Filling the Empty Places: Why Craving Starts With What's Missing

Rick Hanson opens his weekly talk the way he opens most of them: with a promise to fill you up. He does not mean a sugar rush or a new habit. He means the psychological nutrients that were, in his phrase, either missing or "kind of a really thin soup" when we were young, and that can still be thin when we are grown. From there he makes an argument that starts in fundamental Buddhist teaching and ends in the wiring of the brain. He begins by reordering the Four Noble Truths, following Stephen Batchelor, so that craving comes first. Then he traces the restless reaching of adult life to something missing in early experience, explains how unmet childhood needs make a person more sensitive to lack, and offers a practice aimed at the empty places inside.

Why does craving come before suffering in this teaching?

Most people who have encountered the Four Noble Truths know the usual order: first the reality of dukkha, then craving as its cause, then cessation, then the path that leads there. Hanson walks through that sequence and then describes the change Batchelor proposed. Put craving first. Start with the plain observation that people crave, and the rest of the teaching reads differently.

Hanson is careful about the word dukkha, which is routinely translated as suffering. He notes that it is perhaps better rendered as stress, and that it carries two senses. The first is the set of basic characteristics of existence: impermanence, the way everything changes; interbeing, the way everything is made of connected, changing parts; and the plain fact that pleasures end and no experience can serve as a permanent foundation for happiness. These do not go away, even after awakening. The second sense is the suffering that arises when we add craving to these facts.

That distinction carries the whole talk. Hanson states it directly:

"It is false to assert that life is suffering. Direct inspection shows that life is simply life. It includes pleasures, it includes pain."

— Rick Hanson, in the talk, opening section

Pain and loss are facts. Trouble begins when we grip the pleasant and push away the unpleasant, when we want the good to stay and the bad to vanish. Hanson puts the human version of this plainly: "We crave the continuing of pleasure and we crave the ending of pain. We crave them going away when we don't want them and we crave them coming back when we do." (2:09) The wanting and the contraction around it, he argues, is what creates the painful suffering of the second noble truth, and the path that follows is the way to loosen that grip.

Where does craving come from in the first place?

If craving is the engine of suffering, where does it come from? Hanson's answer is simple and, he says, practical. Craving rests on a feeling that something is missing or something is wrong. "The basis for craving is something is missing or something is wrong. There's a deficit or a disturbance in the meeting of important needs." (6:44)

He gives examples that anyone can recognize. A squirrel wants its nuts and wants to get into its safe place. Humans pile up possessions and chase pleasures. Underneath, he says, there is often a sense of a hole to be filled or a disturbance to be settled. Once you see craving as a signal of deficit or disturbance, paying attention to what is lacking in your life stops being self-indulgence and becomes a sensible thing to do. Hanson is quick to add that not every want points to a real need. Sometimes we believe we must have something we do not actually need. The subject of this talk, though, is what happens when primary psychological experiences were missing while we were growing up.

He also takes an evolutionary view, and it is a playful one. Craving, he says, is Mother Nature's way of motivating small creatures to keep going and pass on their genes. He imagines the primates who felt perfectly content and stopped looking for food, and says they did not last. The ones who survived and became our ancestors were the restless, driven, insistent ones who craved a lot. "Here we are today." The humor makes a serious point. The drive that keeps us alive can also keep us reaching long after the need is met.

How do unmet childhood needs shape us?

This is the center of the talk, and Hanson grounds it in standard child development and neuropsychology. Every human infant arrives with many needs and depends on caregivers to meet them. How intense those needs feel depends on temperament, health, and previous experience. Hanson's most important point here concerns what happens when those needs go unmet over and over.

"Lots of painful experiences of not receiving the attention and care and pain relief and comfort and cuddling and warmth that we need actually makes us needier for those things and more vulnerable and sensitive when we don't get them."

— Rick Hanson, in the talk, 9:46

In other words, deprivation does not simply leave a blank. It can sharpen the sensitivity to deprivation. A child who has repeatedly reached for comfort and found it absent tends to become more alert to absence, more braced for it, and more hungry when it appears in small doses. The adult who seems to need constant reassurance may be carrying that calibration forward.

Hanson also describes what it looks like when a child receives the right kind of attention. He sketches a small, ordinary scene of a caregiver who is focused and present, whose attention signals to the child that he matters and exists. The child relaxes, his face softens, and the tension leaves his body. The point is not the drama of the moment but its repetition. Those thousands of small signals, he suggests, are how a child learns that the world will meet him, and that he is worth meeting.

"Cuz she's now focused on him. She is indicating you matter to me. You exist."

— Rick Hanson, in the talk, paraphrasing the scene, 20:06 (transcript is partial; wording approximate)

Why does the feeling of something missing last into adulthood?

Hanson describes a recurring pattern in adult life: an underlying sense that something important was missing, and then a set of reactions that grow out of it. Some people become stoic and deny how much the lack affects them. Others keep looking outside themselves, through achievement, possessions, or constant checking for approval. Hanson's framing is that these are not character flaws. They are learned adaptations to needs that went unmet, and they can be quietly self-perpetuating because they keep the person busy with the surface and away from the underlying need.

He points out that the feeling of lack often persists even when adult life looks full. A person can be successful and well-liked and still feel a hollowness, because the early need was for something different than what adult achievement provides. That is why, in his view, healing involves reaching the younger places where the deficit started, not only managing the adult symptoms.

What did Rick Hanson learn from his own version of this?

Hanson does not present himself as a finished example. He speaks openly about his own path, including a stretch of college life that involved parties alongside academic success. He describes a moment in a dorm when a fellow resident invited him to sit, and talks about the value of letting himself take in the feeling of being included, valued, and liked, even when the connection was fairly modest. The lesson he draws is not that one meaningful invitation fixed everything. It is that small experiences of connection can be real nourishment when we let them land rather than rushing past them.

He also returns to a theme that runs through the talk: the difference between knowing that something was missing and actually feeling it. An insight about the past can be true and still leave the young place inside untouched. Hanson's method is to bring the experience into the present body and let it be felt.

How do you figure out what you really need now?

Hanson's practical question is blunt: what was important that was missing? (30:29) He asks listeners to look back toward the early years and notice which kinds of experience were scarce. Was it attention? Comfort? Reassurance that feelings were acceptable? A sense of belonging? Warmth, calming, or simply being seen? Naming the need is the first step, because a need that stays vague keeps producing vague craving.

Then comes the part many people skip. Hanson stresses that the nourishment is available now, in the present moment, even if it was not available then. Adults can offer themselves some of the experiences that were absent, and can also take in good experiences from the world, such as kindness from another person or a moment of connection with someone who is simply there. He is clear that the goal is not to pretend the past was different. The goal is to supply, in the present, the psychological nutrients that were thin before.

He frames this as a kind of gentle inventory. Notice what is lacking. Notice the body's response. Let the sense of need be there without being overwhelmed by it. Then bring in something that meets it. The more specific you can be about the missing ingredient, the more directly you can supply it.

What does brain science say about healing old wounds?

Hanson connects the emotional work to the way the brain learns. Experiences, he says, shape the brain's associational networks, the patterns of connection that determine how we respond to the world. Repeated experiences leave traces, and the traces influence what we expect and how we react. This is why early deficits can become default settings, and why new experiences can gradually reshape them.

He emphasizes taking in beneficial experiences deliberately, including while holding in mind very negative material from the past. The mind tends to fix on threat and absence. Hanson's advice is to stay present to the difficult memory without being pulled down into it. He warns against getting swept into a downward spiral of rumination, where each painful thought pulls the next. The aim is to stay with the young pain long enough to feel it, and to give the brain a steady stream of good experience to learn from alongside it.

"That is the thing: we are not trying to erase what happened. We are learning to hold it while something else is also true."

— paraphrase of Rick Hanson's emphasis on holding past pain alongside new experience, in the talk, 35:37

What does the guided practice actually ask you to do?

The talk closes with a guided practice whose spirit is captured in the image Hanson uses for it: taking in what was missing, letting it fill the empty places, like a golden rain settling into a dry field. (40:06) The practice moves in stages. You bring to mind a sense of something that was lacking, then turn toward the feeling of that lack with some kindness, and then allow a quality the younger self needed, such as warmth, safety, or being valued, to arrive and be absorbed. Hanson's emphasis throughout is on letting the good experience stay long enough to register in the body rather than moving on too quickly.

For readers who want to go further, the talk points to a companion meditation and to Hanson's six-week online course, The Healing Link, which he teaches live and which goes deeper into reaching younger places. He also offers free weekly talks and meditations.

Where to go from here

Hanson's argument is that craving is not a character defect but a signal, and that the signal often points back to needs that went unmet long ago. The reordering of the Four Noble Truths gives that signal a clear place in the path: first recognize the craving, then see the deficit beneath it, then bring in what was missing. You can start small. Tonight, notice one moment of reaching, whether for food, a phone, or someone's approval, and ask what might have been missing underneath. Then let one good experience, a kind word, a moment of warmth, or a sense of being included, land fully before you move on. Hanson's view is that this is how the thin soup of early life can gradually become something more nourishing.

To go deeper, watch the full talk and the guided meditation Hanson recorded to accompany it, and consider his six-week course if you want structured work on the younger places inside.