We all have emotional needs

One thing we humans have in common is that we all have emotional needs. Emotional needs are the feelings or conditions we need to feel happy. Emotional needs are part of a healthy lifestyle and satisfying them is as important as satisfying our physical needs. Some examples of emotional needs are feeling part of a community, feeling appreciated and being loved.

Many people refer to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, developed by Abraham Maslow in 1943, to describe the most basic emotional needs. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is pyramidal, with the basic needs at the bottom and the most complex needs at the top. Since Maslow's work in the mid-twentieth century, much work has been done to better understand what people need to be happy and healthy.

Emotional needs, for example, are addressed in Human Givens Therapy, a short-term therapy approach developed by Griffin and Tyrrell in the 1990s. According to Griffin and Tyrrell (2004), failure to meet basic needs is the cause of psychological problems (cited in Uçar 2022). The basic emotional needs identified by Griffin and Tyrrell (2004) are as follows:

Security: We need an environment that allows us to fully develop.

Attention: We want to receive attention from others and give our attention to those in need.

Autonomy: We want to have the will to make responsible choices. Community: We want to belong to a large community.

Privacy: We need our own private time and space to reflect and consolidate experiences.

Meaning and Purpose: We want to feel that we have goals to strive for and that our life has a purpose.

Intimacy: It is important to feel connected to friends, family and other important people. Status: We want to feel valued and respected.

Achievement: We want to feel competent.

Everyone's emotional needs can be different from one another, depending on factors such as upbringing and life experience. Different psychologists have created different lists of emotional needs, as I have shared an example in this article. But there is no doubt that the common emotional need of all of us is love.

A child who grows up in a family where their emotional needs are not satisfied may start to think that these needs are not important. When this child becomes an adult, he or she takes on the role of his or her parents and, just like them, does not pay attention to his or her emotional needs. What about your emotional needs? Do you feel that your emotional needs are being met and if not, have you thought about why this is so? How about paying attention to your emotional needs starting today?