Hierarchy of Needs
Have you thought about your needs today?
In working with people who grew up in dysfunctional families, it is natural that many of my clients (and maybe you reading this) are not practiced in understanding and meeting their own needs. Neglecting your needs can lead to increased anxiety, depression, burnout, substance abuse, people pleasing, and other forms of self harm. Research shows that when your physical and socio-emotional needs are chronically unmet, your nervous system goes into overdrive in search of the missing pieces. While many personal, cultural, and societal factors affect each person’s ability to get their needs met consistently, developing the tools to recognize your needs and increase overall needs fulfillment will help you elevate toward more meaningful states of being.
As a pioneer in 20th Century psychology, Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, was interested in developing research focused on maximizing well-being and human potential. He pioneered a framework for understanding and prioritizing one’s needs based on his own observations and research, which just so happen to mirror a lot of what we know today about neurological development. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs offers us a bottom-up roadmap for understanding the order and trajectory of prioritizing and fulfilling our needs as we progress through life. Below, I share about how I use Maslow’s framework and other tools to help clients (and you) understand and attend to your needs more fully and consistently. If you’d rather skip directly ahead to the tools, click here.
Disclaimer: It is important to note that Maslow’s philosophical context and research has been conducted within the context of contemporary White Supremacist Patriarchal hegemony and leads with an individualist perspective. Maslow even studied some indigenous cultures, including the Blackfoot (Siksika) Nation (4), to develop his research without giving appropriate credit or emphasizing the community’s role in the needs fulfillment of its members. To learn more about needs fulfillment through community care and collective transcendence, you can read my follow-up blog article here. Nonetheless, Maslow’s work offers us some important tools to navigate our present reality, particularly for those who have been neglected and let down by their family or community of origin.
The five tiers of needs outlined in Maslow's original research and theory. (1943).
In the image above, you can see five tiers of needs akin to the nutrition pyramid that was drilled into our heads in grade school. However, this pyramid describes a hierarchy which starts at the bottom and works its way up. According to Maslow and his later contributors, we must first have our physiological needs (food, weather, shelter, clothing, etc.) met before we can worry about our safety needs. We must have our safety needs met before we can concern ourselves with love and belonging. We must experience love and belonging before we can attain reasonable self esteem. And we must experience esteem both internally and in the external world before we can experience self actualization (footnote).
One of the most important things that Maslow demonstrates in his research is how the brain functions when our needs are being neglected. If you are experiencing unmet needs in the very base level of food, water, shelter, clothing, etc., then all of your brain’s resources are obsessively focused on meeting these survival needs. The film 127 Hours demonstrates what happens to the psyche when physiological needs are in jeopardy. *Spoiler Alert*: The protagonist saws off his arm with a Swiss army knife, putting himself through extreme pain and violating his health & safety needs, in order to secure his access to the most basic components necessary for life.
Until those most basic needs are met, it is extremely challenging to attend to the next level of needs fulfillment. Each level of the pyramid acts as a threshold around what your psyche can reasonably attain based on your current level of functioning. How can we expect to build relationships if we are lacking physical or emotional safety? How can we develop mastery in our career goals or other external ambitions without relationships and supports?
Many of my clients who have experienced attachment disruptions can get stuck at the third level of the pyramid [Love & Belonging], fully preoccupied with finding a romantic relationship at the expense of developing other aspects of the persona. Through no fault of their own, they may find themselves in a loop of hyperfocus on relationships due to their attachment needs being chronically unmet throughout their lives. However, once they’ve developed the skills in therapy to support a secure relationship, new worlds start opening up within that have long been neglected. All of a sudden, personal development can advance into new areas because they’ve mastered needs fulfillment at their previous stuck point. By understanding where you are at on the pyramid and where your stuck points exist, you can target your self progression and hopefully start to give yourself a break.
We may move up and down the pyramid during different phases of life but the general progression is upward. If you want to keep moving toward the higher levels of needs (and who doesn’t?), mastering needs fulfillment is a crucial skill to develop. You can read on to learn more about how to identify your needs or scroll down to the free, downloadable worksheet below.
Needs Fulfillment
I can’t tell you how often I’ve asked a client from an alcoholic or dysfunctional family what they are needing in the moment and they respond, “I have no idea”. When you have been brought up in an environment where the needs of the ill family member dominate the family system, where your own needs have been chronically neglected and unseen, trying to figure out what you need is like taking the AP Calc exam when you haven’t opened a textbook in years. Does not compute. So how do we do it?
Let’s break it down…
Step One: Identify your feeling(s) in the moment. Check in with your body, your heart, your mind and see what feelings are coming up for your right now.
Step Two: Identify the unmet need(s). Review a list of common needs (see: resources) and identify what needs are connected to the feelings you identified in Step One.
Step Three: Brainstorm 3-5 ways to get the identified need met.
Step Four: Choose one strategy and put it into action.
Step Five: Check back in and evaluate if it was effective, if you need to choose another strategy, or if another unmet need has been revealed in the process
(See Resources section below for a free, printable handout)
Resources:
Footnote:
Self-actualization is considered ‘the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone’. According to Maslow, “This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”
References:
DeBellis, Michael D. (2005). The Psychobiology of Neglect. Child Maltreatment, Vol. 10, Issue 2, pp 91-207.
Fotopoulou, A. (2012). From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in psychodynamic neuroscience. Oxford University Press.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
Maslow, A. H. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. Viking Press.
Maslow, A. H. (1962). Toward a psychology of being. Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand.
