Human Givens

Human Givens or Human givens psychotherapy is a school of psychology that, since its foundation in the mid 1990s, has been influencing psychotherapy and education. It asserts that psychological understanding is best advanced by acknowledging that we have innate physical and emotional needs and that nature has given us resources to help us fulfil them. These needs have evolved over millions of years and are our common biological inheritance, whatever our cultural background. It is because these needs and resources are incorporated into our biology that they are called 'givens'. This organising idea has produced improved ways of treating depression, anxiety disorders, psychosis and addiction.

Innate needs
It theorises that our innate needs seek their fulfillment through the way we interact with the environment using the resources nature 'gave' us. When our emotional needs are not being met, or when our resources are being used incorrectly, however we suffer considerable distress, and so do those around us.

Human Givens says that in everyday terms, it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species. As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we quickly die.

It says we also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. In addition, we instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs which are the main focus of human givens psychology.

There is widespread agreement among psychologists as to the nature of our emotional needs. The main ones are listed below.

Emotional needs
Human givens believes emotional needs include:


 * Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully
 * Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition
 * Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices
 * Being emotionally connected to others
 * Feeling part of a wider community
 * Friendship, intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts 'n' all”
 * Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience
 * Sense of status within social groupings
 * Sense of competence and achievement
 * Meaning and purpose — which come from being stretched in what we do and think.

Human givens says that along with physical and emotional needs nature gave us guidance systems to help us meet them. We call these 'resources'. The resources nature gave us to help us meet our needs include:

Human resources

 * The ability to develop complex long term memory, which enables us to add to our innate knowledge and learn
 * The ability to build rapport, empathise and connect with others
 * Imagination, which enables us to focus our attention away from our emotions, use language and problem solve more creatively and objectively
 * A conscious, rational mind that can check out emotions, question, analyse and plan
 * The ability to 'know' — that is, understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching
 * An observing self — that part of us that can step back, be more objective and be aware of itself as a unique centre of awareness, apart from intellect, emotion and conditioning
 * A dreaming brain that preserves the integrity of our genetic inheritance every night by metaphorically defusing expectations held in the autonomic arousal system because they were not acted out the previous day.

Human givens believes such needs and tools together that make up the human givens, nature's genetic endowment to humanity. Over enormous stretches of time, they underwent continuous refinement as they drove our evolution on. They are best thought of as inbuilt patterns — biological templates — that continually interact with one another and (in undamaged people) seek their natural fulfilment in the world in ways that allow us to survive, live together as many-faceted individuals in a great variety of different social groupings, and flourish.

It is the way those needs are met, and the way we use the resources that nature has given us, that determine the physical, mental and moral health of an individual.

As such, it says the human givens are the benchmark position to which we must all refer — in education, mental and physical health and the way we organise and run our lives. When we feel emotionally fulfilled and are operating effectively within society, we are more likely to be mentally healthy and stable. But when too many innate physical and emotional needs are not being met in the environment, or when our resources are used incorrectly, unwittingly or otherwise, we suffer considerable distress. And so do those around us.

Practise
The Human Givens psychotherapy approach to treating depression emerged from research into sleep and especially the brain state indicated by the rapid eye movements seen during dream sleep. It theorises that excessive worrying while awake arouses the autonomic nervous system which then increases the need to dream in REM sleep which deprives the individual of the refreshment of the mind brought about by regenerative slow-wave sleep. It sees worry as a misuse of the imagination. A worry is a form of expectation and expectations arouse the autonomic nervous system. Any expectation that is not acted out during the day time is acted out metaphorically in dreams. Expectation fulfillment theory of dreams This, human givens psychologists say, is why depressed people dream more intensly than non-depressed people and why all depressed people wake up tired and find it difficult to motivate themselves. The balance of their sleep is upset. It uses a number of techniques to get the subject to use their imagination in a healthier way which then restores a healthier sleep pattern and lifts the depression. The technique was developed by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell in the mid 1990s from observations in sleep research and efficacy studies of different psychotherapy schools.

The theory has been further extended to given a plausible possible cause of schizophrenia.

Human givens has been described as the missing heart of the positive psychology movement.