Sometimes, it's like you're starving. But you don't know you're starving because you've never really been hungry for more than a few hours at a time. And yet, emotional hunger is hunger too.
It would hardly be worth mentioning if it only lasted for days, much less hours. But it can persist for years and quite insidiously, unrecognized!
All you know is that others are feasting, and you are not okay. But, not to worry. The ones you love most are there and will think of you when the feast is over. Rest assured, they will phone before they turn in and call it a night.
You learn that waiting for calls to come after the feasting is especially bad for you, because you imagine the feasting the whole time you are waiting for the phone to ring, while you are so hungry yourself. So you give instructions that calling earlier is better, so sleep can come sooner - if one is lucky enough to sleep.
On a good day, you can answer. But you're quieter and more withdrawn than usual. You don't need to look at your knuckles to know. White-knuckling has been the best description of the whole damn thing for as long as you can remember, even though it doesn't actually describe anything at all.
You muster some willpower, hoping it will be enough to pass for normal, as you recount honorable mentions from the day and press on your stomach to muffle the hunger pangs. Whatever it takes to patch through to the next day and the next, so it can be "over with," and you can recover.
Settle back into some semblance of normalcy when all becomes familiar again. A normal work week is proof that no real harm was incurred. When the pit in your stomach subsides, you know all is well. Normal operations can resume. Crisis averted.
Recovery becomes a series of unsatisfactory conversations about better timing of phone calls, what information to give, how it never seems to be just right, trying to explain why you want to know about every-little-thing they ate, and what time would be better for a starving person to talk about a feast they aren't invited to?
All of this, instead of penetrating the mystery of how one got so hungry in the first place or what one might need to feel less hungry and desperate as an uninvited guest...
But you take all of the responsibility for your brokenness and being disagreeable, and vow to work harder to sound normal on the phone and solve the problem of your hunger and reactivity, all while being completely unable to convey how much starving compounds this problem for you.
Ironically, in your complicity, you feed the very idea that starves you: This is all your fault, and it shouldn't be this hard.
You agree that it shouldn't. The solution seems simple enough, but not simple enough to be solved. Just simple enough to be repeated. For decades.
By some miracle, you and I found another person who had experienced and studied emotional hunger so thoroughly and knew it so intimately, that she forged a pathway through it to the other side. While she said many, many things, albeit few of the words here, this is what I heard:
Emotional hunger doesn't take an inordinate amount of food to be satiated. A consistent, dependable source, with even a modest amount of nourishment, is plenty to meet the need. Don't give up. Discover what you need, go to the source, and here is how...step-by-step.
May God be with us as we hunger, learn, adapt, and persevere. Amen.
**This post is a reflection and dramatization of my lived experience relating to a profound need for emotional connection and struggle when that need is unmet, as well as the importance of communication, relational dynamics, attachment styles/wounds/core beliefs, and personal responsibility.
There is another side, and I am traveling to it. I am waiting on the little piece of paper (Licensed Professional Counselor - Associate) that makes me an official travel guide. It won't be long now. I hope and plan to take as many people as I am able to the other side - where needs are explored, known, met, and understood. If I can be of help to you, please let me know.
If you are interested in learning more about the "person who experienced and studied emotional hunger so thoroughly," it is my privilege to introduce you to Thais Gibson and her Personal Development School...an easy-to-approach (as well as digest) treatment on attachment styles, fears, needs and a pathway to healing, all borne out of her own suffering.
Personal Development | Attachment Styles | The Personal Development School