What are human givens?

Tuesday, 02, Dec 2008 04:11

Every single one of us is born with essential physical and emotional needs and, if we are born healthy, the innate resources to help us fulfil them. These innate needs have evolved over millions of years and are our common biological inheritance, whatever our cultural background and it is because are incorporated into our biology that they are known as the ‘human givens'.

We are driven by nature as our innate physical and emotional needs seek their fulfillment through the way we interact with the environment using the resources nature 'gave' us. But when our emotional needs are not being met very well, or when our resources are being used incorrectly, we suffer considerable distress. And so do those around us.

In everyday terms, it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species. As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we quickly die.

We also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. In addition, we instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs — the main focus of human givens psychology.

There is widespread agreement as to the nature of our emotional needs. The main ones are listed below.

Emotional needs include:

• Security — safe territory and an environment that allows us to develop fully
• Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition
• Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices
• Being emotionally connected to others: Friendship, intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts 'n' all”
• Feeling part of a wider community
• Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience
• Sense of status within social groupings
• Sense of competence and achievement (which counters ‘low self-esteem’)
• Meaning and purpose — which come from being stretched in what we do and think.

Along with physical and emotional needs nature gave us guidance systems to help us meet them. We call these 'resources'. The resources nature gave us to help us meet our needs include:

• 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.