Relational needs are the needs unique to interpersonal contact. They are not the basic needs of life—such as food, air, or proper temperature—but the essential elements that enhance the quality of life and a sense of self-in-relationship. Relational needs are the component parts of a universal human desire for intimate relationship. Although there may be a large number of relational needs, the eight described in this article represent those needs that clients most frequently describe as they talk about significant relationships.
Relational needs are not only needs of childhood or needs that emerge in a developmental hierarchy; they are components of relationship that are present every day of our lives. Each of the eight relational needs may become figure or conscious as a longing or desire while the other seven remain out of consciousness or as background. A satisfying response by another person to an individual’s relational need allows the pressing need to recede to ground and another relational need to become figure as a new interest or desire.
Often it is in the absence of need satisfaction that an individual becomes most aware of the presence of relational needs. When relational needs are not satisfied the need becomes more intense and is phenomenologically experienced as longing, emptiness, a nagging loneliness, or an intense urge often accompanied by nervousness. The continued absence of satisfaction of relational needs may be manifested as frustration, aggression, or anger. When disruptions in relationship are prolonged, the lack of need satisfaction is manifested as a loss of energy or hope and shows up in script beliefs such as “No one is there for me” or “What’s the use?” These script beliefs are the cognitive defense against the awareness of needs and the feelings that occur when needs do not get a satisfying response from another person.
The satisfaction of relational needs requires the contactful presence of another who is sensitive and attuned to the relational needs and who also provides a reciprocal response to each need. The eight principal relational needs that we observe are the needs for:
- Security: the visceral experience of having our physical and emotional vulnerabilities protected. This involves the experience that our variety of needs and feelings are natural. Security is a sense of simultaneously being vulnerable and in harmony with another. It includes the absence of both actual or anticipated impingement or danger.
Attunement involves the empathic awareness of the other’s need for security within the relationship plus a reciprocal response to that need. The needed response is the provision of physical and affective security in which the individual’s vulnerability is honored and preserved. It communicates, often nonverbally, “Your needs and feelings are normal and acceptable to me.” Therapeutic attunement to the relational need for security has been described by clients as “total acceptance and protection,” a communication of “unconditional positive regard” or “I’m OK in this relationship.” Attunement to the need for security involves the therapist being sensitive to the importance of this need and conducting himself or herself both emotionally and behaviorally in a way that provides security in the relationship. - Validation, affirmation, and significance within a relationship: the need to have the other person validate the significance and function of our intrapsychic processes of affect, fantasy, and constructing of meaning and to validate that our emotions are a significant intrapsychic and interpersonal communication. It includes the need to have all of our relational needs affirmed and accepted as natural. The therapist’s affective reciprocity with the client’s feelings validates the client’s affect and provides affirmation and normalization of the client’s relational needs.
- Acceptance by a stable, dependable, and protective other person: the need to look up to and rely on parents, elders, teachers, and mentors. The relational need for acceptance by a consistent, reliable, dependable other person is the search for protection and guidance and may manifest as an idealization of the other. In psychotherapy such idealization is also the search for protection and intrapsychic stability. The degree to which an individual looks to someone and hopes that he or she is reliable, consistent, and dependable is directly proportional to the quest for intrapsychic protection, safe expression, containment, or beneficial insight. Idealizing or depending on someone is not necessarily pathological as implied in the popular psychology term, “codependent”. When we refer to some clients’ expressions of this need to be accepted and protected as “a Victim looking for a Rescuer,” we potentially depreciate or even pathologize an essential human need for relationship that provides a sense of stability, reliability, and dependability
In psychotherapy, attunement involves the therapist’s recognition, often unspoken, of the importance and necessity of idealizing as an unaware request for intrapsychic protection. Such a therapeutic involvement includes both the client’s sense of the psychotherapist’s interest in the client’s welfare and the use of the therapist’s integrated sense of self as the most effective therapeutic tool . This relational need to be accepted by a stable, dependable, and protective other person provides a client-centered reason to conduct our lives and psychotherapy practices ethically and morally. - Confirmation of personal experience: The need to have experience confirmed is manifested through the desire to be in the presence of someone who is similar, who understands because he or she has had a like experience, and whose shared experience is confirming. Attunement is provided by the therapist valuing the need for confirmation by revealing carefully selected personal experiences—mindfully (i.e., client-focused) sharing vulnerabilities or similar feelings and fantasies—and by being personally present and vital.
For example, affirmation of the client’s experience may include the therapist joining in or valuing the client’s fantasies. Rather than define a client’s internal storytelling as “just a fantasy,” it is essential to engage the client in the expression of the needs, hopes, relational conflicts, and protective strategies that may constitute the core of the fantasies. Attunement to the need for affirmation of experience may be achieved by the therapist accepting everything said by the client, even when fantasy and reality are intertwined, much like the telling of a dream reveals the intrapsychic process. Fantasy images or symbols have significant intrapsychic and interpersonal functions that may include stability, continuity, identity, and predictability. When the function of the fantasy is acknowledged, appreciated, and valued, the person feels affirmed in his or her experience.
The client who needs confirmation of personal experience requires a uniquely different reciprocal response from the client who needs validation of affect or who needs to be accepted by a dependable and protective other. In neither of the latter two relational needs is the sharing of personal experience or the creating of an atmosphere of mutuality an attuned response to the client’s need. - Self-definition: the relational need to know and express one’s own uniqueness and to receive acknowledgment and acceptance by the other. Self-definition is the communication of one’s self-chosen identity through the expression of preferences, interests, and ideas without humiliation or rejection.
In the absence of satisfying acknowledgment and acceptance, the expression of self-definition may take unconscious adversarial forms such as the person who begins sentences with “No, . . . .” even when agreeing, or who constantly engages in arguments or competition. People often compete to define themselves as distinct from others in order to maintain a sense of their own integrity. The more alike people are the greater the thrust for self-defining competition.
Therapeutic attunement occurs in the therapist’s consistent support for the client’s expression of identity and his or her normalization of the need for self-definition. It requires the therapist’s consistent presence, contactfulness, and respect even in the face of disagreement. - The need to have an impact on the other person: Impact refers to having an influence that affects the other in some desired way. An individual’s sense of competency in a relationship emerges from agency and efficacy—attracting the other’s attention and interest, influencing what may be of interest to the other person, and effecting a change of affect or behavior in the other.
Attunement to the client’s need to have an impact occurs when the psychotherapist allows himself or herself to be emotionally impacted by the client and to respond with compassion when the client is sad, to provide an affect of security when the client is scared, to take the client seriously when he or she is angry, and to be excited when the client is joyful. Attunement may include soliciting the client’s criticism of the therapist’s behavior and making the necessary changes so the client has a sense of impact within the therapeutic relationship. - The need to have the other initiate: Initiation refers to the impetus for making interpersonal contact with another person. It is the reaching out to the other in some way that acknowledges and validates the importance of him or her in the While waiting for the client to initiate, the psychotherapist may not be accounting for the fact that some behavior that appears passive may actually be an expression of the relational need to have the other initiate.
To respond to the client’s need it may be necessary for the therapist to initiate a dialogue for example. The therapist’s willingness to initiate interpersonal contact or to take responsibility for a major share of the therapeutic work normalizes the client’s relational need to have someone else reach out to him or her. - The need to express love: Love is often expressed through quiet gratitude, thankfulness, giving affection, or doing something for the other person. The importance of the relational need to give love—whether it be from children to parents, sibling, or teacher, or from client to therapist—is often overlooked in the practice of psychotherapy. When the expression of love is stymied, the expression of self-in-relationship is thwarted. Too often psychotherapists have treated clients’ expression of affection as manipulation, transference, or a violation of a neutral therapeutic boundary.
Those clients for whom the absence of satisfaction of relational needs is cumulative require a consistent and dependable attunement and involvement by the psychotherapist that acknowledges, validates, and normalizes relational needs and related affect. It is through the psychotherapist’s sustained contactful presence that the cumulative trauma of the lack of need satisfaction can be addressed and the needs responded to within the therapeutic relationship.