In modern parenting, parents often think about how to meet their child’s emotional needs. But how often do we consider our emotional needs as adults or whether our core emotional needs were met sufficiently by our caretakers when we were children?
Many of us may not even be in contact with what our core emotional needs are, having developed extreme self-sufficiency or because it’s hard to know what we’re missing if we’ve never had it. You may even feel like you are needy when you come into contact with your emotional needs or don’t deserve to have your needs met.
Most of the clients I see have patterns that play out in relationships or contribute to current mental health symptoms that relate to not having their core emotional needs met as children. This can occur even if you received well-intentioned parenting not just as a result of abuse or neglect. When our needs are not met we form unhelpful core beliefs (also known as schemas) about ourself. In certain situations. these schemas activate and feel painful. To learn more about these schemas, I have written about all of the early madalaptive schemas here
In this post, I will be discussing the core emotional needs of childhood as outlined in schema therapy. All children have the same core needs to develop healthily. We never grow out of these needs and continue to have emotional needs as adults. To continue reading this post click here
