The organising idea of Human Givens starts from what we are born with. These are the templates for our species, Nature’s endowment to each of us. These givens come in two kinds:
- The physical and emotional needs evolution has programmed into us, which seeks fulfillment through our interaction with the environment
- The resources (or tools) nature provided us with to help us get those needs met
And so, what we do every minute of the day (you could say) is to use our resources as best we can to try to get our essential emotional needs met.
And so it is very simple
Individuals are emotionally healthy when their resources are working effectively to meet needs in a balanced way. Conversely, individuals will suffer – be it from depression, anxieties, addictions or psychosis – when resources are misused or have been damaged or are overwhelmed by circumstances so that all needs are not met.
The organising idea is simple, powerful and yet so different from the models to which the majority (laypeople and mental health practitioners) continue to subscribe. These models either see mental disturbance as a sickness of the brain, which can be diagnosed and treated with carefully targeted drugs or as requiring long-term insight talking therapy so to uncover the assumed hidden cause.
The Human Givens approach is that both of these ways of seeing mental problems – as illnesses or requiring long-term insight therapy – are at best flawed and at worst downright wrong.