Restoring your wellbeing using your own internal resources
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The Human Givens approach to psychotherapy is brief and solution-focused. It was founded on the modern, evidence-based understanding that, on the one hand, wellbeing happens when our innate emotional needs are being met through the proper use of our innate resources and that, on the other, distressing symptoms and behaviours can arise when they are not.

The physical needs we are born with, for food, water and shelter for example, are obvious to us, but we are often less aware that we have inbuilt emotional needs as well, and that these must also be fulfilled if we are to live healthily and thrive.

Such emotional needs include feeling secure, having control and autonomy in our lives, exchanging attention with other people, being part of a community, feeling known and accepted by someone, having a sense of competence and achievement, and a sense of meaning and purpose.

To meet these needs, nature has provided us with powerful resources, such as imagination to plan and to solve future problems, memory to make learning from experience possible, the capacity to build rapport with others, a dreaming brain to process unfulfilled emotional arousals so that we can wake from sleep with a clear mind, a pattern-matching brain through which we can recognise or ‘know’ the world around us, and self-awareness to allow us to stand back and see the bigger picture.

Our innate emotional needs cannot be avoided because they are hard-wired into us and are givens of our human nature, just like our resources. Together, they are our ‘human givens’. 

Underlying the Human Givens approach to psychotherapy is the principle that when our innate emotional needs are being met in balance through the effective use of our resources, we will not be mentally or emotionally unwell and will experience wellbeing.

But sometimes we are unable to use our resources to get those fundamental needs met in the particular circumstances of our lives. It might be that the environment is hostile, or that we have suffered a trauma, or that other bad conditioning has made the positive use of our resources unavailable to us.

Crucially, if one or more of our emotional needs remains unmet for a significant period of time, we can develop a variety of unwanted and distressing symptoms such as anxiety disorders, addictions or depression.