The 10 Essential Emotional Needs

We are all born with essential physical and emotional needs and the innate resources to help us fulfil them – known as human ‘givens’ – which need to be met in order to facilitate good mental health.

Following are the ten main innate emotional needs:

1) Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully

2) Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition

3) Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices

4) Being emotionally connected to others

5) Feeling part of a wider community

6) Friendship, intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts ‘n’ all”

7) Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience

8 ) Sense of status within social groupings

9) Sense of competence and achievement

10) Having meaning and purpose — which comes from being stretched in what we do and think.

Life is never 100 per cent perfect, but as long as our main essential needs are being met, and our resources are being used well, we do not suffer mental health problems. However, if just one of these needs is unmet, or our resources are being misused, it can affect our mental health and well being.

Here is a list of the innate resources (also human givens) that we have to meet our emotional needs.

• The ability to develop complex long term memory, which enables us to add to our innate knowledge and learn
• The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with others
• Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our emotions, use language and problem solve more creatively and objectively
• A conscious, rational mind that can check out emotions, question, analyse and plan
• The ability to ‘know’ — that is, understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching
• An observing self — that part of us that can step back, be more objective and be aware of itself as a unique centre of awareness, apart from intellect, emotion and conditioning
• A dreaming brain that preserves the integrity of our genetic inheritance every night by metaphorically defusing expectations held in the autonomic arousal system because they were not acted out the previous day.