Self-awareness: emotions & needs! Truly understanding your emotions and needs is the key to getting to know yourself.
Our emotions reliably show us how we are feeling at any given time in our lives. Positive feelings suggest well-being, satisfaction and success; negative feelings are associated with dissatisfaction, deficiency and failure.
While we are taught this from an early age, few people learn where our feelings actually come from explicitly – namely from the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of our basic individual needs.
We can use A. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a guide. According to this model, the fulfilment of physical needs such as breathing, food, sleep and freedom from pain comes first. Once these needs have been satisfied, we can focus on our safety needs, i.e. avoiding danger and financial stability. After this, it is possible to strive for social needs, i.e. maintaining family relationships and building friendships and partnerships. Once these needs have been met, we can turn our attention to the need for self-worth by gaining respect and achieving a desirable social status. Finally, at the top of the hierarchy of needs is self-actualisation, which allows us to find our personal purpose in life and live up to our full potential.
As soon as you experience certain emotions, you can try to observe the connection between these feelings and your basic needs. Positive feelings occur when your needs are sufficiently met; negative feelings occur when one or more of your needs are not met. This allows you to take a closer look at what you need to fulfil specific needs and how you can therefore experience more positive feelings.
Self-awareness: emotions & needs! Understanding your feelings and needs is the key to understanding and getting to know yourself better. If you become sensitive to how you feel in certain situations and around certain people, what triggers you and what needs lie behind these perceptions, you can learn to be self-compassionate and stand up for your needs and boundaries. This journey will take a long time; possibly a lifetime. It will demand a lot from you, but the price is worth it: this journey leads to yourself; it leads to your truth.
Have you already analysed the connection between your emotions and your needs? Would you like to deepen your understanding of your own personal truth?
Let’s talk about it in a free initial session!
#selfcompassion #understanding #truth
