The Arts and Science of Relationships: Understanding Human Needs
Week 1
The reason for starting a relationship: Needs
Physical: safety, food, shelter and so on (specially as an infant and kid)
Psychological: intimacy, affiliation, attachment, security
Social: social position, sense of identity, status, access to resources
Existential/spiritual (for some people): purpose, sense of being
First question: What are MY needs that I want to address?
“Not everyone understands her/his needs clearly.”
There’s a difference between what we need (necessary condition for our lives) and what we want (prefer to have).
Needs:
Intrinsic: doing something for its own sake
Extrinsic:
personal: I want somebody to accompany me when I’m sad. (for myself)
instrumental: I want to have a relationship with you so you could protect my son in school. (not directly for ourselves)
We become who we are as a result of the relationships that we have. The quality of your relationships has a direct impact on your overall quality of life.
N3C: needs, circumstances, characteristics, capacity
“Mutual need gratification”
Circumstances
macro: global level like the era that you live in
mezzo: regional and local things like the country you’re living in and its status
micro: personal level like health, socio-economic status
Characteristics
Physical: gender, ethnicity, physique and so on
Psychological: personality, values, emotional and behavioral patterns
Socio-cultural: lifestyle, regional and cultural attitudes
Capacity
It’s the same as characteristics, but focuses on the positive aspects of it.
Another 3Cs are communication, compatibility and collaboration.
Relationships ALWAYS involves differences and being able to deal with them is the key to its success.
Appreciating differences, curiosity towards them and learning to manage them by understanding problems as unmet needs and then translating them into something we can do collaboratively to address them.
Being able to deal with differences is a very essential critical skill that we have to master.
When you’re tolerating something, you’re dealing with something unpleasant (I think we can’t do it like forever? :-?). We should enhance our capacity towards differences.
Differences aren’t necessarily problems. They might be opportunities. We need to make sure everyone’s need is met.
Share the (similar) memories that impacted you to get closer to each other.
Week 2
Social scripts: things constructed by society, governing the life of people living in it (what is “considered” appropriate or inappropriate)
We should be aware of the scripts we’re following and know why. You might be able to create your own scripts then.
Traps: thinking of only “one” way of living (usually based on the majority of people)
One common trap in relationships: Consumerism and letting it take over our expectations of love and affection → we expect things that don’t usually require creativity and sensitivity to our partner’s needs and circumstances. How much do those contribute to the health of relationship and to the respective and collective well-being of couples involved?
Attachment theory: the way we are raised as a child has lasting effects on our relationship patterns in life (Read “Attached”)
There’s a way to change these unhealthy attachment styles → By learning to develop healthy interaction patterns to communicate your needs, vulnerabilities and increasing this capacity
Having a “game plan” in your relationship doesn’t mean playing a game with another person. It’s going through a self-reflection to know your own attributes in order to be able to deal with different situations in a better way.
This awareness leads into:
Communicating with your partner and knowing her/him better
Understanding yourself more than before
“The One” myth: thinking that there’s one special person out there for you. This attitude will lead into missing out other chances and not paying enough attention to the fact that you will grow, your expectations will change, and there might be different people suitable for you in different stages of your life.
This myth obliterates chances of re-examining and re-evaluating your needs. You wouldn’t open yourself to other experiences.
“When you feel like you’re attracted to another person, you may actually be discovering something inside of yourself. And you may also be discovering some unmet needs.” Acknowledge it, reflect on it, and address it.
Believing in “destiny” makes you less proactive in your life, choosing to leave things to chance and fate.
Don’t get stuck into “mind reading fantasy.” Your partner can not read your mind and if you want or need something, take the responsibility for it and communicate.
Can we follow our instincts in a relationship and wouldn’t that be boring to just follow rational decisions?
It is, and we can follow our hearts, but …
Imagine you want to go skiing. You learn the basics, you equip yourself with the appropriate gadgets, and then you go have fun (following your heart). If you don’t prepare, there’s a good chance to not have fun and get severely injured. The same works for relationships.
First impressions:
Physical appearance: our fashion choice is also important.
Our body language: not the self-help crap that says do this with your hand to tell the subconscious of the other person that you’re powerful. It’s about the real aspect of it; taking care of your gestures, facial expressions and so on.
Attitudes
Each situation needs different presanctions. Self-expression is exhibited through appearances, behaviors, and our attitude which are all closely interconnected.
We need to understand our positive sides while reflecting on our negative aspects and addressing them. “Positive reframing” doesn’t mean lying to yourself, it’s being realistic and see things from a more balanced point of view.
Week 3
Communication in a relationship has three parts:
Reception: the way we receive messages, observe and figure things out
Expression: the ability to articulate our own ideas, feelings and needs
The interaction between partners
More often, the difficult issue to deal with is not being able to listen. That’s because people actually spend too much time and energy on expressing themselves and getting their own way, without paying enough attention to the person that they're interacting with.
Both reception and expression have 4 content areas:
Facts
Attitudes
Emotions
Needs
Although we usually want to establish facts, they are not actually the most important aspect of the communication. The complication is also when the facts we are talking about are colored and conditioned by our emotions, needs and our attitudes. We construct our POV according to them. Facts are the most obvious part that everyone usually pays attention to.
Other aspects of the communication that are less obvious, like emotional content, the kind of needs that people are trying to express, things that they are telling you about their values, their preferences and even how they are seeing you, are the important things that we should pay attention to. Focusing on them will help you gain a more in-depth understanding of the other person.
Note: The emotional content is very often more important than the factual content. What the other person feels (because of your actions) will triumph what you might tell them.
Note: Asking “are you happy?” in a relationship can be almost oppressive and abusive because they might give a yes that asked indirectly.
“How many people in your life do really understand you, especially with regard to your needs?”
Since this number is not high (not just for you specifically, for everyone),
Don’t take people who understand you and your need and try to do so, for granted.
Being the person who can understand another one’s needs will help you develop a significant relationship with her/him. If you care for someone, dive deeper into this part.
Trust will develop at this way. That's why having good receptive skills is an important condition of a healthy and good relationship.
Rephrase: Instead of asking “what do you want from me?” that might put the burden on the other person, ask “what will make you feel better?” (Use the template that JJ showed you from Fight Right book.)
Note: You can understand more about a person’s need by paying attention to what one is complaining about, what one is avoiding and what they are afraid of.
Attribution: simplifying the world or a situation for ourselves to understand by regarding one thing as being caused by something else because
It takes time and energy to deal with more complicated attributions.
We make attributions that will make us feel better based on our needs.
Note: Most human realities are more complicated than a simple one to one relationship and there are usually many other underlying factors.
The homogeneity assumption refers to this simple thinking that everyone coming from the same culture is the same which is wrong. What is more important is to look at what cultural values a person has internalized.
Expression of facts depends on the purpose of engagement. To express our idea to another person we should focusing on the other person's needs not on our needs.
Pay attention to the fact that whether the other person got your message or not. Instead of top-down way of asking the other person to tell you, we would be asking “what do you think of it?”, “Does it make sense to you? How does it make sense to you?”, “Do you see something wrong with this?” or “What aspect of it you like better?”.
Note: The act of expressing emotion, will change the emotion that we are expressing because the expression and feedback that we’ve got will immediately feed into the emotional experience that we have.
Being angry → expressing it → being less angry
Note: Understanding yourself is a condition for effective and appropriate expression.
The more complex the need, the more emotions involved, the better relationship you should have to be able to express it.
A relationship would grow if everyone can express their needs and their emotions freely and they’re are open, embracing and accepting. And it will start a virtuous cycle while things getting better, out of self-understanding, more effective communication, like expanding the shared space in the relationship.
The problem is that different feelings and emotions are being regulated very differently in society and we learn to not express certain emotions or try to control them (expression of happiness might be tolerated in a society buy sexual interest is not and that’ll build the “art” of flirting that we’re seeing). We’re heavily regulated our self-expression of our emotions by society and we don't express many emotions or suppress them because of what society tells us.
The more you express → the more you know about it → the more you’ll be able to identify your needs → the better the relationship goes on
Week 4
Understanding relationship and human life
Social Exchange Theory: We're only in relationships if the pros outweigh the cons. And we do a cost benefit analysis and decide to ourselves.
Some aspects of the relationship might be explainable with formulations like this but relationships are obviously more complicated than that. We do not want to consider people or their relationships simply as black or white.
What is being valued varies from person to person. When we look at value, we have to pay attention to individuals and their needs; no need to mention again that people’s need will change throughout time.
The element of power in relationships can dominate how people interact within a relationship. We do not want to see any relationship turning into something that is oppressive. That’s why we need a balance of power in a relationship (from income to status, even our sense of identity and any other aspect of a relationship and self).
Although people are not calculating in an ideal loving relationship, at the same time, they should be fully autonomous and able to derive pleasure and satisfaction through the act of giving and receiving. If you do not, it is probably time for you to be re-examining the relationship.
Compatibility
When we are attracted to another person, we should pay attention to the needs that are being met.
(Examples: 1. Someone may look for some compensation of the lack of security that experienced as a child, and wants to be in a very stable relationship.
2. Some people are trying to compensate for the incomplete family that he or she had and was fascinated or obsessed with this idea of a healthy family.)
And the problem is in a lot of situations; people are not even aware that they're driven by these needs. It is really important for people to pay more attention to what needs are being triggered, especially in the beginning phase of a relationship.
Notes
There are always irrational needs.
Needs do change.
And in an ideal situation and in a good relationship, the relationship would actually help you grow and develop better understanding. You'll feel better about yourself, you become more capable of communicating your needs and you've also become like more capable of understanding the needs of your partner, so both of you will grow. This will prepare both parties to move forward and develop a stronger intimate relationship.
As circumstances change, our needs and the ability to be compatible also changes. We don't just start off compatible and always stay like that forever. Another thing is that are we really interested in dealing with the changes? That’s because the capacity to change and be compatible is different in people and some people would say no; I don't really want to do a lot of work in a particular aspect.
Intimacy
People have different preferences. Some people do not want to have intimacy. Some people dread intimacy and some might even be desperate for it. Not everyone has to have one certain normative kind of relationship that the society reinforces.
“An ideal relationship (for me) is one in which both parties can become fully who they really are. Sometimes, this creates a tension because who and what you are, it can change, because we grow. Not everyone wants to grow. Some people are actually afraid of growing, because growth involves change. And it also involves in many cases taking risk, moving into uncertainty. It can also mean danger, or like you're moving into the unfamiliar. But to me a good relationship should be growth-enhancing. If a relationship is not growth-enhancing, it probably isn't even a relationship that's worth having.”
A key thing is that although people change, a certain level of trust is important. So that you feel like this is a safe space for me to be who I am and I can like express certain aspects of myself. Without worrying about being judged, rejected or punished for being and becoming who I am. And for this to really happen, you obviously need to have very good communication.
Of course, it is totally normal okay if not everyone wants to reach that kind of intense growth-enhancing and self-actualization level. That is not something that everyone wants. It may not be something that everyone needs. It might not even be something that is good for everyone. Not everyone wants to grow and change constantly.
Fear of intimacy: when you get intimate or get close to someone, you're more exposed and vulnerable. You're showing more of yourself, and people might not be wholly comfortable with it. We all have unpleasant history, we all have our sort of like dark side, things that we ourselves do not even accept. That can be like trauma, or they are like things that we have done before that we are not proud of. And at the same time, we want to be understood and taken as who we really are: an approach-avoidance point that we want to get closer, but also want to protect oneself and stay away.
If you're afraid of getting closer, it doesn't mean that you're sick. It doesn't mean that you have a huge problem. It's just the human thing that many people actually have it.
There’s a difference between commitment and intimacy. Society reinforces commitment but it is necessarily good or bad. It works well for some people and they enjoy the sense of security, predictability, and order. But for some people, it feels like being tied down; specially if they would not be free to explore who they are, their interests, their potential, and the ability to grow and develop into the person that they can be.
Not everyone should follow the same script. I should emphasize that a person’s preference might also change as the time goes by.
In love, the paradox occurs that the two beings become one and yet remain two. There should be a balance between like merging together and becoming one person, and then maintaining your own individuality, your own being, or your own personality.
Have a safe space created between them so that you will feel free to negotiate what kind of distance you want to maintain. If you would let the other person know more about you, you are more likely to get the other person to trust you which in itself increases intimacy.
The relation between physical intimacy and emotional and psychological intimacy is a very fluid one and it is like also very contingent, meaning that it is not fixed.
Some people can actually get very intimate physically without ever getting intimate emotionally. And some people can be very intimate emotionally without even touching each other's fingers.
Some people may actually feel more intimate with another person after being physically intimate with that person. For some people, emotional intimacy is actually a condition for physical intimacy. Some people would talk to people in order to get to sleep with them. But it is also true that some people will have to sleep with someone first before they can really talk to them.
The idea of physical intimacy is actually pretty fluid and sex is only part of it. And how much physical intimacy is involved in the act of sex itself also varies for each person. Even the quality of the experience actually varies a lot. Physical intimacy has to be understood within a context, which is more than physical distance or geographical distance, yeah.
behavioral diary, which will record your experience of the relationship for people involving in a relationship to know how they see the relationship. This helps people understand the relationship better. colour code diary so that they have like an indication of how satisfied or how happy they are with this experience so that they would have some clue with regard to what are the things that they enjoy doing together and what are the things that they hate doing together,
The listening exercises by Carl Rogers
It would allow you to reconstruct the speakers' thinking and feeling and being able to relate their understanding back to the speaker.
Listen to what talker is saying and take notes. When the talker is done speaking (5 minutes limit), tell the talker what they said in your own words, without adding your point of view, without responding to, without judgment criticism, or body language. Ask the talker if you "got it", and if the talker says "yes" proceed to next step by asking the talker if there is more.
Behavioral diary
It helps you to assess the activities, events and experiences of the relationship. This helps a couple understand each other's needs and feelings better by comparing daily activities and subjective moments together.
3D appreciation exercise
The 3Ds stand for discover, document, and display. This helps the couple appreciate each other more by discovering the things you appreciate of your partner, documenting it, and displaying openly to each other of your gratefulness or appreciation.
Some people do not want change. They do not necessarily grow, in the sense of the word, but they're happy. They keep the same stable, simple relationship that they have and they support each other. How much growth and how much change you want to achieve in your relationship, is up to the individual.
Happening vs ritual: A happening is like something that is not routine. It can be planned, it can be staged, but like it is something that is unusual.
There are people who do not want happenings. People who want things to be predictable. They want things to be routine.
Note: People do not necessarily stay at the same point all through their lives. The key thing is being true to yourself, communicate very effectively, and negotiate a win-win strategy so that both parties would achieve a certain level of satisfaction out of this.
Week 5
People change in a relationship and we have to find ways to transform that relationship in order to make sure that is mutually gratifying for both parties.
When someone is heavily invested in a relationship and cannot let go, and cannot leave that relationship and become like more independent. It usually means that this person doesn't have a lot of options from other sources or from other relationships to address his or her needs. That person is heavily invested in this relationship, meaning that many of his or her needs are met through this relationship and those needs cannot be effectively met by other relationships.
For some people they, stay in the relationship and they cannot individuate or separate. Because they're largely dependent on this one relationship to meet most of their needs. And they may not have the confidence; they may not even believe that it is possible for them to have those needs met when they step out of the relationship.
Letting this person develop a wider repertoire of skills and a wider range of working, functioning relationships, makes it easier for her/him to go through this transition of like separation and individuation.
People should not invest everything into one relationship.
Ageist discourse and practice that we have around us displays older people in sort of like a passive role (like waiting for grandchildren to call) with some systematic bias; imagining their lives to be without content, without fun.
Unfortunately, we might have been abusing our bodies for too long; like excessive or unhealthy eating. We should redefine or renegotiate the relationship with our body, so that our needs are being met in a better way.
Termination is another form of transformation; there's a breakup or a divorce or even tragically a partner passes away. After termination of a relationship, we will have to do something differently in order to address the same needs that were previously met by this relationship.
The most important principle in termination is self-care. A good starting point is for us to be very accepting of ourselves, including our own emotional reactions. If we feel sad, angry, upset and even if our biorhythms are disturbed. We cannot sleep. We do not eat well or our menstrual cycle is off. We accept that this is a natural response to a significant event in life and we should not blame ourselves.
Self-acceptance and allowing yourself a lot of space to experience feelings and emotions is the first step.
“It's okay to feel how you're feeling.”
Don’t be afraid of the negative emotions. You don’t lose control. Even if you’re totally overtaken by anger, depression or whatever. Document, journal, write about it. It will help because that would give you a little sense of control over what you're experiencing and that won’t last forever. We will let that take its natural course and it will like stop at some point and we do not have to rush it. We do not have to fight it; we just need to recognize it.
We should do something that can be self-indulgent; to create a pleasurable experience for ourselves without incurring too high a cost or taking too much of a risk. If you have money and you can spend it to make yourself, feel better, do it. It is better to do that than to, like gamble your money away.
Talk to someone who can make you feel good. Do things to feel supported and allow yourself the time and space to take care of yourself and not be harsh on yourself.
When a relationship changes or ends, you don't have that same support that you did from your partner and that's why it’s good to get that or replace that need, with social support, however you can.
Take the time to recognize that feeling emotional is perfectly natural.
Accept where you're at, and eventually the goal is to, in time, get to a point of emotional stability.
In the interim, you might be engaging in other pleasurable activities or indulging a bit.
Take the time to recognize if it's really helping you and if it's coming back to that feeling of self-care.
Finding a way to build your social support social network and talk to someone who might help to fill the needs that your partner or the person in your relationship was once meeting.
We are worthwhile as human beings, regardless of what have happened.
There's always a risk when you're emotionally vulnerable: you jump into another relationship hoping that it will be the panacea or the magic cure or replacement for what you have lost.
People should be a little bit more cautious when they are moving from a disrupted, transformed or terminated relationship into a new one to be a little bit cautious. They should start exploring more relationships instead of immediately focusing on one.
Trying to meet with more people, talk to more people, letting different aspects of self to be expressed, performed, and realized in different relationship contexts. We may actually take this opportunity to discover new aspects of ourselves. Take the time to allow yourself to get a better understanding of yourself. You actually would be in a better position for your future self and future relationships.
When your world is collapsing after termination of a relationship, we start with the area that we find more manageable. We divide our world into three major areas:
The first area is what we refer to as occupation. It is the primary things that is occupying your time.
For some people, after some disruption in their lives, being able to go back to their primary thing can actually be a stabilizing thing.
The other area is relationship. We can look at the other relationships that you still have in your life. And some of these relationships is now given the opportunity to become more central, more important after you have transformed or lost a significant relationship.
You may be able to spend more times, for instance, with your friends, and talking to them. You also would have the opportunity to review how your relationships are doing overall in terms of addressing your needs.
The third area is the self.
We're looking at who you are, what you are, the kind of person you are. You can also be thinking not only about the person you used to be, but about a person that you want to be, or you can possibly be, or become.
That is the sort of the framework to think of when we are starting to think of designing or redesigning our lifeworld.
Week 6
Six domains of love:
Cognitive aspect: One of the things that most people would recognize as important in love relationship is mutual understanding and knowledge.
Emotional aspect: emotional investment is another part to discuss.
Motivation and driving factor: Some people may be looking for a sense of intimacy, sharing, affiliation. Some people will be looking for a way to validate oneself, to prove oneself. People will be seeking out gratification of different needs in the love.
Body and Physical aspect: From cuddling and touching to physical intimacy in sex
Environment: Your environment has a big impact on your expectations, opinions and needs.
What you do: Sometimes love can be articulated or actually most effectively articulated by what you actually do.
Two important articles to read:
From SSLD POV: You can ask how can I love better? By recognizing, addressing the other person's needs, while at the same time, also looking after your own needs; growing, developing and improving through the relationship.
Sex: It's not easy to talk about sex because you know whenever we try to talk about sex, a lot of people would have their feelings and values and a lot of things triggered.
People engage in sexual activity or sexual interactions or sexual relationships. These are not exactly the same concepts, and when you have two partners or sometimes more, participating, they do not necessarily try to address the same needs by engaging in the same act.
Sexual activity:
They are anything that is sexual. From relationship and interaction to the things that you do on your own which is not necessarily interaction.
Sexual interaction:
When you have sexual interaction, you're talking about two or more individuals engaged in an interaction that is sexual in nature and it provides sexual pleasure or sexual experience. But it does not necessarily turn into a relationship.
Sexual relationship:
When we talk about a sexual relationship, we're usually talking about something that is longer term, that involves more than one encounter, something of a relationship going on.
There’s biological, psychological, social or interactional and also spiritual [conceptual] category of needs in sex. Of course they might overlap in real life.
Biological:
The procreational purpose is probably not the central motivation for sex. But many people are sort of driven to achieve a certain kind of physical pleasure.
Sexual pleasure is a broader term. It might come from stimulating parts of body, some people tend to ascribe more significance to the emotional meaning, the feeling of intimacy. And some experience a sense of security when they're interacting with people physically. We have a wide variety of responses among individuals.
Psychological:
Sexual satisfaction is not always, or very rarely, purely physical. Usually, it also involves a certain kind of psychological gratification. People are using sexual interaction or relationships or activities to satisfy needs which can be like a sense of intimacy. It can be security. Some people can use sex to express gratitude and appreciation. There’s a huge a range of possible emotional and psychological needs that can be associated with any sexual activity.
Social or interactional:
You can feel good about yourself based on how the sexual interaction has gone. The self is rarely just individual or personal, the self is always relational.
Spirituality:
Sex can be existentially, to some people, really self-affirming. It can be very gratifying and this can be compared to the more mundane everyday experience.
Sex and the quality of a relationship:
If you have a better relationship, a high-quality relationship, it's more likely that you'll be able to experience higher-quality sex. But it depends on how important sex is to either or both of the partners. There are people who go on in a very satisfactory relationship in which sex doesn't really play an important role. And then there are couples who can tell us that they have good relationship but they don't really have a very active sex life.
There might be a cycle, that high-quality relationship contributes to better sex, and better sex feeds into a higher-quality relationship. But I don't think the two are just going on like this in a simple, straightforward manner.
What is sexual, I would say, to a very large extent depends on the reality that is co-constructed by the participants themselves.
By the end of the day, it would be the participants themselves who one, define what is sexual and how important it is in their relationship.
The general principle is that the two partners involved should give themselves a lot of space to imagine and try out different forms of sexual expression. We should not just very definitely say that A is bad or B is out of bounds. There are huge cultural differences here and we may want to be more open to understand the context of how these rules come into being and how they also change over time and how they also vary from one social cultural context to another.
Awareness is definitely useful if you understand where you are and your chances.
You always want to work towards empowering whoever you're working with. It can be done individually; it can also be done collectively: To help people to achieve a higher level of self-efficacy, develop strategies and skills to help us increase our chance of getting what we need in life.
When you understand what the other person's needs are, characteristics, preferences and capacity, and you learn more effective communication skills and relationship skills, it will increase your life chances of developing or negotiating a gratifying relationship. Although we also understand that it has its own limitations.
Notes:
Most relationships can be improved if you improve the communication.
If the two partners are not compatible, I think it would be better for them to find out earlier rather than later.
When someone is attracted to someone else, it doesn't even mean in some situations that this person is more attractive. It's just that certain needs are not met within this relationship, and this person is seeking a way to meet those needs.
The tricky part, because dysfunctional relationships usually offer partial satisfaction of needs. Otherwise, people would not stay there, they would just split, turn and just go. The dreadful part about a dysfunctional relationship is that it actually does meet some of your needs but not all. And then it is sort of keeping you at a certain satisfaction level, so that you're not leaving the relationship, but you're not growing or flourishing in the relationship either.
There will always be unmet needs and then the unmet needs are more likely the sort of need for growth, self-actualization, development.
People to want to stay in a relationship once it is established. There are all sorts of reasons for people to doing that like social enforcement. It’s also the whole idea of psychological economy because starting a new relationship requires energy, taking chances and risking something that is unfamiliar. So, this is why a lot of people would rather stay in the relationship that is not satisfying instead of like, exploring and venturing.
The other thing that people would have to do or they could think of doing is to try to improve or transform the current relationship. And doing that actually would also not be easy either. Because there is like, you have to change what might be well-established patterns. You and very often your partner may find it difficult to adjust to those changes. And so, it requires a lot of good communication and negotiation skills for you to be able to get the other party to work with you collaboratively on this.
