For myself, I grew up with loving, decent parents and an intact family, with a lower middle class upbringing. I was raised by two parents who were really wonderful, but in their culture delivering empathy was not a particular priority in terms of how they were raised and how they understood being parents. Then I was very young going through school and kind of shy, and so I felt like an outsider, sort of invisible. That led to many experiences of just feeling left out. The normal sustenance psychologically of what are called social supplies was for me a very thin soup. I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t particularly bullied, but life was a lot like breathing through a straw. And so then I landed in college and I felt that I had this enormous hole in my heart, roughly the size of a construction project or a skyscraper.
Where Craving Comes From
Why do we crave? Who thought of that, anyway? Whose plan is this? It’s Mother Nature’s plan for her little critters to crave in order to pass on genes and live to see the sunrise. The basis for craving is something is missing or something is wrong. There’s a deficit or a disturbance in the meeting of important needs. That’s why a squirrel craves its nuts and wants to get into its little safe place. That’s why humans pile up possessions. That’s why we chase various pleasures. It’s because underneath it all, we feel like something’s missing and we’re trying to fill that hole.
Think about it, back on the Serengeti plains or in Jurassic Park, primates that were super chill. Hey, I feel already full. It’s all groovy. They starved to death. They didn’t keep looking for food, right? Or, oh, I’m all mellow, one with everything. It feels so good here. Chomp! They got eaten. The animals that survived and passed on their genes were the ones that were really cranky and driven and anxious and irritated and demanding and insistent. The ones who craved a lot were the ones who passed on their genes, and here we are today.
Sometimes we get caught up in thinking, oh, I got to get this, I gotta get that. And we don’t really need it. Nothing’s really missing, but we believe it so. But it’s really smart in very practical ways to pay attention to the deficits and the disturbances in your life. I want to talk about what happens when important psychological experiences are missing while we grow up, and even as adults.
What I Did About It
Then I stumbled on a method. I began to neither dismiss that longing in me nor get demanding about it. Those are the two common patterns of reaction to important psychological supplies being missing as we grow up, whether it’s from parents or peers or other sources.
Rather than being dismissive or demanding, I just simply began looking for opportunities to experience authentically being included and wanted and valued, which were three normal range needs that were poorly met when I was growing up, for all kinds of reasons, including my own withdrawal from the world. I would look for the opportunity to feel included, wanted, and seen. And when I had that opportunity, I would observe the fact of it casually, like some guy in the dorm invited me to sit with him for pizza at lunch, or a girl smiling at me in the elevator. I would allow myself to experience it, and then I would take it in. And I would let the sense of being included, wanted, valued, seen sink down into these hollow, empty places inside that could feel very, very young, even going all the way back to pre-verbal sort of body memories of being a really, really little kid.
And I was amazed. I started college at 16, so I was probably 17 when I stumbled on this, and I was just lit up. Wow. On my own I could find opportunities to authentically take into myself today the psychological nutrients that were missing when I was growing up. And gradually, truly, and including now today in different ways, I really have filled that hole in my heart. That sense of deficit has been really filled, and around it is much less sense of craving for all that.
Creating the Basis Yourself
Now, to be clear, the opportunities to fill that hole in your heart are really affected by many factors outside your control, including privilege and social class. I was in college. I was in a safe environment. I was a white male. I definitely had opportunities to experience being wanted and valued and liked and included. And that’s certainly true.
On practical grounds, it’s really helpful to do what one can to create the factual basis for the experiences that bring the psychological supplies. The more that we don’t naturally receive the basis for those supplies from the outside, the more, as best we can, it’s important to be self-reliant, and to look for ways to create the basis for those supplies ourselves, like ordinary experiences of being part of a group, or connection, even fairly superficial, but still a friendly connection with someone at the place where you get your deli sandwiches and so forth.
As we really do fill ourselves up in the present, it’s a lot easier to move into the higher levels of practice, because we’re not carrying around those tin cans, tied to us on a string, rattling behind us, calling out, feed me, feed, feed. When we feed them, they grow quiet, which frees up attention for subtler aspects of awakening.
If you would like to learn more about this, check out my Hardwiring Happiness Masterclass, and use code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.
The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.