My husband has issues with needing too much attention and acceptance from people. I was wondering how this can be fixed. He wants me to spend every waking second paying attention to him. He also wants everyone to think he is awesome. He seems to have self esteem issues. Somewhere in his life he was lacking some type of acceptance. Because of his over weening ego he had an affair. I need some advice on how to deal with this. It is getting to the point where I am thinking of leaving him.
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needing too much attention and acceptance
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Benjamin Fry 
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Posted 16 June 2004 - 01:12 PM
My wife was reading the forum when I saw this post. When I read the opening sentence I actually thought that she had written it to play a joke on me!
I am a husband who needs too much attention and acceptance. The causal reasons for this can be located in my childhood, the death of my mother and subsequent distant relationship with my step-mother. Basically, I didnít get what I needed as a baby and Iím still looking. It can drive my wife nuts and I accept that I can be very annoying.
However what I think that we need to look at is you and how you are responding to this needy person. Firstly, you have to recognise that you chose to marry a needy person and that this must illustrate some own part of your psychological drama. Perhaps you like to think that you can help needy people and thereby overcome your own fear of neediness? Whatever the reason, there will be one and it is an internal reason to you, not related to your husbandís behaviour. If you walk away from this relationship, you will still carry the same emotional architecture within you and are more than likely to end up back in the same cycle later on with someone else. Thatís something to bear in mind.
Secondly Iíd like you to think about how disempowering it is for you to want to improve your life by ìfixingî your husband. It would mean that your happiness would depend entirely on your ability to manoeuvre another person into the kind of behaviour that you think would make you happy. Unfortunately other people only change how and when they want to. Trying to make them change can make you very unhappy indeed and result in you forgetting who you were in the first place.
The best way that you can react to your circumstances is to understand that there is a hidden reason why you are in them; and that that reason is beneficial to your healing on a deeper level. You may not be enjoying your husbandís demands (and certainly not his infidelity) but nonetheless there is an opportunity here. There is a Buddhist aphorism that advises us to treasure our enemies because it is from them that we learn. The same might be said for spouses!
Your choice to be with your husband and the way that his behaviour leaves you feeling is part of the activity of your unconscious mind. This area of your mind that you are not aware of is very keen on emotional housekeeping. It doesnít want you to be unhappy, but it understands (much better than your rational conscious mind) that lasting happiness can only be found once the emotional residue of your past is ejected from your mind-body system. Your current circumstances and the way that you receive them are part of its cunning way of making you reconnect with these emotions that were frozen inside of you by trauma (probably during your early childhood).
My advice to you on how to deal with this would be twofold:
1) Firstly you need to separate out in your mind where you end and your husband begins. He is who he is and will be what he will be. You canít fix or change that, but you can learn how to benefit from living with that.
2) Begin to see your painful reactions to your husbandís behaviour as an opportunity to fully discharge certain emotional baggage. Instead of resisting the feelings, go with them. Try to let them pass through you unimpeded by judgement or worry. Then you will begin to see that you process this stuff much more quickly and without the desire to change the person or circumstance that provokes it.
Ultimately if you want to change either your circumstances or your husband, you can only do so by changing yourself. Change can be contagious and one of the great dividends of a constructive relationship is that each is a model for the otherís personal development and growth.
Marriage is meant to be for life, and in most cultures is a sacred bond sanctified by some form of spiritual wisdom. One of the rewards of this commitment is that it forces us to deal with difficult emotions that we would otherwise avoid. In this day and age we have little patience with struggle. Perhaps then the wisdom of a lifelong commitment is precisely that it does force us to come into contact with the parts of us that we would prefer to avoid, but nonetheless will greatly benefit from examining.
If you stay with him, make sure you also stay with yourself, because that is the one part of this process that you can never walk away from.
I am a husband who needs too much attention and acceptance. The causal reasons for this can be located in my childhood, the death of my mother and subsequent distant relationship with my step-mother. Basically, I didnít get what I needed as a baby and Iím still looking. It can drive my wife nuts and I accept that I can be very annoying.
However what I think that we need to look at is you and how you are responding to this needy person. Firstly, you have to recognise that you chose to marry a needy person and that this must illustrate some own part of your psychological drama. Perhaps you like to think that you can help needy people and thereby overcome your own fear of neediness? Whatever the reason, there will be one and it is an internal reason to you, not related to your husbandís behaviour. If you walk away from this relationship, you will still carry the same emotional architecture within you and are more than likely to end up back in the same cycle later on with someone else. Thatís something to bear in mind.
Secondly Iíd like you to think about how disempowering it is for you to want to improve your life by ìfixingî your husband. It would mean that your happiness would depend entirely on your ability to manoeuvre another person into the kind of behaviour that you think would make you happy. Unfortunately other people only change how and when they want to. Trying to make them change can make you very unhappy indeed and result in you forgetting who you were in the first place.
The best way that you can react to your circumstances is to understand that there is a hidden reason why you are in them; and that that reason is beneficial to your healing on a deeper level. You may not be enjoying your husbandís demands (and certainly not his infidelity) but nonetheless there is an opportunity here. There is a Buddhist aphorism that advises us to treasure our enemies because it is from them that we learn. The same might be said for spouses!
Your choice to be with your husband and the way that his behaviour leaves you feeling is part of the activity of your unconscious mind. This area of your mind that you are not aware of is very keen on emotional housekeeping. It doesnít want you to be unhappy, but it understands (much better than your rational conscious mind) that lasting happiness can only be found once the emotional residue of your past is ejected from your mind-body system. Your current circumstances and the way that you receive them are part of its cunning way of making you reconnect with these emotions that were frozen inside of you by trauma (probably during your early childhood).
My advice to you on how to deal with this would be twofold:
1) Firstly you need to separate out in your mind where you end and your husband begins. He is who he is and will be what he will be. You canít fix or change that, but you can learn how to benefit from living with that.
2) Begin to see your painful reactions to your husbandís behaviour as an opportunity to fully discharge certain emotional baggage. Instead of resisting the feelings, go with them. Try to let them pass through you unimpeded by judgement or worry. Then you will begin to see that you process this stuff much more quickly and without the desire to change the person or circumstance that provokes it.
Ultimately if you want to change either your circumstances or your husband, you can only do so by changing yourself. Change can be contagious and one of the great dividends of a constructive relationship is that each is a model for the otherís personal development and growth.
Marriage is meant to be for life, and in most cultures is a sacred bond sanctified by some form of spiritual wisdom. One of the rewards of this commitment is that it forces us to deal with difficult emotions that we would otherwise avoid. In this day and age we have little patience with struggle. Perhaps then the wisdom of a lifelong commitment is precisely that it does force us to come into contact with the parts of us that we would prefer to avoid, but nonetheless will greatly benefit from examining.
If you stay with him, make sure you also stay with yourself, because that is the one part of this process that you can never walk away from.
visit benjaminfry.co.uk for more information on my work
support getstable.org for better mental health treatment in the UK
support getstable.org for better mental health treatment in the UK
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