We can fulfill our own needs best by communicating those needs. One of the most common, passive, and aggressive means of communicating in an inherently violent fashion comes when we feel a need, we don't express that need, and then we hold other people responsible for not meeting that need. This can only lead to blame for the one not fulfilling the need, and harm to both the one not expressing the need and the one who cannot fulfill an unspoken need. This doesn't mean we choose to blame the one who does not speak. Blame interferes with the unconditional and only does harm. We don't voice our needs because we have learned that rather tortured silence, learned a meaning perspective that tells us not to ask to have our needs met.
Silvia and I overheard a remark made by a parental figure to a young girl: "I might have bought you some gum if you hadn't asked. Now that you've asked, I won't get it for you." That has never made sense to us as long as we thought about and talked about it. The adult offered the child a lesson the adult had learned and in which she believed. It doesn't make any sense sitting here nakedly on the page, and it couldn’t have made much sense to the girl, but she would have to cope with it and learn from it. The child learned that she was not worthy of asking for what she needed. All she could do was hope that the dominator in her life would somehow spontaneously know that unspoken need and answer it. This would include her need for the unconditional. Indeed, demanding the silence of the need denies even the possibility of the unconditional.
If the young girl learned that confusing lesson, she may well have developed a meaning perspective which disallowed asking for her needs to be fulfilled. It won't help us to blame ourselves or others for learning that lesson and living by that lesson. Once we become aware of such lessons, and they can come to quite a number, we can question them, critically reflect on them, and make new, conscious perspectives and choices by which we can live more freely. We have that choice.
Interestingly, some students and others have looked at the idea and practice of Compassionate Communication as something that would prevent them from having their needs fulfilled. When we feel motivated by a meaning perspective that tells us that only the dominator gets her/his needs fulfilled, that would be the case. However, domination never truly fulfills our human needs. When the need is a desire for domination, it will never get fulfilled. Domination always hungers for more and more domination.[145] If we couldn't get our true needs fulfilled without domination, it would take all the compassion out of this form of communication. Expressing our needs enacts a fundamental part of our natures as human beings and even as our simpler, animal selves.
Expressing our needs comes as the first volitional act in our lives. We cry. In that cry, we can hear a lifetime of needs reaching out to the world and to those nearest to us. These begin as primarily material and instrumental, but even then, they are inextricably linked to the non-material, to the emotional and, perhaps, even to the spiritual. When a baby cries for food, it wants more than the food to satisfy her/his needs. The baby wants connection, a connection that replaces the semi-conscious intimacy of the womb and creates new intimacies through a becoming consciousness and a becoming self. At the core of these needs comes what we have seen again and again, the need for the unconditional and all that the unconditional entails. Compassionate Communication offers us a mechanism wherein we can express our needs fully, even more fully than less conscious communicative choices. Using such communication allows us to ask for our needs to be met by ourselves and others without violating the needs of ourselves and others. In this way, we can satisfy our needs fully and remain within the moral sphere, the ends principle, and the I/Thou. Our needs form an essential part of our ends as people. If we do not satisfy those needs, we are denying our ends, and in that denial, we become means to some other sort of end. This condition denies our inherent right to live our lives fully through the expression of our becoming self.
Our needs do not give us the right to express them as demands. Demands act against the needs of those whom we address our needs. Demands also deny our need because whatever the response, we will know that the demand has not been met or offered as a gift from one free person to another. It has not happened through the unconditional, only through domination and submission. That's why "please" and "thank you" work so well in that regard as we discussed earlier.