TThe quality of every relationship depends on how well emotional needs are met. That said, most people would find it difficult to say what those needs are. areand that regardless of whether they are your own or someone else’s: friend, partner, child, grandchild, employer or employee.
It might sound like a big task to figure out what they are, but guess what! The emotional needs of others are the same basic as yours. Is there a simple way to think about and attend to the emotional needs of others?
The answer turns out to be yes, because those needs are the same ones with which we all grew up in childhood. Instead of being overcome by the time we reach adulthood, they become the foundation of emotional life in adulthood. Here is a brief summary of the six essentials:
1. Every relationship is based on connection through the recognition of the other person with their own needs, desires and feelings. In healthy relationships, satisfying connections are established as basic feelings like anger, fear, sadness, joy, etc. are shared and accepted. Simply put, healthy relationships are based on a stable emotional ‘home base’ where each party’s feelings and needs are confirmed.
2. Everyone needs to maintain that ‘home base’ while acknowledging that there is a larger world beyond the relationship. Keeping that ‘base of operations’ intact provides the security needed to explore that world and find out what’s out there. If the base is threatened, the choice is to leave the base and cut the connection, or to maintain the connection and stop finding out what’s out there. Healthy relationships allow for the continuation of that stable ‘home base’ as partners explore in a way that increases their mutual security.
3. Bonding is great, but eventually the need to be independent arises. People need to create, set, and maintain healthy boundaries with each other. They need to establish ‘this is mine and that is yours’, and ‘this far and no further’. Healthy relationships have boundaries that allow each person to be themselves while respecting the separation from the other person.
4. It would be great if other people were who WE need or want them to be, but that’s not the way healthy relationships work. Each person needs to explore who they are: their likes, dislikes, talents, abilities, inclinations, and interests. Healthy relationships maintain connection and mutual support while allowing each party to develop their own identity.
5. While healthy relationships often share the same or similar values, it is rare that each party in a relationship has everybody the same values as the other. He witnesses the relationships of introverts with extroverts, of children and parents, of man with woman, of father who stays at home with father who works. Variation of values and priorities is inevitable. Unhealthy relationships are handled with ultimatums (my way or the highway!). Healthy ones allow for differing values between parties with negotiated common ground.
6. If each party in a relationship has reached adulthood, then each has formed all the parts of themselves to form a complete personality. Being in relationship with another No to mean being that other person. Nor does it mean that one part absorbs the other. Healthy relationships allow and even celebrate the other as a whole person.
The bottom line is this: the quality of every relationship of any kind depends on how well these needs are met.