What is your relationship to your own needs What did the grown ups in your life say when you had
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Speaker 3: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Low Demand Parenting Podcast. Where we drop the pressure, find the joy and thrive, even when it feels like life is stuck on level 12 hard. I'm Amanda Deman, author, autistic adult, and mom of three. I'm not here as an expert, but a fellow traveler. Together we're learning how to live more gently, authentically, and vibrantly in this wild
Speaker 4: parenting life.
Before we start today's podcast about our big needs and how we get them met without living in resentment, I'm super excited to share something with you This year. I have a free year end guide to reflecting on the low demand parenting life and how you wanna turn the page on 2025 and move into 2026.
This episode is coming out the last week in December, and this is a time of year [00:01:00] when a lot of people practice a pretty high demand reflection approach, thinking about all the things they did wrong and how they wanna do better next year, and setting these really lofty goals, trying to change how they move through the world.
And I find. All of that really antithetical to the kind of life I'm trying to cultivate. And so I crafted for myself a year-end transition reflection guide that represented the kind of gentleness and radical acceptance, and also room to wanna change and grow and make shifts, and trying to hold all of that at the same time.
Without creating a really demanding process for myself. So I call it the low demand reset, and I decided to put it into a workbook and some videos and give it to you for free, because I believe that this kind of reflective practice really deepens all of our way of living out low demand. And because I'm so grateful [00:02:00] for all of you.
I'm grateful for you podcast listeners. I'm grateful for you social media followers. I'm grateful for the people who send me beautiful, insightful emails and ask powerful questions and join in courses and do coaching in all the ways that I get to know you and walk with you. And I'm just so grateful that I get to do this with my one wild and precious life.
So the reset is for you. It's free. There's a link in the show notes. All we will ask is a name and an email address and it will be zooming its way to you. I can't wait for you to use it. Let me know what you think and how it's helping. I'd love to hear from you on social media or over email. All right, it's time for our podcast.
Speaker: Hello, hello, hello. We are gonna be talking about mindset shifts that help us to do our own inner work.
So that we can show up to the life that we're [00:03:00] living. and Our big shift is us. It's about centering and prioritizing meeting our needs. This is gonna be a hard one, and we're gonna get into some of the layers of why it's hard.
What to do about it and what it looks like practically to meet our own needs.
But first, let's just check in around this idea of meeting our own needs. What kinds of messages did you see from adults in your life when you were a kid or around your needs when you were a kid? What kinds of things did people tell you when you had big needs and they came out?
I wonder if you were a yeller or maybe a big external feeler. As a kid, you might have been told, you're talking too much. You're too loud. Go to your room until you can speak to me nicely. You might have heard from other kids, you're [00:04:00] bossy. You're mean. I don't like playing with you. One thing that's really incredible when we start to talk about the ways that we have been trained around our needs is just how similar our experiences are. not only were those needs not met, I think that's really important.
Those needs were not met, but what they were met with was often push it down. You should be ashamed of yourself. You don't deserve care and that there's something wrong with you for having these big needs. Your bossy, your too sensitive attention seeking. These are all very much personality traits, you know?
The needs are just needs, and they all got turned against us and so little bitty you. Just hold little bit of you, tiny, needy, vulnerable, three, 4-year-old, you, [00:05:00] before you learned that it wasn't safe. You brought those needs out, right? Because we are, we are born as creatures with big needs and we are born expecting and requiring the people in our lives to, to meet those needs.
It doesn't mean that they are. It doesn't mean that we, were received in any way that aligned with our needs, but our needs are made to come out. And so before we learn to do something else with them, we shared them and then, and then life happened, and then we heard the messages. It does two things to our needs.
It says, you are not going to be met and don't do that again. Don't share those anymore. Of course, that just gets layered and layered as we get older and our ability to hide those needs gets more and more sophisticated. And then we have these needy kids [00:06:00] who are as they're supposed to be born with big needs.
Bringing those needs out, bringing them to us, asking us to meet them, and all that stuff is just, just . Unfolded right in our face and probably a lot of those old messages start playing and it comes out. I especially hear it around the idea of being manipulative. So if you've ever heard your kid is just manipulating you, which is often used in the, we need boundaries approach, which is really, we need to control our kids and we need to teach them which of their needs are okay to express and which ones are not okay to express.
That's the coded messaging around that. They're just manipulating me. They're just testing me. All of that is it's an adult version of those things that we heard when we were little people.
These needs are too big, they're inappropriate, and not only are your needs not gonna be met, but you shouldn't have them. There's something wrong with [00:07:00] you for having those needs. That's what manipulative says. It says a person who is like, I got big needs. I am made to bring them out into community so that they can be met.
I am not made to meet them on my own. I am not made to be all alone with this. I am made to bring them forward. That is how humans are. And then that is met with, oh, those aren't okay. Needs to have, oh, those are too much. Oh. You're being manipulative and it turns our beautiful, innate, purposeful neediness into a problem and a problem specifically to be controlled by rigid firm controlling grownups.
That whole narrative is not just about our kids, though. It's also very much about us. The number one thing that people come to me when we're, [00:08:00] when we're doing the masterclass or the Mastermind or one of these other deep programs where I'm able to work with you over months and months and hear the stories and get below the surface to the deep stuff, it is around can I meet my own needs and my kids' needs at the same time?
It feels like a zero sum game or a teeter-totter. Like the more that my kids' needs are met, the less mine are. And if I try to meet mine, my kids are gonna suffer. It's me or it's them. And that fundamental fear that it's me or it's you. Either you get your needs met or I do, but we cannot. Both lies at the heart of so much of our burnout.
Our exhaustion, our difficulty maintaining the low demand life and our difficulty translating the low demand life to other people. And this came up, um, we had our [00:09:00] last mastermind call. So these are people that we've been on a deep journey together for six months, two retreats, weekly sessions, daily texting, like these are the folks that are going the very, very deepest in community and support.
And we were processing. What is the big takeaway for us from the mastermind experience, from being accompanied and trusted and seen on this really deep level and everything was around our needs, our ability to show up, for our needs, to listen to them with compassion to believe that they're deserving of being met.
To unlearn all of the shame-based messages that we got, that not only are these needs not going to be met, but we don't deserve for them to be met. And then all of the ways that that shame then gets pushed outward onto our kids as we believe that they, at their core, are the reason that we can't thrive.
People are hearing this from grandparents, from pediatricians, from teachers. It's everywhere. [00:10:00] This idea that we have got to control our kids, that their big needs are not just a problem, they're a personality flaw.
And that if we don't get control of that early, if we don't clamp down on that manipulativeness with firm limits, boundaries, control, punishments, adult. Focused demands. If we don't do that early, then all kinds of terrible things are gonna happen Later. We might hear like, oh my goodness, if you don't deal with this now, can you imagine what teenager hood is going to be like?
Or they're never going to make it in the real world if you don't. All this fear-based messaging that our kids' big needs are bad, but I'm telling you, every time we hear that about our kids, it bounces back to the little us who had huge needs. And those needs weren't met.
Because the teeter-totter says, I blame you. I don't want to. I love you more than my heart could possibly contain. I've changed my [00:11:00] whole life for you. I have given myself for you, and it's killing me, and I'm not sure I can live like this.
So now I wanna move into talking about what else is there. What does it look like to very slowly retrain our relationship to our needs? Every time we show up for our kids' needs and surround them with understanding and compassion and space and do our best to meet them, we don't have to meet all their needs.
We really don't. It feels like we do because they're gonna have really big feelings about it if they don't, and. Ramifications can be so big, like we can see aggression. Our bodies get hurt when we don't meet their needs. If we step outside for 10 minutes, when we come back in, we're gonna deal with an hour of dysregulation for that 10 minutes.
And so understandably, we're asking like, okay, what is this? Like how can this 10 minutes be worth [00:12:00] an hour of dysregulation? Or, you put your earplugs in just to drown out the sound for a second, and then all it does is make them louder and wilder and more desperate for your attention.
Or maybe you've got a teenager and at this point they feel so far away from you. They're getting their needs met by everybody else. They don't even want you to be a part of the conversation anymore. And they've internalized these negative beliefs about themselves to such a large degree that you feel like just saying I love you the way you are, and you don't need to change.
And it's falling on deaf ears. They can't hear anymore, that they're beloved and that they're special and that they're deserving. So we're down in the basement now, that's the deep stuff. How do we come out? So the first point is that recognizing that yes, our needs and our kids' needs are deeply interrelated.
There is a electrical current running between the [00:13:00] two of us, but it's not a teeter-totter. It's actually one thing. So when we show up for our kids and we say things to them that are true, like, yes, this is a huge need. These clothes don't feel good today. You probably can't go outside because it's raining.
I remember when one of my kids was in school and everybody in the school would walk around the block once a week. And when it was raining, my kid couldn't do it because then their clothes got damp. Even when they had a raincoat on, their clothes got damp and then they had to be in those damp clothes the rest of the day and it felt so big.
And so I would have to advocate for them and say, he really can't. Not that he won't walk around the block, he really can't. This is really too hard. I actually need to bring him in an hour late after the walk around the block so that he can enter into the classroom without this stress.
Every time I do that advocacy work around my kids' needs, every time I surround that really big, very inconvenient, convenient need [00:14:00] with compassion and understanding, it bounces back to me. So allow it, open yourself up to that like, oh, my really big needs deserve compassion and understanding. Oh.
Some days I can't go outside because my clothes get damped and I can't handle it, or there's some other thing for you. Maybe riding in the car with music playing and your kids talking at the same time is totally over your capacity. Or maybe the sound of the dish is going in, the dishwasher is over your capacity or maybe playing in certain kinds of rough ways where your body is getting touched in certain ways is just off limits.
Or you can't do the dishes or you can't walk the dog, or you can't make the phone call. Instead of that bouncing back into those old messages around, you're too much, you're too bossy, you're too demanding., every time we're going to Renae that stuff like, oh, of course.
Of course it does. Of course it's too hard. I'm not too much. I'm not wrong. These needs deserve [00:15:00] meeting. I don't know yet how I'm gonna do it. I don't have a solution in mind. But. I am good and I deserve for these needs to be met. These needs come out because I'm human and because humans are built with needs that are supposed to come out . They're not always met, sometimes there's nobody there for them to come out too, but they come out and that is so good.
And the second point is a refrain that I repeat to my kids and it bounces back to me, which is let it out. . When my kids' big needs are exploding outta their bodies, I say, let it out. Let it out. I posted about this like a year ago on social media, and there was a lot of pushback to this idea.
They were like, how can I say, let it out when they are pulling my hair and biting me, how can I say, let it out when they're cursing at me? I can't, I cannot do it. And I totally get that. Low demand is all about aun to what is doable for you. So if it does not feel doable, there might be [00:16:00] another phrase that doesn't push you so far.
It could be something like. Maybe this is okay, maybe I can trust this. Maybe these needs aren't too much. Maybe my kid isn't being controlling. Maybe they're not bossy. Maybe you just wanna allow some possibility there before you're able to really go with let it out. If you can, or if it feels right, or if you wanna try it on for size and just pretend you could say, let it out.
Let it out, let it out. And then the next time you are feeling like, I cannot handle this. One more second. What if you let it out too? What if you took that same posture for your need that wants to come out and you're like, all right, let it out. Let it out. Maybe it needs to come out as a growl or a stomped foot or shaking hands, or a big old cry.
Maybe it needs to come out with pounding your fists on the wall or calling a friend and being like, you are not [00:17:00] gonna solve this for me. I am just going to dump on you. Can you hold space for me for five minutes while I dump out everything inside of me? There are so many ways that we can let it out that don't harm other people, and so that's the third.
Mindset shift here is that our big needs don't have to hurt others. I, I think that we internalize, and again, this comes from that little us that heard your need isn't going to be met and there's something wrong with you for having it. And then there's this sneaky little third piece, especially for those who maybe had immature parents or parents who were themselves so overwhelmed and under-resourced that they had no capacity to hold any space around our needs. We began to believe, "oh, my needs hurt people." "When I have big needs, other people get hurt, or I get hurt, I get abandoned. [00:18:00] If I let these out and other people see me being this needy, they'll walk away from me and I'll be all alone."
, And it's that piece. So there, there's like, Ooh, I'm a person with big needs. Ooh, I'm gonna let it out. Then the third piece is maybe these needs won't hurt anybody. Maybe me being a needy person, desperately deserving, interdependent relationship. Maybe that's a gift. Maybe that's a strength. Maybe that's something I have to offer.
The world. Again, it's a maybe because it can take us years to be truly ready to let other people see us in our neediness. I mean, the people I love most and trust the most, I still really struggle to say, this is what I need, and trust that they can meet it. I find that shows up for me in a lot of lying, like it's not terrible lying . [00:19:00] but like yesterday, I had two live events and my husband works full time and he was asking me, how can I support you? And I knew one of them was in the middle of the day and there was nothing he could do about it. I knew he was gonna go to work, so he looked at it on the calendar, I said, what is this?
And I was like, oh, that's nothing. That's not something I'm going to The reason I did that is because I believe that. If I shared my need and he can't need it, that we're gonna get hurt. He's gonna get hurt, or I'm gonna get hurt, right? And so then I had to come back and say, I lied to you. I lied to you because I didn't think you were gonna be able to meet the need.
And I knew that there was no way. And, and I'm sorry I did that. And he's like, I get it. I mean, this is a thing, it's a thing I do. It's a thing I do when my needs are vulnerable and big and I'm bringing them out into the world. So it is a continual struggle to believe that you can be needy and those needs can be met or unmet.
Like that. That part, I mean, gosh, we want our needs to be met. Like we so deserve that. [00:20:00] But they don't have to be. They don't have to be. And here's the thing, the same is true for your kids. They can have. Big needs. Like, mom, watch me play this video game. And you're like, ah, if I watched you play that particular video game in that particular mode, it's gonna make me so dizzy.
I might throw up like, I can't do it. I cannot meet that need. It's just like too much. And if we say, oh God, kiddo, I can't, I cannot meet that need that somehow one of us is gonna get hurt. But I deeply believe from journeying this through with myself and my kids, that we can, we can show up for each other and say, gosh, that's deserving.
Like I, I will work hard. If this is a recurring need that you have, I will work hard to find somebody who can watch you complete this level or do this game without getting sick. It's not me, but it should be somebody and I will do all I can to make that happen. I love you. I can't meet that need. We're okay.
Like we [00:21:00] can still be deeply connected looking at these needs and not meeting them. I think that's so important because again, that teeter-totter says I have to meet my kids' needs. I have to meet all of them every time, no matter how much it hurts me. And I will never get my needs met. It's this like total and absolute belief that our kids' needs Trump everything, and that our needs are meaningless, worthless, say something bad about us and are destined to hurt us or hurt others.
And neither of those are working. It's not working for our kids, it's not working for us. So I wanna come to a few specifics here at the end. . One is that the feeling of resentment is a key indicator. So if you pay attention to one feeling that's coming up for you, that you're like, oh, hmm, ding, ding, ding.
Pay attention. It's around resentment. When you are feeling [00:22:00] resentment, that is a key that you have unmet needs. So resentment is like a little flag flying. Unmet needs. Unmet needs. Check in. What might they be? Where might they be yet? That's the first one is resentment is unmet needs. The second practical step is to begin to write down your needs as a way of getting them outside of your body and write them down, not as I am statements, but I need statements.
So like, I am so tired. No, I need rest, and. Just putting them on paper or text or audio message or however in the form of I need can become a script for you so that when somebody does say, Hey, what do you need? Like, how can I help you? Which occasionally happens, right? You have already done some of the work to be like, oh, I need rest.
I don't know how to get it, but I really need rest. Is there [00:23:00] anything you have to offer that could help me get rest? 'cause that's like my number one need. And the third practical step is actually to start to use that language with your kids, not in the moment, not in the heat of the moment where you're feeling deeply triggered by their needs, or you're feeling really sad and unmet.
I think we have this really deep fear that we've been fed again by, a parenting world that really doesn't understand what we're facing. We've been fed this need that if we bring our needs forward with our kids, that they're going to experience that as parentification, that they then have to be, become our grownup.
And that does not need to be the case. You can bring your needs forward with your kids in a contained, safe, trusting way. You're not saying, Hey, solve this for me. You're saying, Hey, I trust that we are in the kind of relationship where I get to have needs and where I can say, dude, I have a real need to get outside today, and I really don't know how that's gonna happen.
I'm not saying [00:24:00] you have to go outside. I know that that's not doable for you, but I just really need to, and then see what happens. See if your kid has the capacity and the interest to problem solve that with you. This was one of the best ways that we moved into collaborative problem solving in the early days. Before my kid had any capacity to problem solve for themselves, they were really interested in helping me figure out how to get my needs met.
They were like, oh yeah, gosh, I have some ideas. And so often because of my kids' creativity and love that they. Have ideas and they're often really kooky and fun, and I love to try them because they're things I've not thought of or I wouldn't think of. And because it says like, I trust you. This is fun.
Let's figure this out together. It's such a powerful way for us to invest trust in them that then comes back later in their [00:25:00] ability to trust us. And again, we do it without putting demands on them, without asking them to solve it for us, we're simply saying, I'm a human. I've got some needs. I'm, I'm kind of at a loss, like, I dunno what could be here, could do you have any ideas for me?
It doesn't have to be heavy or scary or overwhelming for anybody. It can truly be. A process of entering in to genuine collaboration with your kids. I have found that my relationship to my own needs has been the biggest transformation in the low demand life for me. Yes. Everything about the way we live is different now.
And yes, I have become an advocate and a teacher, and a writer and all of that stuff, but that to me all feels so surface level compared to the way that I think about my own needs now when they come up and, [00:26:00] and we're many years in, and it's still such a daily struggle. So if you're feeling . Ooh, this is overwhelming and hard.
Like itty, itty bitty steps around. Maybe you just wanna start with \ that first step of tuning into the relationship that you had when you were little and the things that people told you, and very gently reframing that, especially when you're offering that compassionate love to your kids to just let it bounce back to yourself.
Oh yeah, that's me too. Oh, I deserve this kind of care. 'cause sometimes our inner children are very jealous of our real life children. They're like, I never got that. Why do you get this love when I never got it? Why do I have to be always the one loving and never the one receiving of love? And so we allow everything we pour into our kids to bounce back onto us.
We allow it to create softness and gentleness inside of ourselves so those little inner children can cuddle up and feel safe with us and safe with our real life Kids when they have big needs, they're like, oh yeah, you have [00:27:00] big needs. I have big needs. Sometimes they get met, sometimes they don't, but they all deserve space.
A totally different relationship to the needs. Maybe that's just your starting spot is a lot. Of really gentle, loving compassion to those needs when they come out and reworking that relationship of shame that says, not only are these needs not gonna be met, but you're a bad person for having them. You are not.
You are human. This is the number one thing that I say to my kids is we are human. We are over here human like we've got big fricking messy, confusing off the wall needs. We have desires and urges that make absolutely no sense. And how beautiful to be that, to be alive and full of needs, that is what it is to be human.
Speaker 2: If this podcast is speaking to your soul, you can subscribe through wherever you get your own podcasts. Even better if you feel the nudge, head on over to Apple Podcasts in particular and leave us a review. It's [00:28:00] such a helpful way for new people to also get to experience what this podcast wants to bring into their lives.
I'm Amanda. Remember, it takes great strength to let things go. I'll see you next week.
