Dave Pollard - Empathy: Getting in Touch With Our and Others' Emotional Needs

Very cool article on empathy from Dave Pollard at How to Change the World.

Empathy: Getting in Touch With Our and Others' Emotional Needs

Today I stumbled upon a list of forty 'emotional needs' on a fascinating site, EQI.org, by Steve Hein. He constructed the list from the sites of several students of emotional intelligence and of Maslow's hierarchy (which has five levels of needs -- physical, security, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization). The forty emotional needs cut across the four highest Maslow levels, and I've sorted them roughly according to this hierarchy:

Security Needs (needs from others): the need to be:

free
helped
private
reassured
safe/secure
supported
treated fairly
understood

Belonging Needs (needs from others): the need to be:

accepted
acknowledged
forgiven
included
trusted
worthy

Self-Esteem Needs (needs from others): the need to be:

admired
appreciated
approved of
believed in
heard
listened to
loved
needed
noticed
recognized
respected
valued

Self-Actualization Needs (needs of self): the need to be:

capable
challenged
clear (not confused)
competent
confident
forgiving
fulfilled
helpful
important
in (self-)control
learning
powerful
productive/useful
understanding

I've added learning to the final list, because I believe that we have a need to be constantly learning, improving ourselves (just check out the most popular section of the bookstore if you doubt me). Otherwise I think Steve's list is pretty complete. I agree with his omission of happy from the list, because I think happiness is the result of us fulfilling most of our physical and intellectual/emotional needs, not a need in itself.

The list interests me from two perspectives:

• In reading Richard Moss' The Mandala of Being, and in my study of Jung's quaternity (our minds, emotions, body/senses and instincts), I've been looking at the place of our emotional selves in who we are and what we do. I agree with Moss' view that we have become somewhat unbalanced towards the intellectual and emotional aspects of ourselves, to the detriment of our sensory and intuitive selves, and that, as a result, we live too much in our heads, at the mercy of our abstract ideas and fictional stories about the world and ourselves, and at the mercy of the stressful emotions that these ideas and stories trigger, so that, instead of living in Now Time like most of Earth's creatures (and perhaps pre-civilization humans), we live in what I've dubbed Anxious Time. The above list suggests to me that there may be another, 'through' approach in addition to the 'around' approach that Moss advocates. That 'through' approach entails healing ourselves and others through empathy, helping them and ourselves to satisfy and fill these forty intellectual/emotional needs, by caring and attention and appreciation. It's almost the antithesis of Moss' approach, and I see the merits of both approaches.
• As illustrated in the graphic above, my experience has been that most people seem, during their lives, to travel the path depicted by the red arrow -- starting as babies with needs, erratically 'maturing' those needs into wants and loves, but then too often retreating back to neediness. A more mature approach, that some people I know seem to have found, is depicted by the green arrow -- nurturing ourselves and others so that we 'outgrow' our needs, so that what we strive for is what we want and love but do not need, to the point we achieve an emotional maturity that is not needy.

I accept that this is all rather abstract -- talking about our emotions in such analytical terms is a bit bizarre. But then that's what psychologists do, and I have to believe we can find a better way of coping with our emotional needs than their dubious and expensive approaches.

Go read the rest of the post to see where Dave is going with this.

Tags: Dave Pollard, Empathy, Getting in Touch With Our and Others' Emotional Needs, How to Save the World, emotional intelligence, Jung, empathy, emotions, Psychology