The Necessity of Comfort

Why Emotional Health Hinges On This Need

We all have hurts. The human experience is a contrast and conflict of hurt and healing, light and dark, good and bad. There is an undeniable yin/yang to our realities.

This ongoing dance of shadow and sunlight across our experiences is one of the things I’m most fascinated about in life, and exploring both the depths of darkness and the majesty of the light drive so much of what I do. It consumes my thoughts, and in a lot of ways, lead me to start this Substack.

It also in many ways is what lead my friends and I to start a podcast a few years ago. This podcast, Lunchtime In Rome, is a deep dive into the emotional health - and the behaviors that manifest - of us humans. Recently, we’ve been taking a close look into the ten emotional needs that everyone has, including things like Belonging, Attention, and Acceptance, among others. You can always take our Relational Needs Questionnaire to discover what you’re high and low on. All results are emailed to you privately, and it’s completely anonymous.

This week, we took a much closer look at Comfort. It’s unique to every other emotional need - the cornerstone, if you will - because without proper comfort, every other need can’t be met, and every other hurt can’t properly be healed.

I’m very low on the need to be comforted. I love to extend comfort to others, to join them in their hurt and circumstanced, but I myself have a low need for others to comfort me. I’ve always kind of took pride in this fact. However, during this episode, I found some key insights for myself that have changed my perspective and in many ways unlocked some key realizations.

Starting around the 20 minute mark, we begin our deep dive. I would love to hear your thoughts on your concept of comfort. Is it something that you seek or give as a practice? How do you comfort others, and what brings you comfort? What hurts are you going through - or have gone through - that have not properly been comforted?