I remember the exact nervousness I was feeling the first day I entered the gym with my brother.

I was a young 19-year-old woman who looked friendly and happy on the outside, but that was hurting on the inside.

The pain I felt at that time felt like a huge fire of anger, powerlessness and shame that was burning me from the inside.

Back then, I had two main ways to cope with this pain in order to be able to keep functioning in life:

I would try to escape the pain by running.

I would try to alleviate the pain by cutting myself.

Yes, I was a cutter.

For a lot of people, it is hard to understand how hurting yourself physically with something sharp could make you feel better.

But through this letter, you will see that my addiction to cutting is not so different from your addiction to food, to porn, to social media, to exercise, to alcohol, to gaming, to Netflix, to weed, to work, to shopping, to sex or to cigarettes.

Shortly after starting to train at this gym, I became obsessive about making progress, training harder and harder and learning everything about training and nutrition.

I noticed that I was making huge progress regarding the amount of weight I was able to lift to the point where I was bench pressing and squatting more weight than most men.

My physical appearance evolved from skinny and athletic to “thick and curvy” and with that, the way men would interact with me.

I started to get more and more attention from the people around me, which reinforced my need to keep training obsessively and build an impressive physique.

Training helped with my cutting addiction. I noticed that I wasn’t cutting myself as much, so I interpreted it as a sign of me feeling better.

The truth is that I wasn’t.

Looking back now, I can clearly tell that I just replaced one addiction with another.

Instead of directly hurting myself with a blade, I was destroying my body with a crazy amount of weights and hour-long workout sessions.

Why we do what we do

We all have needs.

Some of them are physical:

The need to breathe

The need to eat

The need to drink

The need to sleep

The need for touch

Etc.

Some of them are emotional:

The need to belong

The need to be loved

The need for importance

The need to feel safe

Etc.

It’s important to understand that our needs have to be met.

If you do not breathe, eat or drink, you will die.

The same goes for our emotional needs:

If our needs for belonging, feeling safe or being loved are not met, we will die.

Our physical needs are way more obvious to acknowledge and understand than our emotional needs, which makes it harder for us to meet them.

Unfortunately, it simultaneously makes us unaware and oblivious to how most of our emotional needs are not directly met.

Most of us are not aware of these needs not being met and go through life starving and completely deprived on an emotional level.

Manipulation – your only current way to survive

If I deprived you of air, water or food, you would probably fight me and do everything possible to get this physical need met because you want to live.

When it comes to our emotional needs, we fight for our survival in a more discreet way :

We manipulate.

If you haven’t spent time getting to know yourself and your emotional needs so you can directly meet them, you will go through life manipulating and using people around you to meet your emotional needs.

This might surprise you, maybe trigger you, because we associate manipulation as something really terrible to do.

And it might be if you are doing it consciously with the intent of using, control and harm someone else.

But let’s not be this hard on ourselves, because it is something we all do very unconsciously.

Here are two examples of how I would manipulate people around me to get my emotional needs met:

The reason why I started to cut myself was because I was having a very difficult relationship with my dad.

It is absolutely essential for a child to feel seen, heard, understood and validated in their emotions and in what they do.

Remember in my first letter, I spoke about how the things I was really good at (sport, creativity) would not be recognised and valued by my dad.

I grew up with the need to feel valued, important, understood and loved for who I truly am not being met.

I turned towards cutting because of the pain of being constantly invalidated and rejected by my parents, but also because it would put me in a position of victimhood, so I could force my parents to make me feel like I matter.

Once I realised that these emotional needs would still not be met by my parents, I started to seek validation, significance and importance of other men through my physical appearance.

The bigger and curvier I would get, the more attention I would receive.

This started a vicious circle of attaching my worth to the way I looked and reinforced my determination to train harder and harder.

At that time, I was completely unconscious of what I was doing and why I was doing it.

And because I was indirectly trying to meet my emotional needs, they never felt completely satisfied and I kept feeling a deep hole inside of me.

These two examples are quite deep and complex to become aware of.

But here are other ways we all manipulate and use people around us to meet our emotional needs:

• You lie because you think that you will be rejected, disliked, judged or pushed away if you tell the truth
• You stay in a bad or toxic relationship because you don’t want to be alone
• You use your physical appearance as a leverage to get something
• You refuse to take responsibility for yourself and hope that someone will come and save you
• You self-sacrifice and constantly try to please other people to feel accepted
• You promise things you can’t fulfill
• You try to escape the feeling of emotional starvation by distracting yourself with food, porn, social media, smoking, drinking, work, exercise, partying etc.

Can you see that the reason we do these things always comes down to trying to get other people to meet our needs for belonging, safety, importance, significance, connection, and affection?

The link between emotional starvation and addiction

Ok, we realised that we all have needs.

Some of them are physical and some of them are emotional.

Our only option if we want to survive and live a happy life, is to become aware of these needs and to meet them in a conscious way.

The problem is, that most of us grew up with parents, caretakers and people who were not aware of their own needs and how to directly meet them.

Which means that they were not able to meet our needs as kids either.

This vicious circle leads us to grow up in a world full of human beings who are starving and desperate for real connections because no one knows how to get their emotional needs met.

We do not know how to turn to humans to consciously and actively resource each other to meet our needs, so we turn to an alternative to escape the pain of emotional deprivation.

That alternative becomes a way to cope with life and, simultaneously, a reliable way to escape the very uncomfortable feelings of loneliness, unworthiness, fear, shame or anger that are a by-product of our unmet needs.

If we use that alternative over and over again, it becomes an addiction.

We get hooked on the temporal relief that action or behavior gives us. So next time when these strong emotions come back up, we will turn towards our addiction again.

Addiction is another taboo-like word we like to avoid or demonize. When we think of addicted people, we think of extreme hard drug addictions like heroin.

But we realised here that anything can become addictive.

(food, porn, social media, exercise, alcohol, gaming, Netflix, weed, work, shopping, sex or cigarettes etc.)

And that everyone is most likely addicted to something.

Because no one has taught us how to get to know our needs and how to consciously and directly meet them.

Now that we have identified one of the biggest and deepest problems of our society, and you have started to develop the skill of observation (if you don’t know what I am talking about, read last week’s newsletter here), it is time to start observing yourself too.

With that, I have one question for you:

What are you addicted to?

I will see you next week for the last part of this Social Conditioning series of letters.

Until then, take care.

Oli