My Needs and Why I Prioritize Everyone Else’s
On the bottom of the priority list
Have you ever seen a totem pole? Those wooden figures all stacked on each other standing straight up into the sky? Prioritizing everyone else’s needs can feel like you are at the bottom of the totem pole, carrying the weight of what everyone feels they deserve above your desires. Putting everyone else above yourself can feel suffocating, unfulfilling, or even isolating. You may even begin to rationalize these feelings of isolation and lack of fulfillment by telling yourself that your feelings aren’t that important or that next time you’ll ask for what you need. That is, until the next time comes around and again you have put your wants and needs last, thus the cycle of disappointment and loneliness continues.
You may not even recognize that you are repeating this cycle. The beginning of this cycle usually creates positive feelings about yourself. Maybe you’ll tell yourself that you're helping someone else with their hopes and dreams because it does feel good even if it is at the expense of your time, energy, efforts, and desires. This can include staying late after work while everyone has left for the day, taking on extra chores at home after being a stay-at-home parent while your partner rests before their next day at work, taking on the emotional responsibility of your parents, swallowing your unhappiness in a relationship, etc. While these brief positive feelings mask fulfillment, they are just that, brief. Until those feelings of anger or resentment creep up, we may find ourselves questioning why. “Why am I so angry?”, or “Why am I so resentful?” or “Why do I feel alone when I just spent the day doing something good?”. So, instead of understanding our why, we engage in yet another cycle as we desperately search for those positive feelings and dopamine. It can feel like you are stuck, between who you are to others and who you want to be for yourself.
Rewriting the priority list
To put ourselves higher on the totem pole of priorities, it is necessary to understand what we gain out of our current situation. This is often referred to as your “why”. Why do we continue to engage in a pattern of behavior that we feel unsatisfied with? Perhaps this is the only way you feel valued in your life. This could feel like the only social connection you currently have. Has this always been the role you have been given in your family? Did this use to be enough?
The best way to begin answering some of these questions is to do a check-in with yourself to begin naming how this affects you. In other words ask yourself the most common therapeutic question, “How does this make me feel?”. This will help you begin to label your feelings which is always a good indicator of what it is that you need. We often underestimate the power of labeling our emotions and commonly boil them down to anger, sadness, stress, and, on occasion, happiness. However, those surface-level emotions do not tell an accurate story of your internal experience and are often protecting your true feelings. To rise to the surface of our totem pole, we must question how we feel at the bottom and how we would like to feel at the top.
Making yourself a priority
If you could be at the top of the totem pole, feeling the warmth of the sun as you are embracing the freedom from unwanted commitments, what would that mean for you? What would freedom look like for you? Would it be getting home early on a Friday so you can finally attend your child’s high school basketball games? Maybe it would be taking your spouse on that much-needed date night instead of staying silent about wanting to spend quality time with them. Or perhaps you pick back up that hobby you loved in high school that you gave up when life overtook your free time.
We have been taught that asking for what we need is something that we should be ashamed of. However, we cannot continue to fill everyone else’s cup until yours is full.
I want to teach you how to climb to the top of your totem pole and take ownership of your needs.
