Photo by Юлія Дубина on Unsplash
When we have been conditioned to thing we should be constantly productive, perfectly happy, and endlessly calm, it’s easy to feel inadequate when these expectations aren’t met.
But let me tell you something important: if you don’t fit this image of the perfectly calm and collected person, you’re not broken. You’re not crazy. What you’re experiencing might simply be a natural response to having your emotional needs unmet.
Anxiety? It’s a normal response to unmet needs for safety or appreciation.
Burnout? A normal response to unmet needs for autonomy, rest or impact.
Depression? An perfectly normal response to unmet needs for connection.
For too long, society has labelled people as “difficult” or “defective” for having very human reactions to their emotional needs not being met.
But what if these emotional struggles aren’t just random malfunctions in your brain? What if they’re your body and mind’s way of telling you that something essential to you feeling human is missing?
Sure, it could be a chemical imbalance, but what if that’s only part of the story? Were you really born defective, or are these overwhelming feelings the result of a lifetime spent with your emotional needs going unmet?
What if, instead of simply labelling ourselves and others with this or that disorder, we start looking at ourselves and others with the same acceptance and compassion we look at children?
Because this is the truth of what we all are: hurt children walking around in adult bodies, doing the best we can to have our needs met.
This is why I created jornee. The app is designed to empower you to regain control of your emotional well-being by helping you reconnect with the parts of yourself that need attention, care, and understanding.
At jornee, we believe it’s time to normalise being imperfect and having needs. Let’s be honest — pretending otherwise isn’t working, is it? Ignoring your emotions or labelling them as inadequate only deepens the pain of feeling unseen and unheard.
It’s time to embrace what makes you human, and to acknowledge that your feelings are there for a reason: they’re guiding you back to the unmet needs within you.
Join us in this movement. Reclaim your mental wellness by embracing and nurturing your needs. Because when you do, you’ll find the peace, balance, and happiness you’ve been searching for all along.
Our innovative app features an exclusive emotional needs framework, created by me personally, based on my 2 decades journey through radical self-compassion and emotional freedom.
🚀 We are launching the jornee app in late November 2024.
⚡️Click here to sign up for the waitlist and be the first to hear when we launch.
📖 P.S.: You don’t need to wait for the app launch to start healing. I wrote a book about my journey through radical self-acceptance and emotional freedom You can purchase it here, or download a free sample here.
📝 P.S.2.: If you’re looking for a more practical guide for embracing self-compassion for emotional freedom, I made a digital guide workbook where you get to write about the story of your life through the lens of therapeutic writing prompts.
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You’re Not Broken, You’re Having Your Emotional Needs Unmet was originally published in Mindful Mental Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.