It is completely natural to be stuck and unable to move on from situations, events, circumstances and people. One of the journeys of life is to learn to unbound yourself from material (i.e., home, car, ex-friend) or immaterial (i.e., thoughts, pain, emotions) objects which we become attached to.
When it comes to attachments, there are many things that we desire. For sake of this article and providing context to ideas to unbound yourself, I will touch on a topic that comes up often in conversations with others: how do we move on from a relationship when our hearts are broken and we continuously cling on to the hope that the other person will change and come back to us. I will seek to provide light to this area in a series of upcoming posts.
The basic question to answer is: how do we let go of our attachments to someone who we once liked, loved, or that which we have any kind relationship with?
In order to understand the answer to this question, we need to do conduct a basic study of needs. .For this I will refer to both Abraham Maslow and Cloe Madanes who I think have captured the essence of seven core needs which I have summarized below:
- Physiological – The need for food and water.
- Certainty/Comfort – The need to feel safe, avoid pain, and feel comfortable in our environment and our relationships.
- Uncertainty/Variety – The need for variety and challenges that will exercise our emotional and physical range.
- Significance – The need to feel belonging, important, needed, wanted.
- Love/Connection – The need to for love and connection with other human beings.
- Growth – The need to expand oneself and accomplish
- Contribution – The need to go beyond our own needs and to give to others.
The first five needs — physiological, certainty, variety, love and significance— are essential for human survival. The last two needs, growth and contribution, are essential to human fulfillment.
Wants are nothing more than what is derived by any of the basic human needs listed above. In order to survive and thrive in this world, we need to fulfill our needs and this is where needs turn into wants. The problem is that we can’t control the exact percentage of each of those needs that we need fulfilled as these vary on a case-by-case basis from person to person, and circumstance to circumstance.
What we know is that need fulfillment doesn’t have any limits. All over the world, every person from a small baby to a grown adult is getting their needs met to survive. The universe has an endless supply to help those meet their needs. The issue comes when we continuously want more and more and more to meet those needs and are unable to find acceptance on what has been given to us. These more and more wants are called desires – basically, uncontrolled wants.
The “controlling spigot of need fulfillment” is how well you control your wants. How much food and water do you need to fulfill your physiological wants? How many passwords or burglar alarms, do you need to implement to feel safe? How many times do you need to have sex to feel that you are loved?
All objects have only so much to give to you – whether it is a car, home, or person. Each of these has a shelf-life of giving. A car will breakdown or be run out with mileage and needs to be replace; a home needs to be maintained from time to time and can be taken away by a hurricane; a person – who you love – can get frustrated with you and walk away.
The problem many of us have is that we expect much more than the maximum threshold an object can actually give us. All objects have a breaking point when you are trying to extract more from them than what is possible for them to give you.
Happiness is derived through material objects which we believe will give us joy: food gives us happiness by keeping our stomachs full; homes give us happiness by putting shelter over our heads; burglar alarms give us happiness by ensuring our security, and people – in most cases – give us happiness through companionship.
The Anatomy of Desires can be broken down as follows:
- You have basic needs as a human being; you are entitled to getting your needs fulfilled.
- Needs get converted to wants; these wants are driven by an internal drive to survive and thrive.
- An uncontrollable want becomes a desire when your ego takes over and you seek more and more and more objects to fulfill your needs.
- A controlled want becomes satisfaction as you are fully accepting of the result(s) an object has given you to fulfill your need.
The needs which are met at the human survival level need to be controlled by your mind to an acceptable level of satisfaction to be happy. If at any point you are not satisfied what is being returned to you by the object – meeting your need – you will continuously fall prey to unhappiness. There must be an acceptable level of happiness established to be fulfilled. This is why some people who have the least are the most happiest, as they are in full satisfaction that their need has been met.
In order to be satisfied, you have to find a point where you are fulfilled. In many cases, all that it takes is a choice to make this happen.