Jamie takes out his special book. He slowly labors over copying the words from it, five times each. It is tedious work. His mother quizzes him on the words, and he goes back and writes the ones he missed 10 times each, using them in sentences and finding things to help him remember those with strange spellings or exceptions to the spelling rules. Every day he works on lists upon lists of words. Finally the big day comes. He is on the stage, using all of his hard work to spell out words in front of a huge group of people. Finally it is just he and another boy and they have come upon the word pneumonia. Jamie has remembered that this is one of the special words, and that there is a silent letter before the n. The other boy misspells the word. Jamie gets up in front of the crowd and carefully spells "P - n - e - ". Jamie pauses and thinks that it sounds like a w, but it is a special word. Thinking back to his lists, he imagines looking at the word on the paper, and he sees it clearly. He continues, "u - m - o - n - i - a." The crowd cheers and his mother jumps up and down in the audience. Jamie has just won the state spelling bee. He will go on to represent his state in the national spelling bee.

Laura comes home from school and throws herself down in a kitchen chair. She sighs heavily, and her mother notices her eyes are red like she has been crying. Lately things haven't been so good between Laura and her mother, so she doesn't say anything, she just looks worried. Laura feels like her mother doesn't care about her problems. She turns and looks around the kitchen, and then says, "Mom, I have had a really rotten day, could I please just have a hug with no questions asked?". Laura's mom is thrilled that Laura would ask for a hug, she can't remember the last time she hugged Laura. Maybe that was why Laura always screamed at her in the middle of their all-to-frequent-fights, "You just don't understand". Maybe she should just offer more support and stop trying to tell Laura what to do all the time. Laura's mother gives Laura a hug, and Laura cries on her shoulder. After a while, she pulls away, and Laura's mom simply says "I am here if you want to talk, no advice given unless you ask." Laura smiles and thinks that maybe her mother is beginning to understand her. Maybe she could be more cooperative. She asks if there is anything that she can do to help with dinner.

Penny is once again in a hospital emergency room. Her parents frantically pace the floor outside, wondering what Penny is going to say this time. Penny looks around her and sees that she has gotten quite a few stitches on one arm, and from the equipment in the room, it looks like she took a bunch of pills and had her stomach pumped as well. She doesn't really remember that part. She remembers locking herself in the bathroom and cutting her arm, she had to release the pain after her father raped her, again. She doesn't know what else to do. Of course the doctor wants to admit her, but her parents won't allow it. They know if she is admitted they will find out why Penny does this. Penny feels hopeless and trapped. She thinks that maybe, someday, someone will ask her why she cuts, someone will offer her safety and understand. She doesn't know how to tell anyone. Looking around the room, she sees the cabinets full of needles and scissors and other things, and pretty soon, Penny is cutting a new gash in her body, this time in her leg, and praying that someone will actually ask her why. Penny is 9 years old.

What do all these people have in common? The are all attention-seekers. Doctors and other mental health professionals have put an unhealthy connotation to the term, but in truth, every single one of us seeks attention in some form, in order to fulfill our basic needs. Attention seeking is normal, and there is nothing wrong or bad about it. Everyone needs and seeks attention. It's time to stop making people feel guilty because they use whatever they know, whatever skills they have, in order to fulfill the most basic of human needs beyond food, water, and shelter. All humans need love and attention, recognition and belonging.

Abraham Maslow was a humanistic psychologist who believed that people are not merely controlled by mechanical forces (the stimuli and reinforcement forces of behaviorism) or unconscious instinctual impulses of psychoanalysis. Maslow focused on human potential, believing that humans strive to reach the highest levels of their capabilities. People seek the frontiers of creativity, and strive to reach the highest levels of consciousness and wisdom. People at this level were labeled by other psychologists as "fully functioning" or possessing a "healthy personality". Maslow called these people "self-actualizing" persons. Maslow also set up a hierarchical theory of needs in which all the basic needs are at the bottom, and the needs concerned with man's highest potential are at the top. The hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization. Each level of the pyramid is dependent on the previous level. For example, a person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied.

According to Maslow's theory, the hierarchy of needs is as follows, with number one being the most important to survival and at the very bottom of the pyramid.

1. Physiological Needs These needs are biological and consists of the needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. These needs are the strongest because if deprived, the person would die.

2. Safety Needs Except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting) adults do not experience their security needs. Children, however often display signs of insecurity and their need to be safe.

3. Love, Affection and Belongingness Needs People have needs to escape feelings of loneliness and alienation and give (and receive) love, affection and the sense of belonging.

4. Esteem Needs People need a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others in order to feel satisfied, self confident and valuable. If these needs are not met, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.

5. Self-actualization Needs Maslow describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was born to do. It is his "calling". "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write." If these needs are not met, the person feels restlessness, on edge, tense, and lacking something. Lower needs may also produce a restless feeling, but here is it much easier to find the cause. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem the cause is apparent. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.

Looking at this, we can see that the need for love, affection, and belonging are important and crucial to survival. As abuse survivors, we are often deprived of these things, as well as the some of the first two, especially the safety needs. The needs outlined in 4 and 5 are nearly non-existent in abusive households. Therefore the child "acts out" and seeks to fulfill these needs in other ways. Sometimes, if the child has learned enough and is strong enough, they can tell a teacher or other adult about the abuse, be believed, and the cycle of abuse stops and the needs begin to be met. However, most of the time either the child does not have enough self-esteem to tell, is too fearful, or does tell and is not believed. Therefore the child carries these survival methods of getting these needs met into adulthood. They have no idea that there are people in the world who will give them love and attention and affection just because they are worthy of it. They usually believe that they are worthless and that they are at fault for the abuse, and therefore they don't think that anyone would stay with them or be their friend if they don't do something to keep the "friend's" attention.

Survivors, and multiples especially, are very imaginative and creative in getting their needs met. From self-injury (which also has other causes), manipulation, crisis creation, narcissism, codependency, promiscuity, one-upmanship, lying, exaggerating, raging, and addictions; all the way to complete anti-socialism, criminal behavior, and suicide attempts. There is no doubt that we did whatever necessary to make sure we got as much as we could of what we needed. Unlike Jamie and Laura above, we have no idea what it means to seek attention in positive and healthy ways. We have been told repeatedly that we are bad, worthless, useless, ugly, selfish, wrong, etc., or have had these things implied for so long that we inherently believe them. Because of this belief, we have a deeply imbedded "program" that works as hard as possible to fulfill the needs of safety, belonging, love, and acceptance into some group in society, even if we have to resort to more unhealthy attention-seeking behavior in order to "fit".

For me, I first found a group I "belonged" in with drug addicts. They fulfilled my needs at least as long as I had dope or money. Of course, when I ran out of both, they were gone too, but I didn't see that this was something common for drug users, I personalized it, thinking it was just because I wasn't good enough. I was never good enough, no matter what group I tried to fit into. That is because when using unhealthy attention seeking, others get tired of constant crisis or lack of give and take in the relationships or of being manipulated, and they pull away. It isn't because we are bad or unworthy, it's because we are using the survival skills we used as children to get our needs met. It works for awhile, but never for very long, because everyone gets tired of it, including us.

It is important, I believe, to recognize and appreciate those survival skills for the time that we needed them in order to survive. I don't think we need to make these behaviors "bad" or criminalize them, they were an important part of our ability to bear the unbearable. You are not bad for using these tools. They are all you know.

However, today we are adults, and we can find ways to replace these old attention-seeking behaviors with new ones that really get our needs for love and belonging and affection met. Asking for hugs or time to talk, using our creative gifts to express ourselves (such as painting, drawing, music, crafting, writing, etc.), and realizing that we are worthy, wonderful, and deserve to be cared about; these are all very good attention-seeking methods that work. When we experience friendship for the first time that isn't based on our manipulations, need, crisis generating, or codependency, we find a small measure of self-worth. The more we find these pockets of self-worth, the more our self-esteem grows, and we learn that we are valuable and become more self-confident. This eventually leads us to become ready and able to move into self-actualization. The more we leave these old survival skills behind, the more we move away from survivor to thriver.

The first part of the process is the most difficult. As with everything else, we have to admit there is problem before we can work on a solution. Professionals have made attention-seeking such a negative and horrible thing that of course none of us wants to own up to these behaviors. The more they push, the more we resist, until the mere suggestion that we are "attention-seeking" will send us into a defensive rage. This is totally unproductive and hinders healing. Each of us has to be ready, in our own time, to face the truth of our survival behavior. It is my hope that this essay will help you understand that you are not bad or wrong for using these behaviors to get your needs met. Once we have put away the idea that there is something bad about it, admitting and finding our own ways we seek attention in an unhealthy manner is the next step. Don't worry if you find many of them, it still doesn't make you bad or wrong. Remember, these were survival modes, they were necessary for you to be here today.

Once we have admitted we have these unhealthy attention-seeking behaviors, and we have identified them, we can choose one and begin to replace it. It is important to choose only one at a time, or we can quickly become overwhelmed. Change is hard for humans in general, painful for survivors, and even more difficult for multiples. We are giving up tools that served us well in the past, and they are somewhat like an old security blanket. It's hard to do. The important thing in this step is to acknowledge that it was a necessary skill at the time, and it is simply no longer needed, and to find a way to replace it. Be very gentle with yourself, but always work as hard as you can to maintain as much self-honesty as possible. The point is to heal, not make yourself feel worse. It is important that you understand that you are bad making yourself good either. That also misses the point. The idea here to understand that seeking attention is necessary, natural, and necessary. We only need to find ways to fulfill those needs that leave us satisfied, increase our self-esteem and self-worth, and bring us closer to healing rather than those that keep us stuck in the past.

Having a qualified therapist who understand this concept can go a long way to helping you see where your weak spots are and how to strengthen them. However, as I have said, professionals have done a great disservice to their patients by making attention-seekinga bad word. Perhaps printing this out and taking it to your therapist is a way to see how he or she feels about the issue. Or if you are in a 12-step program, you can apply the steps to this issue very successfully in most cases.

I am not a therapist or professional anything. I am simply another survivor and multiple that believes that we are all worthy of love, belonging, acceptance, and consideration. I have fought with self-destructive survival techniques for years, and I am just now beginning to understand the truth of the survival skills I have developed over the years. Sometimes this understanding is painful, because I have sometimes hurt others in my desire to be wanted, needed, and loved, but I know that each step I take and each unhealthy behavior I put away for a healthy one, I am learning to live again.