By Paul and Patricia Richards
Energetic Fact of Life #42: We are trained to think that giving positive messages to one another is optional or not needed, or that the same kinds of positive messages work for both genders. We also tend to believe that we have the option to remain silent when positive messages are obviously called for. These assumptions contribute hugely to human suffering. Everyone needs a daily diet of positive messages, and you can’t opt out of this need no matter your degree of awakening or strength of will. Withholding a needed positive message from your mate is no different from sending a crushingly negative one, and negative messages destroy relationships. Your job: Ask for and offer five basic messages freely and ongoingly. Tell other people and especially your mate: “I see you,” “I regret your pain and suffering,” “You are loved and a part of the pack,” “I appreciate your contributions and achievements,” and “You are safe with me and from me.”
Everybody needs positive messages, and no living creature possessing a personality can escape this fact any more than a sentient being living in a human body can deny that body’s need for physical food. Equally important, negative messages are poison to the personality; they starve and deform it. It is therefore the business of all sentient creatures to avoid both internalizing negative messages themselves and offering a negative message as sustenance to any other person.
Each person must receive at least five key kinds of positive messages every day. In addition, the gender essences have their own set of message requirements. As important as is our need for positive messages, (they are, in fact, vital to the creation of powerful intimacy), our requirement for specific signals is just one of many vastly underestimated stumbling blocks relating to need on the path to great intimacy.
We humans are physical, imaginary, energetic and spiritual creatures, and can be said to reside at once in all four corresponding realms. The fourth, spirituality, is an ineffable Allness of which we are a part and in which no need exists. But as creatures of the other three realms, we humans have needs. We can define a human need as an element the lack of which will either kill a person or destroy his or her quality of life and thus indirectly bring about death. The physical needs are food, drink, air and warmth, among others. The imaginary or psychological aspect of a person, as just mentioned, needs certain positive messages on an ongoing basis. The energetic needs are three: to gather energy, to release content, and to live free of the intent of others.
Finally, we must consider the issue of need as a special element in romantic relationships.
The profundity of the union between two sexually connected people makes them the primary message sources for each other. They are capable of delivering positive messages to one another at a depth possible for no one else (though as popular culture reminds us, they are also capable of delivering devastating negative messages whose impact can be so incandescent that recovery may never occur).
Gender relationships are thus the primary vehicles for meeting the human need for both male-female-specific signals (“Good job,” “You are lovely and you are enough,” “You are my first choice,” and “You are the center of my universe” are examples) and basic positive messages. Yet paradoxically, no gender relationship can become extraordinary if it exists mainly as a machine whose job is to meet the needs of either partner. The best way to resolve this tension is to remain attentive to meeting mutual message needs, while never allowing need itself to become the driving force in the relationship—this is done by focusing on the relationship as an unselfish celebration of love. Extraordinary relationships must in the end exist to affirm that love exists, rather than to serve the false god of need.
Other ways are available to you to meet the life necessities of your partner (and expect your partner to meet yours) without letting the fact of need dominate your relationship. You can spread your dependency for messages and assistance fairly widely among a healthy community of friends. This obviously keeps each member of a couple from depending solely on the other.
Another important way to dodge the gray bullet of need is for each partner to develop a reasonable confidence that he or she can easily find a new mate if the present relationship fails. This kind of confidence, well exemplified by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, does not have to diminish or challenge your mate, or undermine your mutual love and devotion. Rather, it frees your mate from the burden of obligation to you, allowing him or her to feel wanted more than needed. This can be an incredibly fulfilling relationship experience.
The real secret to avoiding need-based relationships is to choose a partner who is not inherently a needy or need-based person, and avoid entering into an intimate relationship as a need-based person yourself.
Having examined need itself, and the gender specific signals that we all must receive, we come at last to the five messages introduced earlier as the primary needs of your personality. No one is exempt from nature’s mandate to be both a sender and a receiver of positive messages. Silence is not good enough. The absence of a positive message is the equivalent of a negative one, and negative messages do not build healthy individuals or relationships. To fail to be an active positive message sender is to doom oneself to a life of limited or zero intimacy and message starvation, in which major aspects of the human composite remain unhonored.
You . . . need . . . to . . . know . . . this. You.
Despite the fact that these messages are obviously and desperately needed by everyone, our culture at present shows little consciousness of this basic fact of human life, and most people deliver only a fraction of the number of messages truly called for. We would do well to be sending positive messages to everyone around us, and especially to our mates, whenever such messages are true.
I am not encouraging you to believe that you are your own thoughts or personality. The Wild Attraction model is based on the idea that you are something more, and that, spiritually, we probably need nothing.
If you accept the premise that you are not your personality, it becomes possible to view the need for messages in a soft and gentle way. Sending and receiving positive messages is simply a way of treating your personality as lovingly and thoughtfully as you would treat your pet or take care of your car. Give it what it needs for love’s sake, and it will serve you well. Do the same for the personality of your lover.
The necessary five messages are given here. They tend to build on one another in a hierarchical way—for example, most people need to feel seen before they can really hear an apology. That said, each message is a stand-alone, and all are equally important.
• I see you. Tell your lover, and everyone else in your life, that you see them fully and completely. Then tell them exactly what you really do see. Let them know that you really are seeing them by paying careful attention and delving into detail beyond what they might expect. Tell them your impression of their hopes and fears, their special talents, and, when appropriate, their deeper feelings.
• I regret your pain and suffering. Next, express regret. Tell your lover, and anyone else you care about, that you regret their misfortunes and sufferings. Feel free to apologize for the pain life itself may have caused them, if it seems appropriate. You can apologize for anyone, for anything, without taking the guilt or blame on yourself, and your apology will have value. Think of apology as the expression of regret rather than acceptance of blame. Remember that only about one out of every thousand needed apologies is ever conveyed in our world.
• You are loved and a part of the pack. The third message to give freely to everyone is the message of unconditional love. I always think of this message in concrete terms. I want people to know that if I were the helmsman of a crowded lifeboat in frothy green stormy seas, and if they were to fall over board, I would go back for them. This third message is, therefore, a lifeboat message for me, rather than a syrupy declaration of emotion. The message you give your lover is an ultimate version of this message; it is both beyond gender and highly sexualized, and the pack is the couple itself. When expressed to the rest of the world, the message is free of gender context, and the pack is the fellowship of human beings everywhere.
• I appreciate your contributions and achievements. People need to hear that they are appreciated for their contributions, achievements and victories. Here too, people rarely receive the messages that they have earned. Moreover, most of the incredible feats achieved by human beings are internal. People suffer in silence, they struggle internally, they face demons and dig deep inside for hidden resources, and it is almost all hidden from view. Great things happen inside the human heart. Look there and don’t hold back when you perceive something wonderful or amazing in your fellow creatures.
• You are safe with me and from me. Finally, people need to hear that they are safe, really safe. Watch over them, and tell them that you are doing so. Incredibly, many people I meet have never been effectively told that safety exists. Most people believe only in degrees of jeopardy and live in degrees of greater or lesser anxiety, but never in true relaxation. The assurance of safety is a vital and wonderful resource that we need to share with one another.
It is the business of a seer to also share the observation that a great many contentious behaviors in the world are attempts to compensate for the lack of needed messages. People ask for raises because they haven’t been told they are appreciated. People sue other people because they haven’t received an apology. They destroy and even murder because they have never felt seen and it seems as though any attention is better than none.
Knowledge of the messages and their role in human life is one of the simplest and most precious things to have come my way in a lifetime on this path. It is the most needed idea about need. I hope it gets passed along.
Excerpted from Wild Attraction: A Ruthlessly Practical Guide to Extraordinary Relationship (Chelsion Press), by Paul and Patricia Richards. Centered on 59 “energetic facts of life,” the book provides cutting edge advice and tools for experiencing energetically “awakened” romantic relationships and transformational intimacy.
