Human Givens Therapy

The healthy feeling that life has meaning and purpose comes from being motivated to actively engage with the world. Only when we lose the motivational energy that promotes action does the sense that life is meaningful drain away. Human givens psychotherapy grew out of a desire to find out why this should be so (Griffin & Tyrrell, 2003).

Our innate knowledge motivates us to engage with the world

We all continually experience the effect of this innate knowledge as “needs.” Our physical needs (air, water, food and sleep) are obvious because, if they are not met, we quickly die. But many psychologists and psychotherapists before us, indeed, throughout the ages, have observed that emotional needs are equally crucial for human wellbeing. These include the need for:

• Security — safe territory in the home and outside where we can live without experiencing excessive fear and anxiety
• Volition — a sense of autonomy and control over what is happening around and to us
• Attention — receiving it, but also giving it — an essential nutrition that fuels the development of each individual, family and culture
• Emotional connection to other people, both individually (friendship, love, intimacy) and in the wider community (respect, status)
• Privacy — time to reflect and consolidate our experiences
• A sense of competence and achievement (ensuring we don’t feel low self-esteem)
• The need for meaning and purpose that comes from being stretched mentally or physically (or both).

When any of these needs are not being met, the evidence supporting the Human Givens approach shows that we fall into mental illnesses like Anxiety, Depression and PTSD.

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