Becoming Un-Desperate for Love

Kerrie Jones • August 1, 2024

Many of us are desperate for love and don’t recognize it. One telltale sign is when you find yourself stuck in the same relationship cycles and patterns that don’t serve you. These cycles leave you feeling hurt, confused, lonely, and sometimes ashamed because you’ve given so much and failed yet again. In your mind, ‘this time will be different’, yet somehow, you’re here again, and again, and again. Be encouraged! There is a way out.

 

Desperation is driven by unmet needs that no matter how hard we try we can never satisfy. We can’t satisfy them because they aren’t actual needs, they’re needs we’ve convinced ourselves we have, born out of painful childhood experiences; let’s call them phantom needs. Left unchecked, phantom needs lead to a lot of pain as we chase after the unattainable. The truth is we all have the need to be loved, first by our parents/caregivers, then by ourselves; and if we weren’t loved properly as children this need quickly becomes desperation if we don’t happen to stumble upon someone who’s willing love us properly. The challenge many of us face is while some of us may gravitate to the person who shows up willing to love us as we need, many of us will reject that person and gravitate toward the people who love us in similar ways to the people who failed to love us properly as children. This is the cycle, overlooking healthy love for toxic love that feels familiar, out of a need to resolve our childhood dilemma.

 

Childhood is the space we are given to learn everything we need to take care of ourselves for the remainder of our lives, including how to love and be loved. If you were loved properly as a child, you then love yourself properly and have a generally healthy approach to loving others. If not, the opposite is true. Children learn by example, our initial lesson is to receive love, and as we learn, our priority shifts to loving ourselves. If you were not loved properly as a child, you will miss the cue to begin loving yourself as you have not been given the tools to do so. Instead, you will move into adulthood continuing to seek after the love you missed in childhood from romantic partners instead of recognizing your responsibility to give it to yourself first. Somewhere in our adolescent years (I imagine) is when the shift takes place and the cycle is put in motion, hence the boy crazy/girl crazy teen.

 

It's also important to note that our perception of love is informed by our childhood experiences. Because we are born with the automatic expectation to receive love, we understand love to be whatever it is we received or witnessed. Thus, no matter what we experienced, we interpret the treatment we received from our caregivers as loving, even if it was completely devoid of love. Generally speaking, if we were neglected as children, we will tolerate and accept neglect in our adult relationships and see it as ‘the way we love each other’. This is how toxic love is born.

 

Healing this type of trauma isn’t a linear process, meaning, there’s no true first, second, and third step to take. There are, however, steps you can take, in whichever order feels right for you, toward healing so that you no longer chase after love outside of yourself. The goal is for you to rely first on self-love and then look to others for love, as God intended. I’m going to provide you with a numbered process, but again, this isn’t linear; you’ll circle back and skip around according to your own needs. I will say, this process is best undertaken with the help of a trained mental health professional or a trusted friend or family member, so they can reflect what they see to help you make more informed decisions. If you have neither, there are things you can do right now in your own company with as little as a journal and a pen to begin moving the needle in the direction of healthy love; the key is to be honest and reflective with yourself about what you think and feel.

 

  1. Become clear about what happened to you. Who hurt you? When? How? What hurt the most about it? What message(s) did that hurt send to you about yourself? How did this hurt change you? Where possible, address your concerns with the people who failed you.
  2. Learn yourself. We are full of strengths and great characteristics, as well as flaws. Who are you? What do you enjoy? What are your strengths? What are your flaws? What are your values? It’s difficult to love what you don’t know.
  3. Know your worth. When we are improperly loved in childhood it can cause us to believe that we are not worthy of proper love because something is wrong with us. The truth is there is nothing intrinsically wrong with you, you are lovable just because you are.
  4. Learn to love yourself. Love is accepting someone exactly as they are, with all of their flaws and being willing to stick it out for life. The easiest way to learn to do this for yourself in adulthood is to surround yourself with people who show you this type of love; people who are willing to hold up the mirror to show you how great you are and how flawed you are, and are willing to love you anyway.
  5. Embrace aloneness. If you can tolerate, and even appreciate spending time alone, it’ll become difficult to settle for time with just anyone. Quality time will need to be quality.
  6. Become clear about what you want out of a relationship. Do you want to be needed or wanted in relationships? As healthy bonding occurs, the need for one another will increase as you grow to depend on one another; however, at the outset of a relationship being needed can create a dependency that can foster resentment down the line
  7. Address the symptoms of the trauma. One of the most common symptoms of childhood relational trauma is fantasizing. Many of us meet someone, and within weeks, or even days the fantasies begin. You begin to envision a future with this person without the evidence that they are a suitable mate. To address this, bring yourself back to the present, what behaviors do they display? What do these behaviors say about who they are? Don’t assume anything is true about them; if you don’t know, ask. Be clear and honest with yourself about the red flags that are present? If you’re making excuses for them, your fantasies have become stronger than your reality.

 

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start. The goal here is to work through, process, or even resolve your childhood trauma around improper love so you can clear out the clutter and become more intentional about the love you give yourself and the love you expect to receive from others. By doing this, you become more capable of showing up for yourself and others from a place of worthiness and confidence, rather than from desperation. The truth is, from the moment of your conception you were lovable and worthy of being loved properly. You have the power to shift your mindset so you can achieve the loving relationships you were born to have.

 

If you’re in need of support, I invite you to join the waitlist for a community I’m developing to support singles in their quest for healthy love. Visit https://theothersidetherapy.com/news and enter your email address to join the waitlist under the paragraph entitled ‘Hey’. Additionally, if you’re interested in therapy, I have a few slots available for individuals and couples. Visit the website and book a free 15-minute consultation to determine if we’re a good fit for therapy.

 

Kerrie Jones,

Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (#143151)

Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (#15245)

Supervised by Dr. Glenna Anderson, LCSW (272046)

The One Thing Standing Between You & Success

By Kerrie Hudson • February 8, 2026
The new year typically comes with a desire to be successful in an area where winning has been challenging. As such, we spend time thinking about what we want for the year ahead and commit to doing things that will help us achieve our goals. The challenge many of us run into is that we quit on our goals before we can clear the first few months of the year; so, while January is still with us, I want to share with you some information about what I believe to be the number killer of success, anxiety, and how to overcome it so you can have a greater chance at winning this year. Regardless of your goals, anxiety has a way of stepping in and stealing your motivation before you can gain much momentum. It’s the quiet voice lurking in the background telling you that you can’t have what you really want because it’s too hard, or you’re not good enough, or if you do attain it, something terrible will come along and take it away. Essentially, anxiety is at the heart of why you settle; you’ve listened to that little fearful voice that’s informed only by your limited experience and/or imagination, and convinced yourself you can’t have the thing you deeply desire; so your only option is to go without the tightened body, or the love you deserve, or the business that would positively impact the lives of others, which ultimately leaves you dissatisfied and even regretful. You’ve given up on your goals and dreams because of something that might happen, but probably won’t. If you’re going to disrupt this cycle the key is to challenge your ego. Many people believe the issue with the ego is cockiness and arrogance that leads one to see themselves as above others, and while that’s true, what most people fail to understand is the arrogance in perceiving fear as fact versus seeing it as just one of many possibilities. When you see your fears as fact you treat them as certainty and you make decisions that align with them, ultimately shortchanging yourself of the life you deserve. In reality, the ego can work for or against you, and combined with anxiety, an unhealthy ego will kill your ability to enjoy your life and achieve your goals. So, if you you’re going to succeed in anything and have a good time doing it, you must check your ego and anxiety so they don’t keep you in a constant state of settling in fear. If left unchecked, the ego will convince you not to invest too much or not to try too hard because “this probably won’t even work”, or “nothing good ever happens for me”. It will see losses as catastrophic events and overinflate the importance of a few outside opinions. Its goal is to keep you safe, when in reality, the things that pose a threat to you are likely not threatening at all. The key is balancing the ego by removing certainty from your beliefs, because anything that hasn’t yet happened isn’t certain, it’s a possibility. When you begin to see your fears as possibilities you can move from a place of guardedness to a place of curiosity; this helps you to open yourself to more possibilities than the one rooted in your fears, and when you see more possibilities, you can free yourself to take risks (which is necessary to succeed). With this shift, you can begin to see losses as lessons so you can use your setbacks as a setup to do better, to refine your approach, to put the proper supports in place; and as your gain more experience, you’ll begin to see realistic likelihoods of what can happen over possibilities and certainties, reducing the size of your fears. You begin to think “if I take these steps, it is possible that I won’t achieve my goal, but it is likely that I’ll be closer to it than if I settle here”, and when you take on this perspective beautiful things happen.

What's The Deal With Boundaries

By Kerrie Hudson • December 21, 2025
Most of us are trying to improve our lives, and as such, we can cling to ideas and concepts that we believe will help us to get there. A lot of times these ideas and concepts lose their true meaning and become a crutch that we lean on to resist change, instead of a skill we develop to become a better us. Boundaries is one of those concepts that’s often used, rarely understood, and often weaponized in ways that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns; that changes for you today. Simply put, boundaries are our deeply held, internal ‘no’, and when our boundaries have been violated, you feel it. Think about the feeling you get in your body when you’ve waited for a parking space, and someone steals it, or when you’ve loaned someone money that they fail to repay; these are boundary violations. Boundaries are the line we’re not willing to cross in our interactions with others, and that line is your responsibility to maintain. For example, you may have a boundary that dictates you don’t loan money; but, if someone asks you to borrow money and you give them the loan, you have violated your own boundary, and that feeling is far worse than violations from the outside. When you don’t know and/or do not articulate your boundaries you are hurting yourself, and that type of behavior sets you on a course for a world of pain. When you fail to take responsibility for your boundaries it becomes difficult to trust and depend on yourself; and if you can’t trust and depend on you, who can you really trust? Bottom line, boundaries are ingrained into the fabric of our person, they don’t go away; and boundary-setting and protection are necessary skills to develop in order to become a confident and self-assured human who is fulfilled in life. If you struggle with identifying and honoring your boundaries, Becoming Her Again is the gamechanger you need to step into the woman who no longer shrinks or settles for less than she deserves. The course is coming soon, join the waitlist to be the first to access this powerful resource. (P.S., it comes with 2 bonuses: The Boundary Starter Pack & Scripts for Difficult Conversations)
Dirt path winding through green, grassy mountains under a partly cloudy sky.

Why Heal?

By Kerrie Hudson • October 8, 2025
Why Heal? Healing has become a buzzword in the company of words like self-care, peace, and mental health. They’re certainly a bit overused, but are nonetheless vital components of the life we all want to live. So, what is healing? Healing is wholeness. What makes us “unwhole”? Trauma. Many of us don’t believe that we’ve experienced trauma, and that’s understandable because this type of trauma is so common it doesn’t seem very traumatic. But here we’re talking about what we call “little t” trauma. Some examples are the separation or divorce of parents, emotional neglect (no one to talk to/childhood loneliness), or a parent suffering with mental health challenges (anxiety and depression are most common). When children have experiences like these, they often have parents or caregivers who are unavailable or incapable of providing for their needs, and instead of the parent taking responsibility, the kid blames themselves – that’s the trauma. When you are at fault of anything, you naturally correct or fix yourself; so, when you blame yourself for something you weren’t responsible for you overcorrect and rid yourself of attributes and qualities you actually need. There’s no way of knowing this process is taking place in childhood, the damage is done. The good news, however, is it’s reversible, and reversing the damage is called healing. There’s also no way to instinctively know what we need to heal until we begin living; life tells us where we need to heal. The easiest way to identify areas where healing is needed is when we want something, especially basic life necessities like love, and we can’t seem to achieve it, we do the same thing we did as kids, we fix ourselves. And when the fixing doesn’t work, we either settle, or we give up. We settle, because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have this than nothing, or we quit because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have nothing. There is some truth to the idea it doesn’t get better. The truth is, this is the best you can get if you don’t change, and change comes with healing. This is why you may feel stuck in certain areas of your life. You’ve fixed everything you believe needs fixing, but you haven’t healed. We can see this very thing play out currently with Cardi B who within the past year has separated from her husband Offset, had a baby, met a new man Stefon, and is currently pregnant again. In her new album she reflects on the events of the past year, and likely before. She’s gotten a new man, new clothes, and upgraded her body, but she hasn’t described any updates on her heart. Same Cardi, different man, same problems; and the same is true for us all. When we invest heavily in the superficial things that we believe will get us what we want (and we will undoubtedly start with the superficial things) yet we fail to do the real heart work, we’re deceiving ourselves. Why heal? Because it’s necessary to achieve our goals so we can live the life we truly want to live.