Our innate superpowers – our human givens
Do you ever wonder?
Why you just cannot stop yourself from feeling stressed all the time?
Why friends sometimes do strange things that upset you?
Why you get annoyed at silly things and maybe take it out on yourself or others?
Why you seem to be sleeping more but still feel tired all the time?
Why your mind just goes blank in an exam or test, even when you know your stuff?
Why teachers don’t understand you?
These are examples of questions many young people have shared. Sometimes it just helps to know that others feel the same as you. Understanding the superpowers of your human givens can help you answer them.
So what are these human givens? The phrase came from a collaboration between two very clever men. One called Joe Griffen, a Social Psychologist and the other called Ivan Tyrrell a Psychotherapist. Joe and Ivan developed an approach to understanding the foundations of a healthy mind. They cleverly take a lot of the science and different theories about how our minds work and organise it into an easily understood framework. Their framework is used by specially trained Human Givens Counsellors who work with people suffering emotional distress. It is also being used to improve healthcare, education, the criminal justice system, society and even governments – so big stuff.
Joe and Ivan are not much into psychobabble, these guys like facts backed by science. So let’s start with a fact – the law of all living organisms is that in order to survive, they must take nourishment from the environment so they can continually maintain and rebuild themselves. Humans are born into this world already equipped with very specific human genes {Joe and Ivan call these our innate templates] that incorporate a complex set of needs [human givens] and the guidance systems [more human givens] to get them met. These human givens are linked to our survival and well being. Our human givens are clearly different to the genetic templates that a sunflower has, or a bumble bee. Every living thing arrives in this world with its own unique genetic templates of needs and guidance systems.
The basic human givens for survival such as the physical need for water, food, clean air etc. are well understood because if we do not satisfy them we get ill and/or die. However, we are also primed with less obvious nutritional needs. These are our emotional needs and they are equally crucial to our well being.
There are lots of different ways of describing our emotional needs and it can be difficult to remember all of them. Easier to remember the 3 big ones:
- Relationships – the need for at least one positive relationship in our life, someone who just gets us warts and all.
- Self Worth – having confidence in our self worth – deep down believing we are a worthwhile and valued person.
- Sense of Purpose – the need for purpose which comes from finding meaning in our lives.
There are 9 emotional needs recognised in the Human Givens Framework that divided across these 3 big groups of needs
- security – an environment where we can develop fully and live without experiencing excessive or undue fear
- attention – we need to receive attention from others but also give it to others – nutrition that fuels individual, family and cultural development
- autonomy – some degree of control over what happens to us and around us, exercising some volition gives us feedback from our environment that we exist
- emotional connection to others – friendships, loving relationships, intimacy
- sense of community – being part of something bigger than ourselves [we are social animals]
- status – feeling valued and accepted in the various social groups we belong to
- privacy – space and time to reflect and consolidate our experiences
- self esteem – a sense of our own competence and achievements, avoiding feeling inadequate
- meaning – which comes from being stretched and challenged in what we do and how we think. It gives us a sense of purpose.
Making up the rest of our human givens is our human guidance systems – not the ones used by NASA or satellite companies, the ones we are born with. These have evolved over thousands of years to help us get our needs met. These innate internal guidance systems are very much part of our superpower – if we develop our ability to use them effectively.
Our 7 guidance systems are:
- our ability to develop long-term memory to add to our knowledge and learn;
- our ability to build rapport, connect with and empathise with others;
- our imagination that enables us to focus out attention away from our emotions and problem solve creatively;
- a conscious, rational mind that can question, analyse, plan and check out our emotions;
- unconscious patterns – the ability to know things and understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching;
- our observing self – ability to step back from our individual reality separate from emotion and conditioning, be more objective;
- a dreaming brain that resets our emotional arousals not dealt with in the previous day.
The way we use our guidance systems influences our physical, mental and social well being. If we use our guidance systems inappropriately, unwittingly or otherwise, then we may struggle to get our needs meet in a balanced way and create negative consequences for us individually and others around us.
So are you ready to develop your superpowers – maybe you can start by completing the emotional needs audit and see what you might want to improve on. Up to you.
You can also share your Do You Wonder questions with us and we will add to our list.