A Mission 22 Blog Series on Relationship Healing, Divorce Recovery, and Healthy Vulnerability.

PART I: You’re needy, and that’s okay.

Sometimes, one of the hardest questions to ask in a relationship is something like, “Can you do this for me, please?” 

Asking to have our needs met by our partner, business, romantic, or otherwise, can be a task that seems simple and straightforward, but when the rubber meets the road, it can prove to be unnecessarily challenging. 

From the outside in, it seems perfectly reasonable for one party to ask another a basic request, like, “Hey, can you let me know 24 hours in advance before you schedule our next meeting so I can plan accordingly?” or, “I could really use some help with chores today; could you please take out the trash before I get home?” 

And yet, it can very often be the case that making these requests clearly and straightforwardly generates apprehension and inner conflict. We might come up with reasons, perhaps subconsciously, that we really don’t want to bother the other person or that we can handle things ourselves. Whether out of insecurity or pride, we can have a hard time making our needs known within a relationship. 

At times, this can devolve into a game of what author Dr. Rober Glover calls “covert contracts.”

Here’s How It Works 

If I feel uncomfortable making requests for my needs in a relationship, then I’ll find a backdoor kind of way to receive what I’m looking for. It’s a way of masking an expectation of behavior from another person yet still obliging them to respond. 

For example, let’s say I would like my partner to greet me at the door when I come home with a kiss and ask how my day was. But I never tell her explicitly that’s what I want because making that request plain is something I’m uncomfortable with doing. So, instead, I might hint that I would like more physical affirmation around the house, then implement an if-then agreement that I play out, but without telling the other person that’s what I’m doing.

I might think to myself, if even mostly subconsciously, that “I can get what I want if I just work really hard around the house in a way that she notices. Then she’ll have no choice but to oblige me if I ever get to a point where I need something.” 

A covert contract works in a similar way to when we have an injury in the body and compensate for it with an adaptive motor pattern. If someone gets a shoulder injury and it takes six weeks to heal, that person may have gotten used to moving that shoulder in a different way during the healing period so they can go about picking things up and doing their work. Once the tissue has healed, the nervous system needs to relearn how to move efficiently as the injury is gone.

But if we don’t relearn to use the joint as it was designed—in its state of good functioning—we will still find a way to perform the movement, but in the long run, it can become dysfunctional. 

Over time, having created this internal scorekeeper through the implementation of this covert contract, I may become resentful that she has not met my needs despite the fact that I never put it into words. 

Why Do We Make These Contracts in the First Place? 

It’s very likely that we developed this way of relating to people when we were very young. If you have ever heard of attachment theory, you may be familiar with how it works. 

Effectively, we learn poor attachment when we make “bids” for our needs to be met, but those bids are met with indifference, neglect, or abuse. 

There is a verse in the book of Matthew that says, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

Unhealthy attachment is formed when we ask for food, and we are given a snake! (So to speak, I hope). The adaptive pattern—which is formed in response to unsuccessful efforts at bids—is both a way of thinking and behaving. 

We can learn to figure out how to get food, affection, and other essentials in “maladaptive” ways, by people pleasing, chronic obsequiousness, or emotional deferral (that is, a total disregard for one’s own emotional well-being for the sake of the other). This is usually paired with a view of oneself as not actually needing one’s own needs to be met and denying that emotional closeness in any context is worthwhile.  

Why Do We Start to Believe These Things?

Because the alternative way of thinking and behaving at one point in life was threatening our young brains, a story was created to help us adapt. 

If our young self learns that any time a bid is made, the response leaves us feeling unseen, then we learn to behave as if the world doesn’t see us as a way to explain why it is a caregiver would refuse us in that way.

This might sound like childish logic, and it is, but these same neural circuits we create when we are at that age are the ones that we bring with us into adulthood. 

It doesn’t mean you’re broken; it means you have a human brain that was doing the best it could with what life presented it. 

But brains are plastic. Your old attachment style is not your destiny. We can come to learn that being open and honest about our needs is actually a gift to our partners. We can gradually teach our nervous system that voicing an honest need without the veil of a covert contract is not, in fact, going to be the death of us. 

We do it one small step at a time. 

In this series of blogs, we’ll look more deeply at how attachment styles show up for us in relationships, specific steps we can take to get to a healthier place, and several other relationship challenges and relationship healing opportunities along the way.