Typically for me it’s a basic need for love and acceptance that isn’t being met (which seems strange when I’m a grown, independent adult)
It’s not that strange at all, actually. It’s quite common for us to not learn how to take care of our own emotional needs as children. And in my case at least, it’s been taking me a great deal of study to learn how to do it now. There are quite a lot of non-intuitive things about it, including the part where getting other people to love and accept you doesn’t actually help, unless you’re trying to use it as an example.
To put it another way, we don’t have emotional problems because we didn’t get “enough” love as kids, but because we didn’t get enough examples of how to treat ourselves in a loving way, e.g. to approach our own thoughts and feelings with kindness instead of pushing them away or invalidating them (or whatever else we got as an example).
Or to put it yet another way, this is a matter of “emotional intelligence” being far more about nurture than nature.
But now I’m babbling. Anyway, from the rest of what you describe, you sound like you’ve actually got better skills than me in the area of the actual “taking care of your needs” part, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m glad the specific tip about norm violations helped. Those are one of those things that our brains seem to do just out of conscious awareness, like “lost purposes”, that you sort of have to explicitly ask yourself in order to do anything about the automatic reaction.
It also helps to get rid of the norm or expectation itself, if it’s not a reasonable one. For example, expecting all of your colleagues to always treat you with love and acceptance might not be realistic, in which case “upgrading an addiction to a preference” (replacing the shoulds with like/prefer statements) can be helpful in preventing the need to keep running round the “get offended, figure out what’s happening, address the specifics” loop every single time. If you stop expecting and start preferring, the anger or sense of offense doesn’t arise in the first place.
Thanks for the reply.
It’s not that strange at all, actually. It’s quite common for us to not learn how to take care of our own emotional needs as children. And in my case at least, it’s been taking me a great deal of study to learn how to do it now. There are quite a lot of non-intuitive things about it, including the part where getting other people to love and accept you doesn’t actually help, unless you’re trying to use it as an example.
To put it another way, we don’t have emotional problems because we didn’t get “enough” love as kids, but because we didn’t get enough examples of how to treat ourselves in a loving way, e.g. to approach our own thoughts and feelings with kindness instead of pushing them away or invalidating them (or whatever else we got as an example).
Or to put it yet another way, this is a matter of “emotional intelligence” being far more about nurture than nature.
But now I’m babbling. Anyway, from the rest of what you describe, you sound like you’ve actually got better skills than me in the area of the actual “taking care of your needs” part, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m glad the specific tip about norm violations helped. Those are one of those things that our brains seem to do just out of conscious awareness, like “lost purposes”, that you sort of have to explicitly ask yourself in order to do anything about the automatic reaction.
It also helps to get rid of the norm or expectation itself, if it’s not a reasonable one. For example, expecting all of your colleagues to always treat you with love and acceptance might not be realistic, in which case “upgrading an addiction to a preference” (replacing the shoulds with like/prefer statements) can be helpful in preventing the need to keep running round the “get offended, figure out what’s happening, address the specifics” loop every single time. If you stop expecting and start preferring, the anger or sense of offense doesn’t arise in the first place.