The Human Givens Organising Idea
Individuals are emotionally healthy when their RESOURCES are working sucessfully to meet NEEDS. Most mental distress and disorder is the consequence of some of these human NEEDS not being met because RESOURCES are not working properly.
NEEDS include:
- Feeling Safe
- Getting your attention needs met – both giving and receiving
- A place for privacy and reflection
- Being stretched by how
- Having people who are important to you and to whom you are important
- Having wider connections beyond your family and close friends
- A sense of autonomy and control
- Comfortable with your status in society and with your peers
- A sense of competence
- Meaning from being stretched from the way you live and the work you do
RESOURCES include:
- Complex long term memory, which enables us to add to our innate knowledge and learn
- The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with others
- Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our emotions and so solve problems that get our needs met
- A conscious, rational mind that can question, analyse and plan
- The ability to 'know’ — that is, understand the world intuitively through metaphorical pattern matching
- An observing self — that part of us that can step back and be aware of itself as a unique centre of awareness
- A dreaming brain that preserves the integrity of our emotional inheritance by metaphorically defusing expectations every night that were not acted out the previous day.
And from this organising idea, holistic solutions can be sought – which make use of, restore and enhance essential resources in the service of getting essential needs met.
Mental distress is not an illness of the brain (as a damaged heart or an arthritic hip is a weakness of the body). All of us will suffer mental distress (under certain conditions) and all of us will heal if given the right kind of help.
Phobic fears and trauma (PTSD) and most emotionally strong past experiences can be quickly removed.
Fast Phobia cure (also called VK or Rewind) is a non voyeuristic dissociation method to use in trance. All Human Givens therapists can attest to its effectiveness and wide applicability. Fast Phobia cure is one of the main tools to overcome bad past experiences – not to understand them for their own sake but to remove their capacity to stop essential needs being met today.
How the brain manufactures Depression is easy to understand.
Based on original research by Joe Griffin (one of the founders of Human Givens), it is clear that dreaming, by deactivating the uncompleted emotional arousals of the previous day, is essential for mental health.
For a depressed person, excessive emotional arousal (caused by rumination and black and white thinking styles, often precipitated by difficult life events) overloads the dreaming mechanism. This then generates a downward spiral of hopelessness and loss of energy and motivation. The key to lifting depression is to stop rumination and reduce arousal (and so improve sleep and dreaming), to build hope by focussing on small practical steps that get needs met and to carefully challenge rigid and unhelpful thinking.
Human Givens therapists understand how to make a difference quickly – beginning with the first session.
This is by using different tools, all of which are based on the establishment of good rapport. This includes careful listening and appreciation of the client's values, experiences and view of his/her situation, focussed information gathering and the identification of clear concrete goals. Other often helpful aspects include the identification of client resources (often forgotten or unappreciated), a clear explanation and normalising of the problem, teaching ways to reduce emotional arousal, reframing unhelpful views and rehearsal of agreed goals. Practical advice and tasks may often be appropriate – to assist with future feeling and thinking (e.g. to reduce and control anxious thoughts) and to help get needs met (e.g. for shelter, friendship etc.)
