help. However, I’ve found that connecting to the needs underlying my actions–even my seemingly mundane, boring actions—is a particularly effective antidote for self-doubt.
How to identify your needs
If you are feeling self-doubt, along with the anxiety that so often accompanies it, take time at the end of your day to do a “needs inventory.” I suggest you print this feelings and needs list for easy reference. You’ll need a pen and paper, also.
Make a list of what you did today, from the moment you woke up. I include everything: “brushed my teeth, took medication, made the bed, 25 minutes of tai chi and qi gong, responded to Mom’s daily morning text, confirmed client session time change,” and so on.
I also list things I did that I didn’t feel so great about: “Got cranky with my partner for buying non-organic lettuce (yeah, we had a lettuce power struggle for a while there), doom-scrolled for 15 minutes at lunch.” It’s important to include these, too, as you’ll soon see.
When you’ve completed your description of your day, notice how you feel. I find I feel a bit better already, simply having acknowledged what I’ve done. Now, look at the “needs” side of your feelings and needs list. Starting at the top of your description of your day, consider the first thing you described.
What needs were met—or unmet—for you, in that moment? If you are developing a literacy of needs, you’ll probably find it helpful to read through the needs list, working by process of elimination.
“Hmm. When I did the dishes at lunch time, was I meeting a need for air? No… Water? No…” Keep going until a need, or needs, clicks: “Ah! Doing those dishes met my needs for contribution and order.”
Write the needs—met, or unmet—next to the item. Work through your day in this way.
Empowering yourself with needs awareness
Once you’ve finished identifying the needs at play in each item on your list, notice if you see any patterns. Do certain needs show up again and again? For me, for example, “contribution” comes up often. Many things I do, I do to contribute to life, or to another person’s well-being. This, in turn, contributes to my well-being, because contribution is a high value for me.
Met (and occasionally unmet) needs for self-care come often for me, too. I highly value self-care. When I get tired, frazzled, or cranky, I’m not much use to myself or anyone else. So attending to my need for self-care also helps me meet my need for contribution.
If I’ve behaved in a way I don’t feel good about (like getting upset with my partner about lettuce, or doom-scrolling, or staying up too late), I’ll typically identify unmet needs for self-care, consideration, and integrity. This is painful to see, but also I find it practical and helpful.
Specifically, seeing my unmet needs begs the question, “OK, what needs was I trying to meet at those moments? How could I meet those needs in a healthier way in the future?” When I ask this kind of question, I empower myself to find creative, positive ways to meet my needs.
Whatever the needs you find, though, seeing the needs at the root of your feelings and your actions enlightens you about your choices. Self-doubt is a cue to examine your needs. One way or another, this process of exploration will relieve your self-doubt. Either it will confirm that you have in fact been acting in harmony with your needs…or it will reveal to you what changes you need to make so that you can act in harmony with your needs.
Leading a values-based life
I’ll say it again: when you know how to identify the needs underlying your choices, you empower yourself to evaluate whether you are living your values, moment by moment. Even when the news is momentarily “bad”—that is, when you discover you’ve acted in a way that did not meet your needs—the very act of identifying the unmet need points you towards ways of getting the need met.
The truth is, we can’t control outcomes. Nor can we control other people. But we can control our own actions and attitudes, and striving to align our actions and attitudes with our most valued needs is the best antidote I know to self-doubt.
Knowing the needs you are meeting throughout each day gives you the power to chart your life according to your needs and values. That way, no matter how anyone else reacts, you know you are on the course that is right for you.
Image ©2024 Emily Agnew
Hi Emily. Can you say a bit more about connecting unmet needs with bad feelings? For example, if I snap at my partner and feel bad about it, do I look at what need I was trying to meet by snapping?