Winter Needs

Winter in New England this year has been quite a winter. Cold temperatures and snowstorms have caused many older locals to reflect on how this was the sort of winter they had known for much of their lives.

For my part there was a joy in having snow on the ground for not just days, but weeks and months. My daily patterns became delivering kids to school and then skiing in the local open spaces, around frozen ponds, seeing up close places I had been curious about but had never been able get to because of water and marsh.

Winter is wonderfully metaphorical: turning inward, slowing down, restorative, restful. It is also harsh, and the needs for shelter, food and warmth are clear.

Enough time in winter conditions also brings noticeable changes and adjustments, such as finding that I needed a bit fewer layers of clothing as the winter progressed. While there was a need to get warm and dry and eat and hydrate there was also an expansion and tolerance through many days of being in the cold.  

At work in the cabin-office there is much to do during the cold months to simply deal with the conditions. The needs are distilled into simple repetitive tasks, but they take a while. Winter is expert at slowing things down. Getting up early to light the wood burning stove in the office, refilling it often and stacking more wood inside the building are ongoing.

‘Needs’ have been the theme in and around the therapy process too. One client discussed his question about whether unmet needs as a young child could come full circle and cease to be needs and instead become reconciled and completed in his current life. I have loved his question. It was simple and rich. I could enjoy my shared experience with him in the need for parents and adults to be in emotional contact or attunement with me as young child and how that need lives on into late adulthood.

This singular piece was the kernel that ushered me towards therapy, and therapy work. It was a need not fully satisfied as a younger self but it became more actualized by working with it, relating it to others, integrating it through repeated work into this place of yearning.

I don’t know that are most basic needs ever become unnecessary in our lives. But I do think that whatever our circumstances in life have been our most basic unmet needs can become unlikely gems when we have both awareness of them and willingness to work with them. Therapy is a tending to these needs and because it is relational it helps integrate unmet needs. What has been unresolved in the person has the possibility of being whole once again.