Do you know what your core needs are and are they being met?

Do you know what your core emotional needs are, or if they are being met? This is a very important question. If your core emotional needs are being met, then it is likely that you are more content. If there are some psychological problems that you are dealing with, then within a Schema Therapy perspective, it may be worth exploring whether some of your core emotional needs are not being sufficiently met.

What are your own core emotional needs? Is it to be cared for by others? Is it to have the freedom to express yourself? Is it to feel safe? Perhaps you identify with one of these needs more than another. Are there any others that spring to mind?

Although you may think of emotional needs as something to be met in your personal relationships, they are in fact equally valid in your working life. Whilst emotional needs aren’t always valued in the workplace, many people would say that they prefer a work environment that is both friendly and supportive, rather than one that is bullying and excluding.

As you can see then, emotional needs have a lot to do with relationships. People are social beings, and to feel secure is to feel connected to others.

Within Schema Therapy, as described by Jeffrey Young, there are five broad categories of core emotional needs:

• To feel safe, stable, nurtured and accepted.
• To have some autonomy, to feel competent and to have a sense of identity.
• To have the freedom to express your own needs and emotions.
• To be able to act spontaneously and to play.
• To live in a world with realistic limits, which help you to apply self-control.

It is possible to go into a lot of detail about each of these categories. In this article, we are going to look at the first three areas explored in the original series.

1. Safety, stability, nurturance and acceptance

These words describe some of a human being’s core emotional needs. Without feeling safe at home, at work or when travelling around, a person’s functioning can be significantly reduced.

Stability is about having safety and a basic level of predictability or routine in your life. If your life is chaotic and occurs in extremes, then the lack of stability is likely to cause much fear. This is different to having some variety.

Even within the most varied and exciting life, there is some stability, which allows a person to take on new adventures and challenges.

Nurturance is about feeling protected, cared for and guided by others. This is important in childhood and adulthood. Without sufficient nurturing from others, you may have to rely heavily on yourself and find it difficult to seek support from others when you need it.

And finally, to be accepted by others is to feel as though you are likeable, lovable and worthwhile as a person. Feedback from people is important in feeling accepted, because when you are ignored, then you are more likely to develop a sense of not being liked or feeling unimportant.

What can you do about it?

Safety

If your needs in these areas are not being met, then it is going to be important for you to begin to rectify it. If it is safety that you are lacking, then first identify which part of your life it is missing.

Is it at home? Is this because of a volatile relationship with a partner or other person? If so, then it is going to be very important that you begin to take action to make yourself safer. This may mean leaving your home and going to a friend’s or another family member's.

If you are experiencing domestic abuse or feel unsafe at home, consider seeking specialist support to help you think through your options and safety.

If you aren’t feeling safe at work, then what is the reason? Is it because of how others are treating you? Is it because there aren’t sufficient safety measures in place when you are doing your job? If this is the case, then you are going to need to tell someone either in the organisation or externally. You’ll need to make a judgement call depending on your situation.

Whilst this may be hard and you might be worried about losing your job, you have the right as an employee to work in an environment where you feel safe enough to do your job.

If you don’t feel safe when travelling, this may be due to an anxiety problem like panic disorder, agoraphobia or traumatic stress. If so, then you may find it helpful to seek support from a qualified therapist.

Stability

If your life is lacking stability, then again try to identify in what way. Is it in personal relationships? Do relationships with people come and go? Or, are you lacking something meaningful to do in the day? People can get stability from having roles in life, and a working role or a parental role can provide stability.

Nurturance and acceptance

If it is a lack of nurturance, then you may need to identify more clearly in your mind two groups: those people that support you and those that don’t. Try to reduce the time that you spend with the latter, and increase the time you spend with the former.

Similarly, if you feel disliked or unloved, then consider whether you are connected enough with people who are able to express what they appreciate about you.

Alternatively, you may need to begin asking for more support from people so that they know what it is that you need.

The above guidance aims to point you in the right direction of changing some of these difficulties. It can be useful to access some support through personal relationships, or by seeking out a professional. It can also be hard to do these things, and it may take persistence.

Whilst, likely, it isn’t your fault that these needs aren’t being met, there may be steps you can take towards meeting them more fully.

2. Autonomy, competence and a sense of identity

To have some autonomy, to feel competent and to have a sense of identity is the second category of core emotional needs.

Autonomy

To be autonomous is to be independent. It is to have confidence in your ability to get on in the world. If you feel that you are able to cope independently of others, to survive, to function well enough without others to do things for yourself and to perform successfully, then you may be less likely to struggle with autonomy.

Competence

Competence is about your abilities. How capable are you in what you do? Think about your work, education and leisure activities. Your competence is also about your common sense and your ability to problem-solve. How good are your problem-solving skills?

People that worry a lot may sometimes lack a belief in their own abilities.

A sense of identity

How clear is your sense of identity? Identity is often described as who you think you are. To have a clear sense of your identity is to be clear about the person that you are.

Often people identify with the things that they do - for example, their work and their hobbies. Identity also requires self-awareness, to know your strengths and flaws as well as how you tend to behave in relationships.

Where does it come from?

A good starting place for dealing with some of these issues is to be clearer about what may have contributed to them.

Within Schema Therapy, childhood, adolescence and family relationships are understood as important influences on the development of core emotional needs.

If you’ve grown up without much confidence in your abilities, then you may recognise one or several of the following experiences from childhood:

• Your parents were too emotionally involved with you.
• You were not given enough praise or encouragement to try out new things.
• Your parents were over-protective.
• One or both of your parents displayed a lot of anxiety.

Now you may find it interesting to read that having parents who are too emotionally involved can sometimes create difficulties. After all, we have already looked at how having parents who weren’t emotionally involved enough could also cause problems.

However, a parent who does not give space for a child to develop themselves and overshadows their emotional experiences with their own may contribute to their child growing up without a clear idea about who they are and what they want from life.

How much praise and encouragement did you get as a child? If you were given lots, perhaps at school as well as by your parents, then this may have helped you feel more confident developing yourself personally and professionally.

However, if you were not, then you may find it harder to make decisions and consequently may tend to rely on others to advise you, give you reassurance or go places with you.

If you had a parent who was over-protective of you growing up, then you can probably easily recount the feelings of frustration as you were prevented or actively discouraged from trying out things separate from them.

In many incidents, the over-protectiveness can come from a place of caring. However, for some people, being over-protected may undermine confidence in getting on in the world independently.

Parents who are overly anxious are likely to display certain types of behaviour. For example, worrying a lot and avoiding a lot. Children can sometimes pick up messages about safety and danger from the adults around them. Of course, this applies only to circumstances in which the safety of the family members is not threatened.

What can you do about it?

This depends on you as an individual. The focus for you may not be exactly the same as for someone else who is struggling with this problem. Below are several suggestions of how to begin tackling this. Pick one that feels most helpful to you.

• Give up depending on others to do things for you or with you so much. Make a list of all the areas in your life where you are over-dependent on others, e.g. travelling, making decisions about what to do in your time off and what to do in a task at work. Practise doing it on your own. Inevitably, you will make mistakes, and that is OK. Making mistakes is part of learning. If you can accept that it is OK to make mistakes, then you can keep on practising.

Over time, you’ll develop the confidence and intuition about what works best.

• Face your fears instead of avoiding them. Make a list of all the activities that you avoid doing due to a fear of something bad happening to you. Set yourself an ideal long-term goal of what you would like to do if you didn’t have these fears. Then, set out a series of smaller steps that you can take gradually to help you get there. This is part of what therapists call graded exposure.

If you have avoided things for a long time because of a fear of something bad happening, then you may wish to seek professional help to support you in learning new skills to manage your anxieties.

• If you spend too much time with or thinking about a parent or a significant other, then it is going to be helpful to reduce this. Write a list of all the advantages and disadvantages of remaining so intertwined with that person. Then, write a list of all your favourite things e.g. music, films, books, places to eat and drink and activities. Schedule some time to start doing some of these things even if they are not what those close to you prefer doing.
• Ask yourself, how well do you feel you have achieved in your work and career? How satisfied are you with what you’ve accomplished so far?

If your thoughts suggest that you do not feel successful or satisfied, then you are probably struggling with a “belief” that you are a “failure”. Now, this may be for different reasons. For example, you may have tended to focus on goals which weren't that realistic. Or, you may have held back because of a fear of failing. Alternatively, you may be experiencing a particular learning difficulty that has interfered with your development.

If you think the latter is the case, then it would be best to seek out professional help from a relevant service.

If you have the belief that you are a failure, then the following exercises may help you challenge that belief and focus on developing your ability to achieve.

• Repeat the words: “I am not inherently inept. Failing at something does not mean that I am a failure.” Stop over-preparing and avoiding trying. These are traps that many people fall into when they are afraid of failure. Instead, set yourself some realistic goals of what it is that you want to achieve in your work, education, leisure, relationships, friendships and health. Develop an action plan of what you need to do to get there by setting out a series of smaller steps.
• Focus hard on paying attention to your successes. You’ve probably been focusing too much on what you fail at and neglected what you’ve done well. Write down each day something that you’ve succeeded at so that you can develop a fuller awareness and teach yourself the whole truth.

If you’ve taken the time to read this far, then you’ve taken the first step in exploring your feelings of failure or over-dependence on others. If this is a long-term difficulty, then it may take time and persistence to work through it. Getting support from others can be important so that you can keep on track when the going gets tough.

3. Freedom to express your own needs and emotions

Imagine this for a moment. You are someone who rarely puts yourself first. More often, you are focused on what other people might want or like best. As a parent, you hardly ever take any time for yourself. As a partner, you let your other half make decisions about what you do and when you do it.

In your family relationships and friendships, you are often just going along with what others say and do. You rarely express your opinion clearly or openly.

If this were true, why would you do this? For some people, it may be because they are afraid of upsetting other people or they don’t want to feel guilty from thinking of themselves as selfish.

In some circumstances, a person is unable to recognise at all what they like or need. They are preoccupied with gaining the approval and attention of other people, and their sense of worth may become heavily dependent on it.

If you recognise some of these feelings and behaviours in yourself, then within a Schema Therapy perspective, you may be stuck in a life-trap theme of remaining too focused on other people. This excessive focus on other people’s wants and desires can prevent you from being able to acknowledge and express your own valid needs and emotions.

How does this develop?

Within Schema Therapy, these patterns may sometimes be linked to early family experiences where conditions were placed on acceptance.

For example, you might have only been shown love and affection if you avoided expressing your anger. You may have been ignored when you felt upset or cried because you were sad or frightened. Your parents may not have attended sufficiently to your own wishes.

Instead, they may have reacted harshly towards you or shown more interest when you did something that met with their approval.

Three types of life trap

There are three types of life trap that fit within this domain of being too focused on other people. They are subjugation, self-sacrifice and approval-seeking/recognition.

Subjugation

Subjugation describes a pattern of letting other people dominate your behaviour. When you subjugate, you surrender control to others because you feel coerced. You are worried that unless you do what they want, they’ll either punish you or abandon you.

You can surrender to others over both your needs and your emotions. If you have this problem, then you may rarely express anger for fear of retaliation.

Self-sacrifice

Self-sacrifice is different from subjugation in that the excessive focus on other people’s needs is voluntary. Here, people try to help others at the expense of taking care of themselves. Frequently, they are motivated to alleviate the pain and suffering of someone else.

Whilst this isn’t bad in and of itself, it can be a problem if you do it to avoid feeling guilty about putting yourself first.

For example, you avoid buying yourself something, watching what you want on TV or taking time to do something for you, because you would feel too guilty. You may also take on a lot of responsibility for how other people feel.

Approval-seeking/recognition

Seeking approval from others can become a problem when you habitually want everyone to like you. You try really hard to fit in and be accepted by others.

Recognition-seeking is more about wanting others to constantly admire you and applaud you. You might over-emphasise the importance of appearance, status, performance or money and how others perceive you. You attach your positive feelings about yourself to what others think rather than your own natural inclinations or to the pursuit of your own values.

What can you do about it?

If subjugation is the problem, then it is about learning that you have a right to express your own needs and emotions. Here are some ways that you can begin to practise it:

• Test out whether your feared predictions are accurate. Often people who subjugate may overestimate the feared consequences of expressing their views. Try expressing yourself in some small way to begin with. Do it with someone that it feels safer to do it with.
• Make a list of the people in your life and separate them into controlling and not so controlling. If you have friends and acquaintances who are very controlling, then it may be worth considering if they are people that you want to continue to have in your life. To help you overcome this problem, it may be useful to spend more time, to begin with at least, with people who are less controlling and more supportive.
• If you have a partner who is controlling, consider whether it feels safe to begin practising assertiveness. Assertiveness can be tricky, and so you may want to go on an assertiveness skills course or read up on how to be more assertive. Practising assertiveness can be more successful with the support of another, so involving a friend or professional might be more effective.
• Keep a daily journal of your thoughts and feelings to help you begin to develop more awareness and understanding of what you want and need. Your thoughts and feelings provide clues to your needs, and recognising your needs and emotions is the first step to being able to express them.

If self-sacrifice is the problem, then it is about learning that you have an equal right with others to express your needs and emotions. Here are some suggestions:

• Spend some time thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of ignoring your own needs. What do you gain in the short term and what does it cost you in your life?
• Identify the people to whom you devote a lot of your time and energy. Think about how helpless and fragile they are in reality. Make a list of both the ways in which they are vulnerable and capable. Try giving a little less and see what happens.
• Apply a give-get ratio to your significant relationships – weigh up how much you give with how much you get from these people.

This might mean appearing less strong some of the time and expressing when you want or need help. And it might mean giving less so that you have time for other things.

If approval-seeking/recognition is the problem, then it is about acknowledging that you have an authentic self that is different from your approval-seeking patterns. Here are some ways you can begin to do this:

• Weigh up the pros and cons of continuing to focus on gaining other people’s approval versus discovering who you are. You might think about how emphasising things like money and status may only give short-term satisfaction.
• Try to begin seeking approval a little less in what you do. Delay seeking approval or recognition where you can and notice what happens. Instead, focus your energies on setting goals related to some personal values and then acting them out.

For example, if you value fun, identify something you can do that is fun for you and plan when you are going to do it.

Applying some of the above strategies can be tricky, and it requires persistence. Overcoming problems of being overly focused on others to the detriment of expressing your own needs and emotions can seem strange and uncomfortable at first.

However, with repeated efforts, it will likely become less strange and more natural as the weeks, months and years go by.