My theory of life is based on the idea that we humans have both physical and emotional needs and that most social problems and pain in what we call the developed countries come from unmet or unsatisfied emotional needs.
Some of these emotional needs are to feel accepted, appreciated, cared about, free, understood, valued.
I began to develop my theory when I lived in the USA and looked at all the problems there. I decided the problems were not from a lack of material or physical things, nor from a lack of religion or what is called spirituality. I saw people who needed to feel more powerful, more important, more in control. They seemed never to be able to get enough of these emotional needs to satisfy them. I concluded that we need to fill the emotional needs of children so they are not emotionally needy or emotionally "hungry" (or starving) as adults.
To help fill or satisfy children's emotional needs, (or anyone else's emotional needs) we must identify each need specifically and somehow measure it to find out if it is filled or not. Or more precisely, how filled is each need? This is similar to knowing how full the gas tank is in a car. Is it empty, full or half full? Or we could say is it 0%, 100% or 50% full? For that we have the gas gauge. We also have a temperature gauge in a car that tells us when the engine is getting too hot.
The way I measure the level of our emotional needs is to ask direct questions about specific feelings. For example, how accepted do you feel from 0-10? How respected do you feel from 0-10? How understood?
My belief is that our feelings tell us if our emotional needs are being met or satisfied in way similar to how our physical feelings tell us if our physical needs are being met, filled or satisfied. For example, if I feel hungry, I need food. If I feel thirsty I need water. If I feel cold, I need warmth.
So if I feel rejected, I need to feel accepted. If I feel unappreciated, I need to feel appreciated. If I feel uncared about, I need to feel cared about. If I feel disrespected, I need to feel respected. If I feel afraid, unsafe, unprotected, or insecure, I need to feel unafraid, safe, protected, secure.
My theory is also that we humans depend on each other for our emotional needs. I need to feel cared about by another person. I need to feel appreciated by another human being. I believe that if our emotional needs are not met, all of society suffers from a wide variety of problems.
I also believe that if I am emotionally "starved" I will be very needy and I will be constantly trying to fill my own basic emotional surival needs. This will make it difficult for me to think or respect about your needs. This is a little like having enough money or food. If I don't have enough money or food I can't help you financially or offer to share my food. It is natural for us to be motivated by a drive to fill our own basic survival needs.
For our human relationships to work, we need to know what we feel and what our emotional needs are. We need to be able to express them very clearly and directly. And we need to be able to listen to and accept and understand other people's emotional needs. But they also need to be able to identify and express their own needs and feelings. I call this being emotionally literate.
I define emotional literacy as being able to express your feelings in three word sentences beginning with "I feel..." For example, "I feel pressured." "I feel afraid." "I feel appreciated." "I feel understood."
I find it very useful to express feelings with a scale of 0-10. For example, "I feel pressured 8." "I feel understood 4."
I also believe that by nature, it feels good to help people. So if someone tells us what they need, and we are not excessively need ourselves, we feel a natureal desire to help them because it creates positive or healthy brain chemicals inside us.
Currently, most people I meet do not know how to specifically identify their feelings or their unmet emotional needs. But they are still trying to fill them. This wastes a lot of time due to miscommunication, indirect communication and misunderstandings. If someone needs to feel powerful or in control, but they don't realize it specifically, they are very likely to use other people, or even abuse them, to try to fill their needs for power and control. But while they do that they are going to be taking away from their other emotional needs such as to feel appreciated, admired, trusted and cared about.
So they feel pain from those unmet emotional needs. They feel a need to stop the pain but without knowing exactly what they need, they get trapped in some kind of vicious cycle of trying to stop their pain and often cause themselves, and others, even more pain.
Society now has many unhealthy or unproductive ways of temporarily stopping emotional pain. But since the emotional needs are still not being met, the pain comes back or grows and spreads, including from one generation to the next. Few resources are directed towards understanding cause and effect or prevention. Yet many resources and a huge part of our economy is directed towards temporarily stopping or numbing our emotional pain. We do not seem to be progressing much in identifying what is actually causing our emotional pain. Without understanding the causes of emotional pain, we are unable to prevent future emotional pain. For example, we might learn a new technique to reduce our feelings of stress but we don't identify and address the cause of the stress.
Once people begin to clearly see that all humans have emotional needs, we can really start what I would call the true healing and prevention process. This process is basically identifying our needs and filling them in healthy ways. In summary, I believe the key to a "better future" is to do a better job of identifying and filling the emotional needs of children and teenagers.
I also believe our emotional needs are not identical. They might be similar, but you might need to feel more free, for example, than someone else. I don't believe "one size fits all" when it comes to either our physical or emotional needs. I don't believe we all need exactly the same amount of food or water. Nor do I believe we all need exactly the same amount of freedom or privacy or security. So I believe we need to be very clear about our own individual needs. Only we can know just what we need, just like only we know just how much water we need till we do not feel thirsty anymore. No one else can tell us that. They can estimate, but they will never be as accurate as we are.
In society now, many people try to tell us what we need and therefore what we "should" do or "have to" do or "need to" do.
But I believe we are the best judges of what we need, and if we help children and teenagers identify their own emotional needs, the world will be a much healthier place.
It seems now we live in a world where we try to change children and teenagers to meet the unhealthy needs of a sick and unsustainable society. A better option would be to try to change society so it meets or fills the needs of healthy children and teens.
Paul Hein