The Need To Be Understood
We all have felt the need to be understood, the wish for someone to get us on an intimate level. Without feeling like others know us, we can feel isolated and alone. As kids, we are entitled to such emotional needs being fulfilled by adults around us, but as adults why do we still seek it?
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a motivational theory in psychology helps us understand this. It states that, humans are motivated by a hierarchy of needs. Physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem and self actualization are the five tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The lower four tiers out of the five are deficiency needs i.e, the need grows further if not fulfilled. These needs stem from deprivation and motivate people when they are unmet. The top tier, self actualization is a growth need which stems from a desire to grow and stems from fulfillment of rest of the needs.
Needs are the energy of life — the fundamental motivation for all behaviors.
Behind every action, there is a hunger to meet needs.
— Marshall Rosenberg
Emotional Needs
The ‘love and belonging’, ‘Esteem needs’ in the hierarchy, come under psychological/emotional needs. Emotional needs are feelings we need to feel happy, pleasant and at peace. Young children have emotional needs, which if fulfilled help them grow into a stable adult with a coherent sense of self. Fulfillment of psychological needs help us reach the self actualization stage, which is the highest psychological stage to reach full personal potential. According to Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg, the basic emotional needs are Affection, Creation, Recreation, Freedom, Identity, Understanding, Participation, Protection, Subsistence.
Why Understanding is the most important need?
Out of all the emotional needs, if we don’t experience being understood by others then all the other emotional needs become irrelevant. As mentioned by Leon F Seltzer in this post, being understood is a prerequisite to experience or accept any other emotional need.
Without experiencing that others know us, or are able to, we’re left feeling alone
— at times, despairingly so. It’s a bleak place to be and can lead to feelings of
emptiness and despondency.
— Leon F Seltzer
On the other hand as adults, expecting others to meet all our emotional needs and go out all the way to understand us or make us feel understood is wrong. We need to strike a balance between the expectation of being understood and the responsibility of effective communication.
What can you do about it?
1. The first step is that we as a society need to accept the importance of emotional needs as being equal to physical needs.
2. The second step is to be self-aware of our personal emotional needs.
3. The third step is to become empowered from understanding self/self awareness and take control of our emotional well-being.
4. The fourth step is to communicate effectively where we not only take responsibility for what we say but also for how are we being perceived.
People perceive information through their personal emotional filters which distorts the reality. This can be dealt by developing empathy — perceiving accurately what another person is experiencing. While the need to be understood still exists by the end, but it is balanced out with empathy.
Understanding self or Self awareness is not the end but a precursor to healing or emotional growth.
