How to avoid damaging people

The human givens approach

The term ‘human givens’ refers to our innate physical and emotional needs, together with the natural guidance systems (or resources) Nature gives each healthy baby to help it fulfil them. They are a form of accumulated knowledge that has evolved over millions of years – the shared biological inheritance of all races, which should not be ignored. They are called ‘givens’ because they are genetically incorporated into our biology to aid our survival and further development.

The premise is simple: those whose innate needs are met well in the world thrive. They do not develop mental health problems or behave antisocially.
People whose needs, for whatever reason, are not met well, or in balance, don’t thrive. Instead, they become stressed, anxious, angry or depressed – some even psychotic. People will instinctively attempt to get their needs met in whatever way they can. This can help fuel addiction, greed, self-harm and antisocial behaviour; for example, we all need to feel connected to a wider community and to have a degree of status, so if someone can only do that by joining the local criminal gang or a terrorist group, they will be driven to do so.

Major policy implications

We ignore the givens of human nature at our peril. As with any venture, if the innate physical and emotional needs of everyone involved are not factored in, policies will fail and contribute to the rise in rates of mental illness.

Despite more than 50 years of massive government expenditure directed at education, welfare and mental health, the innate emotional needs of millions are not currently being met. As a consequence the rates of mental ill health and anti-social behaviour continue to rise.

What exactly stops someone from getting the necessary physical and emotional nourishment?

From the human givens perspective, there are three possibilities.

One: The environment does not provide proper nourishment at that time. Crops don’t grow in a drought. With people, once our physical requirements are taken care of, we must also consider our emotional needs: security, volition and control, attention, status, intimacy, connection to the wider community, feeling we have competence in some areas and are being stretched in what we do so that our life feels meaningful.

Furthermore, modern life presents several characteristics that disrupt our ability to use our 'internal guidance systems' effectively. For example, the activities of large institutions can impact on the lives of individuals and families by imposing innumerable inappropriate rules and regulations on them in an attempt to legislate for every eventuality. The constant stress such autistic ‘straight line thinking’ causes the rest of us is palpable and affects huge swathes of the population.
Another is that we can no longer take it for granted, as past generations did, that our existing family, neighbourhood or political, religious and educational institutions will ensure social stability – those days are over. The only answer to that is to formally identify our emotional needs and create new, more flexible organisations that can keep up with the pace of change by constantly holding these needs in mind. Then we might be able to reduce the damage being done to people.


Two: A person doesn’t know how to operate his or her internal guidance systems to help them get their needs met, as when they haven’t learnt how to engage and disengage their attention at will, or they misuse their imagination by worrying, which leads them to become depressed. The more complex any animal organism is, the more learning input from the environment is needed to survive over and above what it inherits from its genes. Higher mammals that hunt, for example, learn how to do this from older members of the pack. But humans, whose capacity for learning is vast, need much more complex input from the surrounding culture than, say, a wolf, and the input has to be sufficient and of the right quality for healthy development.

Three: An individual’s internal guidance system is damaged. Now, obviously, when things go wrong in the transmission of genetic knowledge children can unfortunately be born damaged. And direct physical assaults on the brain due to attack, accident or poisoning by drug or alcohol use later in life, can also damage it. But these represent a comparatively small number of cases. Overwhelmingly the most frequent damage to human guidance systems arises from three sources: insufficient nourishing food to rebuild the actual physical apparatus itself; psychological damage due to trauma; and unhelpful conditioning. Fortunately, there is a wealth of easily available information available about nutrition. Fortunately too, many psychotherapists know how to decondition psychological trauma quickly. But the way we are conditioned by the culture we live in and the harm it can cause is more problematic and less widely known; we don’t often recognise our own conditioned behaviour and responses objectively and examine them consciously.


There is enough psychological knowledge available to correct this situation and help people get their needs met

And that knowledge is already being put to good practical use across the country to improve the provision of a wide range of services. Time and again, practice based evidence is showing that, when psychotherapists, schools, mental health trusts, PCTs etc., adopt the human givens approach, they transform the lives of the people they serve for the better. To continue the huge beneficial inroads they are making, they need your support.

To find out more about the human givens approach please visit:
www.hgi.org.uk