The Therapist and The Coach Podcast - EP 022

Episode 22: The Need Beneath the Want In this continued conversation on needs, wants, and values, Lerae and Oren move more deeply into the places where human longing can become confused, displaced, or unknowingly lived out through our choices. Together, they explore how unmet needs for love, safety, being seen, belonging, and emotional regulation can become attached to the things we think we want: success, achievement, relationships, recognition, material things, or the need to keep moving. What begins as a very human longing can slowly become a pattern of reaching, performing, compromising, or trying to fill something from the outside that was never meant to be filled that way. Lerae brings the conversation into the lived reality of adulthood, marriage, change, and contentment. She reflects on how disorienting it can feel when the old drive to strive begins to soften, and how strange it can be to realize that the way we once made decisions may no longer fit who we have become. Oren names the deeper ache beneath many of these patterns with tenderness and clarity: that when early needs were not met, we often begin to trust replacements more than we trust relationship, stillness, or ourselves. The work, then, is not to shame ourselves for what we reached for, but to begin asking better questions about what is underneath the reaching. This episode is an invitation into awareness. To pause before the next want. To notice where we may be trying too hard. To ask what need is asking to be met with honesty, compassion, and care. And to consider that real change may begin not with having the answer, but with allowing the right question to reorient us.