When the Thing You Do Isn’t the Thing You Need

A pattern I often see in couples showed up especially clearly in a recent session. I’ve changed a few details here to protect their privacy. When things got emotionally intense, one partner tended to disappear. He might go quiet, shut down, or physically leave the room. His wife did nearly the opposite: the more he pulled away, the harder she pursued him, and her words could become sharper and louder. Sometimes she lashed out.

From the outside, it would have been easy to call this avoidance on one side and anger on the other. But when we slowed down and got curious about what each reaction was actually doing, something more interesting emerged. For him, disappearing was a form of protection. When the emotional temperature climbed too high, getting away helped him feel safer and less overwhelmed. For her, the anger was doing a completely different job. Underneath the sharp words was a longing for connection, and she wasn’t really trying to push him away. She was trying, rather desperately, to bring him closer.

And that was the painful irony. The strategy he used to feel safe left her feeling abandoned, and the strategy she used to feel connected left him feeling less safe. Both reactions made sense, and neither one was getting either of them what they were really after.

What Is That Doing for You?

In my last article, I wrote about a question I lean on often in therapy: “What is that doing for you?” I like it because it makes room for curiosity before judgment. Instead of rushing to stop the anger, the withdrawal, the people-pleasing, or the overthinking, we can wonder what job the reaction is trying to do. Anger might supply a sense of strength when we feel powerless. Withdrawal might turn down the volume on overwhelm. People-pleasing might keep rejection at arm’s length, and reassurance-seeking might buy a few moments of relief from uncertainty.

Once we have a sense of the job, a second question tends to follow: what do I actually need? The strategy and the need aren’t always the same thing, and sometimes they’re barely related at all.

The Need Beneath the Strategy

I find this distinction surprisingly useful. Someone who needs reassurance might ask their partner the same question six times in a row. Someone who needs space might walk out of the house and ignore their phone. Someone who needs to feel respected might decide that winning the argument is the way there, and someone who needs connection might criticize until the other person finally engages.

None of these strategies is foolish. Most of us learned them for a reason, usually because they worked somewhere, at some point, well enough that our minds and nervous systems kept them around. The trouble is that a strategy can eventually get in the way of the very thing it was meant to deliver. The person longing for reassurance asks so insistently that their partner begins to back away. The person who needs space vanishes so completely that coming back feels less safe for everyone. The person desperate to be understood may explain themselves in so much detail that the other person becomes overwhelmed and stops listening. One of the more frustrating things about being human is that we can work enormously hard to get something we need while quietly making it harder to receive.

Sometimes the Need Is Surprisingly Ordinary

There’s another reason I like asking “What do you need?” For many people, it’s easier to answer than “How do you feel?” We tend to imagine that emotional needs are mysterious things that take years of therapy to uncover, and occasionally they do take some digging. Quite often, though, the answer is wonderfully ordinary. I need to eat something. I need twenty minutes where nobody talks to me. I need to know what the plan is. I need someone to tell me we’re okay. I need a quieter room. I need some sleep. I need reassurance. I need space. I need a hug. I need not to be touched right now.

Human beings are complicated, but not every difficulty calls for an elaborate psychological explanation. Sometimes what looks like irritability is exhaustion, and what looks like withdrawal is sensory overload. Sometimes anxiety settles considerably once we find out what’s going to happen next. The important part is being curious enough to ask.

Understanding the Need Creates Choice

Knowing what we need doesn’t make everything easy. If I need reassurance, the other person may not be able to give me exactly the reassurance I want. If I need space, I may still have a job, a family, and a dog who needs walking, which makes disappearing for the afternoon unrealistic. If I need closeness, my partner may need some time to settle before we can reconnect.

Recognizing a need also doesn’t automatically make it someone else’s job to meet it in exactly the way I want. “I need reassurance” is different from “You need to reassure me until I feel better.” “I need space” is different from “You have to leave me alone whenever I ask.” Naming the underlying need can actually help us become more flexible about where and how we respond to it.

The husband in that relationship didn’t have to choose between staying in an overwhelming conversation indefinitely and disappearing altogether. He could learn to say something like, “I’m getting overwhelmed. I need a little space, but I’m not leaving you. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll come back.” His wife didn’t have to choose between swallowing her need for connection and chasing him harder. She could find language closer to what was really happening: “When you pull away, I get frightened that I’m losing you. I need to know we’re still connected even if we take a break.”

Their needs hadn’t changed, but they now had new ways of reaching for them, and each had far more room to respond to what the other was actually asking for. I suspect this applies well beyond couples. Once we understand what we actually need, we’re no longer stuck with the first strategy our nervous system happens to offer us.

Continue the Conversation

🛠 Try This

The next time you catch yourself doing something familiar, such as pulling away, getting louder, over-explaining, people-pleasing, seeking reassurance, or reaching for control, try pausing for a moment. You might ask yourself what this is doing for you, then go one step further and ask what you actually need. After that, you can wonder whether there’s another way to respond that might serve that need better.

It’s fine if the answer isn’t obvious. Noticing that the thing you’re doing may not be the thing you need is already a useful piece of information.

📚 Curious to Learn More?

One helpful resource for thinking about needs is Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. Rosenberg draws a clear distinction between underlying human needs and the particular strategies we use to try to meet them, and you don’t have to adopt the whole model to find that distinction useful.

For relationships specifically, Sue Johnson’s Hold Me Tight explores the patterns couples can get stuck in when one person pursues connection while the other withdraws for protection. I particularly appreciate how her work shifts the conversation away from “Which one of us is the problem?” and toward “What is happening between us?”

🍋 Something More Is Coming

I’ve been working for some time on a more comprehensive TLS resource, tentatively called Tuning In. It began as a workbook focused on alexithymia and interoception — difficulty identifying and describing emotional experience, and the process of noticing and interpreting signals from inside the body — but it has gradually grown into something broader.

The questions at its heart are how we notice the signal, put words to it, understand what it might mean, and recognize what we need, and then how we use all of that to make choices that move us toward the people and things that matter to us.

Many of the ideas in this recent series of posts are finding their way into that larger project. There’s still work to do, but I hope eventually to have something practical that brings all of these pieces together in one place.

🤝 Need Some Help?

Sometimes the patterns that once protected us become so automatic that they’re hard to see from the inside. Individual or couples therapy can give us a place to slow those patterns down, get curious about what each person is actually trying to accomplish, and experiment with new ways of responding. I offer individual and couples counselling in Milton, as well as secure virtual psychotherapy across Ontario.

The need underneath a pattern often makes sense, even when the way we’ve learned to pursue it isn’t working. Most of us simply do better when we have more than one way to get where we’re trying to go.