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Self Actualization
At the top of the hierarchy; includes needs like personal growth, creativity, and fulfilment of one’s potential. We can work towards self-actualization by pursuing our passions and interests, engaging in meaningful work, and continually learning and growing. Maslow later expanded the hierarchy to include cognitive needs like knowledge, aesthetic needs like appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, and self-transcendence like helping others achieve self-actualization.
Esteem
This includes things like self-esteem, confidence, or respect from others. Esteem needs are usually met by achieving set goals, and developing a sense of competence, self-worth, and respect. Through techniques like cognitive-restructuring or self-esteem exercises, we can learn to manage the maladaptive thoughts and core beliefs that are perpetuating feelings of worthlessness or failure.
Love and Belonging
Once physiological and safety needs are met, one can start thinking about social needs. This includes things like love, friendship, and a sense of belonging. Social needs are met through spending time with loved ones, making new friends, or finding a community where one feels accepted and supported. We can learn to form healthy relationships, improve our social skills and create a sense of community and connection with our environment.
Safety Needs
Like personal safety, financial security, and health and well-being. We can meet our safety needs by taking care of our physical and emotional health, learning to set boundaries with others, and working towards financial stability.
Physiological Needs
Like food, water, shelter, and sleep. These are the most basic needs which we cannot survive without. It is crucial to ensure that our physiological needs are being consistently met.
Autonomy, Competence, and Identity
This need involves developing a sense of individuality, independence, and confidence in one’s abilities. It includes being able to express oneself freely and pursue personal goals. Unmet needs in this area can lead to schemas such as Dependence or Undeveloped Self. Caregivers should aim to satisfy these needs by teaching their children to make decisions, take risks, and develop their own identities and competencies.
Freedom to Express Valid Needs and Emotions
This need is about having the freedom to express needs, feelings, and desires openly and honestly. It involves being able to communicate and assert one’s needs without experiencing excessive criticism, punishment, neglect, or emotional suppression. Unmet freedom needs can result in schemas like Emotional Inhibition or Subjugation. Caregivers should aim to create an environment for children to express their needs, validate their feelings and encourage assertive communication.
Spontaneity and Play
This need emphasizes the importance of having opportunities for joy, play, creativity and spontaneity. It involves engaging in activities that are pleasurable and fulfilling. When this need is neglected, individuals may develop schemas like Negativity/Pessimism or Unrelenting Standards. it is important to explore activities that bring joy and satisfaction – this might include creative pursuits, hobbies, or social activities that foster spontaneity or relaxation.
Secure Attachment
Secure attachment refers to the basic need for consistent and reliable care from primary caregivers. This includes emotional warmth, physical protection, nurturance, acceptance, and the assurance that one’s needs will be met. When this need is unmet, individuals may develop schemas such as Abandonment or Mistrust. Therapists can provide a corrective emotional experience through consistent, reliable, and nurturing interactions, helping clients develop trust and a sense of safety.
Realistic Limits, Boundaries, and Self-Control
This involves the need for having appropriate limits and guidance to develop self-discipline and respect for others. It includes learning to balance personal desires with social responsibilities. When this need is unmet, individuals may develop schemas such as Entitlement/Grandiosity or Insufficient Self-control & Self-discipline. We can also meet these needs by setting achievable goals, managing impulses, and balancing personal needs with responsibilities.
The Driving Force of Nature
Needs are at the core of our human experience. They are the driving force behind everything we care about. Without basic needs, plants, animals, and people would struggle to survive—let alone grow and thrive.
As humans, we depend on one another to get our needs met. Even house-plants rely on us to water them, place them in the sun, and tend to their environment. We are no different in essence, just more complex.
How Early Experiences Shape Our Worldview
Psychological theories across time have emphasized the importance of early relationships in shaping how we come to view the world and others. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (left figure) and the set of core needs identified in Schema Therapy (right figure) are two frameworks that attempt to categorize our basic psychological needs. When our basic needs – like safety, love, and recognition – are consistently met in childhood, we tend to see the world as a safe and forgiving place. If those needs are neglected or inconsistently met, we may grow up expecting harm, rejection, or abandonment from others.
Normal Yet Maladaptive Patterns
Just as sunflowers adjust their form to follow the sun, humans might change their behaviors to seek what they are missing. These behaviors are sometimes labeled as “abnormal”, but in reality, they are simply learned strategies for coping with or trying to fulfill unmet needs.
Although these behaviors are normal responses to abnormal circumstances, they can sometimes become maladaptive. For example, we might end up chronically avoiding what scares us, attacking before we are hurt, or surrendering our needs completely just to keep the peace – a pattern often referred to as the fight, flight, or freeze response.
Although this is a primitive and essential survival mechanism, over time, it can shape our responses into unconscious patterns. These patterns can become automatic ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that once protected us, but now keep us stuck without satisfying our original unmet needs.
Looking Ahead
In the next post, we’ll go deeper into how early relationships shape the way we connect with others, through the lens of Attachment Styles. These patterns often reflect the needs that were—or weren’t—met growing up, and continue to influence how we experience closeness, independence, and emotional safety in adulthood.
Further Readings
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few foundational works that have shaped our understanding of human needs, development, and the self:
- Motivation and Personality
by Abraham Maslow - Attachment and Loss (Vol. 1)
by John Bowlby - Reinventing Your Life
by Jeffrey Young & Janet Klosko - The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment
by Donald Winnicott - On Becoming a Person
by Carl Rogers - When the Body Says No
by Gabor Maté