Arjan Bogaers

Crisis: a Matter of Neglected Needs?

Introduction
You may be somewhat familiar with the concept of the Human Needs through Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. The Human Needs are our most powerful drivers. They determine our choices and our behavior. If necessary, you will compromise your beliefs and your values in order to meet your needs.

But what if your needs have been ignored or denied? Let us examine the relationship between the occurrence of a crisis and suppressed needs.

Crisis as a Manifestation of Subconscious Needs
A crisis is defined as being ‘a time of intense difficulty or danger’. Here, the emergency or calamity has reached a critical point. This can indicate a turning point, a cross roads with the necessity of making important decisions. Thus, a crisis harbours both danger and possibility.

A crisis plunges you into the subconscious, and although it appears to be a sudden event, after honest examination you might have to admit that, in truth, it had been some time coming.

A crisis develops over time. Repeated warning signs, discomforts, and conflicts may have been ignored, neglected or denied for some time. But the imbalance remains and intensifies until there is no longer merely an imbalance, but an emergency.

The occurrence of a crisis in one’s life is often the result of some fundamental needs that have been ignored, neglected or denied for a long time. Needs are not ‘wants’; they are absolute necessities and suppressed needs will eventually emerge as a crisis.

On a personal level, a crisis, be it in a relationship, in health, in finances or in one’s emotional life, represents neglected needs. Needs that have been ignored or denied for some time.

What does your crisis hide?
If you are confronted with a crisis in some area in your life, it may be of help for you to consider: what are the needs within me that have been neglected and denied? Do I have a need for certainty, stability and safety? Do I have a need for belonging, for love and connection? Or maybe my need to express my unique self has been ignored?

Childhood Deprivation
Needs indicate what we experience as lack. Your strongest needs represent what you feel is most missing, and those needs will define your behavior, your choices and your expectations.

In this, strong needs will likely represent what you experienced as most lacking in your childhood, and they run as a theme throughout your life. If, for example, you experienced abandonment or little or no love and connection as a small child, that deprivation could express itself in an understandable need for acknowledgment, acceptance, belonging and love. This need then translates into a certain behavior and as an expectation regarding relationships, or with regard to a social group you join and so forth.

Now, stepping into any relationship out of strong needs, be it a personal relationship or a professional one, puts that relationship under pressure of the expectations you impose on it. Maybe for some time the relationship can answer those needs, or so it seems, but when the pressure continues, that one-sidedness will become detrimental. Then a crisis develops.

In order to understand the crisis and, eventually, to break the pattern, it can be helpful to recognize the needs that lie at the foundation of the imbalance. This could lead to a painful confrontation with childhood deprivations and you can, sometimes for the first time, really experience what you lacked in your emotional world as a young person. Then, part of your healing lies in being and doing for yourself what others could or would not be or do when you needed it most.

This may well be the very thing that is necessary to break the pattern and for you to develop emotional freedom.

3 stages in the Process of Transformation

The following three articles make up the brief series: a Process of Transformation. Each article will elaborate on one of the three main stages than can be identified in a process of transformation of any kind:

1. Loss, death, separation.
2. Liminality – the in-between space
3. Integration – Rebirth

1. Loss, Death, Separation
The first stage in a process of transformation that in its intensity and effect surpasses mere change, is known under many different names: death, separation, loss, feeling lost. Often, what is lost, happens without our consent, as the result of personal betrayal, financial ruin, a chronic health condition, death of a loved one and other traumatic events that most unexpectedly and profoundly undermine our sense of safety, certainty and trust.

Something in our life’s structure collapses, it ends, and our first psychological defence kicks in: denial. After all, we can only let so much new information in, lest we get entirely overwhelmed. But day after day, the unbelievable truth settles into our being – who, or what, once was, is no longer.

We encounter this aspect in stories and mythologies of the lonely, shipwrecked sailors, of being lost in the desert or of the youngster who leaves home and family behind to embark on a quest in the unknown world.

The shock and trauma of this first stage cannot possibly be overestimated. The very fabric of one’s life structure has torn and there is nothing that can undo this. And with it, one’s sense of identity also threatens to come undone, because, consciously and unconsciously, we fully invest our sense of well-being, of life purpose and of meaning into the multiple aspects with which we have built up our life.

*Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. *
First verse of Canto I, Inferno, Dante Alighieri - 1265-1321

Maybe, a slight insight can be gained from the knowledge that the alchemists of old considered ‘Separatio’ to be an essential part in the process of turning base metals into gold. Maybe something similar can apply to our psyche: certain emotional and mental aspects were too tightly packed, and could not be known in their individuality? Maybe your sense of identity was too tied up with your possessions, your status, your profession or even, with that other person?
Separation from what was ‘inseparable’ before is followed by an existential crisis. Questions such as: ‘What is life really all about?’, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘For what should I carry on?’ rise from deep within the soul to full consciousness.

Whatever the case may be, fact is that part of your world has ended.

*“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” *
Cynthia Ocelli

Next: Liminality – the in-between space.