Chapter Three: How We Know What We Need

For a pdf of Chapter Three, click here.

Health is about getting what we need. From the lens of diet, health comes from eating that which is nutritious and avoiding or getting rid of that which is toxic. From the lens of exercise, health comes from building a physical frame that is strong and flexible. From the lens of relationships health comes from building relationships that are strong and flexible in which we create that which nurtures us and in which we can expel or avoid that which is toxic.

Are you getting what you need? If you just ponder this for a moment, would you say that you are mostly getting what you need, or are you mostly not getting what you need?. However you first answer the question, try on the opposite response and see what comes up for you.

When I ask this question in a large enough audience, those that say “I am mostly getting what I need,” and those who say, “I am mostly not getting what I need,” tend to be about equal in number. Even when we have most of our needs met, we can still find things we need that we don’t have. Even when we have huge needs in our lives, we can still find areas in which we are getting what we need. Whether our glass is half empty or half full, it is still pretty close to the half-way mark. We seem to have an innate need to preserve both a sense of what we have for which we are grateful, and a sense of what we don’t have for which we will strive.

But now let me ask another question, “How do you know?” When I asked whether you were mostly getting what you need or were mostly not getting what you need, to what did you look to be able to answer the question? There are two places that we look for answers to this question of whether we are getting what we need. We look out, and we look in.

Looking to the outside into the world of our perception we notice whether we have a place to sleep tonight, whether we have food to eat, a job to go to, and friends that look out for us. To answer whether we are getting what we need, we look to the world around us to see if it is as we would have it be. If things are the way we want them to be, then we must be getting what we need. God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world.

Looking to the inside into the interior world of interoception, we notice what feelings arise in us and whether those feelings are good ones (ones we like) or bad ones (ones we don’t like). We check and see if we are anxious, or afraid, or satisfied, or scared, or safe, or content, or guilty. If we are having what we consider to be good feelings, then we are generally feeling safe and satisfied and so we assume that we are getting what we need. If we are having what we consider to be bad feelings, then we are experiencing some sort of hurt and we assume that we are not getting what we need.

If we want to know what we need, we will have to be exquisitely sensitive to what is going on around us and within us. And why would we want to pay attention to what we need? Because the chances of my getting what I need rise dramatically the more I know about what I need… and the more I create what I need, the healthier I become.

In the exterior we will be focusing on attending to the conflicts that arise in our relationships with those around us. We will notice that they are not as we would have them be and we are not as they want us to be. These conflicts are windows into what we need—especially the ones about which we have strong feelings and which happen over and over again. In fact, simply by resolving these conflicts we are able to create what we need.

In the interior we will be focusing on attending to the feelings that arise in ourselves in the context of our relationships with others, especially those we are closest to. We will notice that our interior world is easily as varied and diverse and complicated as the world around us. For most of us this will be an exploration of uncharted territory because we live in a culture that does not encourage this sort of exploration. Indeed, we sometimes refer to this sort of inquiry as “navel gazing.”

We disparage explorations of our feelings because we imagine that emotions are less valuable than reason, and we may even believe that emotion can corrupt the pure light of reason which can illuminate the solution to all of our problems. If we allow ourselves to be too conscious of our emotions, we fear, those feelings will hide the salvation that reason can provide.

In fact, as we will see, while emotions and thoughts are different, and it is true that there is a sense in which thoughts are above emotions because our thinking, judging, reasoning rests on the rock of our emotional connection to our experience; nevertheless, if we are not fully aware of and appreciative of our emotions, then our judgments have a weak foundation. The denial of our emotions weakens our capacity to make sound judgments.

Using “what we feel” to teach us “what we need”

These are all concepts that we will return to, but for the moment let’s look at the relationship between knowing what we need and our familiarity with our feelings. How does knowing how I feel help me know what I need and help me act in ways that create it?

As I write these words it is winter, a blustery day in February. It is cold and I notice that I am cold. I have a feeling, in this case a sensation of cold. Feelings are data. They are data about the qualities in the relationship between my “I am,” the core sense of my identity, and the world around me. In the case of sensations, these are data about the relationship between “I am” and the physical world in which I find myself. Because “I am cold,” I will now act in ways that create what I need. I can identify that cold doesn’t satisfy me. What I need is warmth. I identify that there are at least two immediate options I can follow. I can flip on the space heater or I can put on a sweater. I make a choice and see if my actions are able to create what I need by continuing to monitor my sensations. This is what feelings are for. To give us the data about what we need, or about when we don’t have what we need, so that we can act in ways to create what we need.

“Sensation” is one category of internal experience. There are many different ways to construct a typology of interior experience. Deepak Chopra in one of his books lists ten domains of consciousness. For our current purposes, that is a bit too complicated. Ten are more than we need for now. We will start with just four. Later we will add another two. But, for now, just notice that sometimes when something has you stirred up emotionally you might say that you are stewing about something. We will use the acronym STEW to remind us of the four primary interior domains.

Sensation: I feel cold.

Thought: I feel like I am being mistreated.

Emotion: I feel hurt and angry.

Wish: I feel like taking a walk.

So whenever you are stewing about something, remind yourself to identify each of the four domains in what you are worrying about. What are your Sensations, Thoughts, Emotions and Wishes? Notice that each of the four interior domains is a feeling or at least we can speak of it as such. But each is distinctly different. A wish is very different from a sensation. A thought is very different from an emotion.

If something upsetting happens I am likely to feel bad. But is this a sensation, a thought, an emotion, or a wish? It can easily be all four.

Suppose I finally get around to registering for the semester and find out that the last class I need to take to finish my degree is already filled. There is a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I feel nauseous. I know that if I can’t find a way to get into that class, that I will be delayed six months in graduating. I am furious at myself for not getting around to registering sooner. I wish I weren’t such a procrastinator.

The strength of the sensations and the emotions help me gauge the urgency of this issue and motivate me to act. The thought about delaying graduation six months reminds me that the need is not just about this class, but about the degree and the employment opportunities that I believe will open up once I have it. And the wish reminds me that there are certain qualities of self care that I can address where I pay more attention to what I need and I don’t put off acting in ways that get me what I need.

So if I want to get what I need, I will have to know what I need, and to notice when I am not getting what I need. I know I am not getting what I need (or perhaps I am getting what I don’t need) whenever I am having a “bad” feeling. I put bad in quotes here because the feeling itself isn’t bad, it is good data. It is just a feeling I don’t like having. If I step into the street and look up and see a bus barreling down on me, I feel fear, and I step back out of the street. I don’t like being afraid, but I like getting squashed by busses even less. The fear is my friend.

Good feelings will also give me information about what I need. When I feel safe or satisfied I am getting feedback that the current situation is healthy for me. If I can figure out what is working and what I did to create it, then maybe I can recreate the situation in the future.

Knowing how I feel will help me know what I need. Ideally, once I know what I need, I will know what to do to create what I need. But I am not likely to create what I need without knowing what that is and I won’t know the need unless I know what I feel.

Still, we are not good about knowing what we feel. Even when we know we are feeling bad, we may have little idea what the source of the bad feeling may be. Isn’t there an easier, perhaps more immediate way to know when we are not getting what we need? Yes, indeed. Instead of looking inward, we can look outward upon the many relationships in which we find ourselves. Whenever in any of those relationships we are not getting what we need, we experience conflict. Either the other is not as we want them to be or we are not as they want us to be.

So the second arena for discovering what it is that we need is the context of our relationships with others. Indeed, when we have healthy relationships we have what we need.

Hierarchy of Needs

In 1943 Abraham Maslow published a paper on “A Theory of Human Motivation” in which he first proposed his now famous hierarchy of needs. While he has had his detractors, it is now pretty universally accepted that there are different kinds of needs that we experience, they arise for us in a universal sequence and, when lower order needs are not met, they have priority over the higher order needs. Let’s take these three points separately.

Maslow suggests that there are five categories of needs:

• Physiological needs: air, food, water, sleep, excretion, homeostasis
• Safety: security of one’s own body, family, property, job, resources, community morals
• Love / Belonging: durable connection to friends, family, lover, community
• Esteem: being respected by others, having confidence and self respect, symbols of achievement
• Self-actualization: clarity of purpose, clear sense of one’s own identity, creativity, acceptance of others

When we talk about needs we are talking about all five areas, though for the purposes of a conversation about healthy relationships, we are generally not focusing on physiological needs but those higher up.

Maslow’s hierarchy suggests that we don’t much worry about having symbols of achievement when we don’t have a place to sleep tonight. It is only as the needs at a particular level are met that we begin to identify and work towards the needs at a higher level. It also suggests that whatever we may say we are about, what we are really trying to do is to meet the unmet lower order needs.

When members of a rival gang meet and are challenging each other under the rubric of respect (as when one confronts the other with, “Are you disrespecting me?”) what may more likely be going on is a matter of establishing security or belonging. It may appear to be an esteem level need, but it is more likely a way of backing the other off to create safety and to show off to members of one’s own group to create a sense of belonging.

And the third basic point that Maslow is making with his hierarchy as that even as we are working at meeting the higher order needs, when we are under stress and the lower order needs are not met, they take priority for us. I can be working on getting things worked out with my family about a misunderstanding, but when I have an asthma attack; my only concern is being able to breathe. I really don’t care if my son makes curfew.

Sometimes people experience a setback which challenges the availability of lower order needs but they don’t adjust. A man who loses his job but won’t seek another one because that would require him to admit that he lost his former one is trying to maintain esteem but at the expense of security. This is an example of pathology. We have to meet the lower order needs in order to address the higher order needs.

There is one other thing that Maslow had to say in that paper from 1943 that has importance for our discussion but has largely been lost from public awareness. He also pointed out; indeed, this was the central point he was making, that whenever we act, we do so because of a complex web of needs we are trying to meet. It is almost never true that there is a single need that motivates our actions. We do what we do for very complex reasons connected with what we need but in ways that may be not available to us consciously.

What I am suggesting is that the more conscious we become of what we need, the more our actions will be effective in constructing what we need. Further I am suggesting that we can look to the interior world of our feelings to know what we need or we can look to the exterior world of our relationships with others to know what we need. When we look inward, what we are looking for is our “bad” feelings as evidence that we are not getting what we need. When we look outward, what we are looking for is the conflicts that arise in our relationships with others as evidence that we are not getting what we need.

We will be focusing first on the external, the world of our relationships with others and the conflicts that arise for us there as ways of discovering the arenas in which our needs are not met. We will return to the internal, to the vast and marvelous expanse that is our own unique interior domain, and the place we each have to go if we are to resolve the conflicts that arise with others and to ultimate build healthy relationships.

A line sung by a little Italian girl, Pippa, in the poem “Pippa Passes,” by Robert Browning.

This is a term I was introduced to at the IFS Annual Conference in October of 2007 during a plenary address by Bessel van der Kolk. Interoception refers to the process of looking inward and is thus in a sense the opposite of perception.