needs that need meeting:

I am trying to learn how to ask for what I need without feeling

guilty
ashamed
angry.

I think this will *only* happen when I can find people who do not

guilt
shame or
reject me

when I ask for what I *need*.

***
Comment I made on Michael’s blog, cut and pasted and dragged here:

When I saw that your therapist is sad when she sees you suffering, I felt - I don't know - jealous? resentful? angry?

Because I've never experienced this feeling of care and concern from a woman.

My mother, it seems, has always looked on it from a distance, as if my feelings have nothing to do with her. It actually *hurts* just to be in her physical presence, as if there is this giant *bruise* on my *soul*. It *aches* when I'm near her. Which is why I spend as little time with her as humanly possible.

It took me a long time to get this, but when I lived with her as an adult (?) for five years, I became more and more aggressive, more demanding, began feeling like I was some kind of emotional poltergeist - very volatile, on edge all the time, never able to relax.

I realize, looking back on it, that I *needed* her to *respond* to me, in some obvious, visible, tangible way that I could actually *feel*, instead of this cold, unresponsive demeanor she always seemed to wear.

When she *was* moved by something I was experiencing, she'd hug me, but never say anything, and I always felt like it was *me* comforting *her* - as if my needs and feelings were so frightening and troublesome to her that it was *her8 that needed the hug, not me. So I actually found her hugs repulsive - I would push her away and feel angry, because *my* needs were not being met - only hers.

Yikes. Wonder why I can only express some of this stuff *here*, and not in my own space (blog)? I guess I need the 'witnessing' provided by knowing you'll read this.

I wonder if it's harder for women to get our emotional needs met? Because we're so often cast in the role of 'caretaker', and so rarely allowed to *have* needs of our own, except the ones that prevent us from being 'of service' to other people?

So women tend to be harder on their daughters than on their sons, (though there is a myth to the contrary - that somehow mothers and daughters have this 'special bond' just because we're both women. But the fact is that women are pitted against one another almost from birth - the 'divide and conquer' thing that keeps our attention focused on the *men* in our lives instead of each other. Though I think there are *some* women who don't experience this, who have *good* bonds with at least a few other women. Maybe these are women who grew up with sisters instead of brothers? I can imagine either situation being true.

In any case, that kind of 'bonding' is something I've never experienced with a woman, and most *certainly* not my mother.

In the past this whole thing has made it very difficult for me to get my needs met *at all*, and often only from *men*, which make it feel a bit like 'consorting with the enemy', given what I wrote about 'divide and conquer', and how it often feels like men see us (women) as only *tools* to get *their* needs met, instead of as people in our own right.

As if men are always and eterally allowed to be 'babies' (in compensation? for having to 'cut off' their emotional needs to 'function' in patriarchal culture? yeah, but who made *that* rule, and who *benefits* from it the most? Hm. 'Men', and 'men'. Yes, I'm *still* angry.)

So: Don't take care of them.

Hold fast to grasshopper's rule Nos. 1 and 2:

1. Meet me half way
2. Two way street.

And: Open the way, as often as possible, to *women* in your life.