May 1, 2014,  Fundamental Human Needs  No comments

How do you cope with those really intense emotions? And how do you cope with your children’s intense emotions? Do you try to crush them away before your children even realize them? Or do you provide your children with the opportunity of giving these emotions a name and understanding them?

Children, as any of you who are parents know, can feel everything intensely. And whether they like something or dislike something, you will most often get the message loud and clear.

But while children really feel their feelings, they don’t know how to name them or how to express them appropriately until they learn these things from their carers, in the first instance normally their parents...

April 28, 2014,  Fundamental Human Needs  No comments

As a child grows and has their physical needs met, there is also a fundamental need to feel safe from harm – physically and emotionally. “Safety” here means the knowledge that someone – your parents when you were a child, and your partner when you are in an adult relationship – will always be there for you. You need to feel that this person will always be a “soft place” on whom to fall when you need someone the most, but also in good times as well as in times of distress.

As with all of these fundamental needs, this need remains the same throughout life.

Safety Needs may also be described with an extremely efficient metaphor: safety is just as feeling hungry – the way one cannot feel partially hungry, the same way each of us cannot feel partially safe.

Safety Needs is not just th...

April 23, 2014,  Fundamental Human Needs  No comments

As a Relationship Counselor, Coach and Therapist, I have learned that there are several fundamental human needs that we all need to have a happy life. I have already written about them collectively in my article “Five “Secret” Keys to Create Your Own Fairy Tale”.

These fundamental human needs are like staircase steps – all five steps exist in unity and harmony.

The very first of these steps is for the Physical Needs to be met. Let me go into a little more detail about this first step.

As a newborn baby, your very existence depended on your parents touching you in a loving way. It might surprise you to know that this was just as important as the food they gave you.

In the first few days after a baby is born, and before the mother’s milk “comes in,” the baby discovers the mother thro...

April 16, 2014,  Fundamental Human Needs  No comments

Imagine that the postman brings you mail consisting of an envelope with sender “Change” and your name proudly sticking out as a recipient. You go back home, open the envelope with bated breath, and discover a ticket waiting for you inside. The flight destination is your own personal happiness, and the departure day is TODAY!

How many steps do you actually need to reach your happiness? The answer is: five. Five steps to create your “Happily Ever After”.

What I have learned from my many years in a relationship, and as a Relationship Counselor, Coach and Therapist, is that there are five fundamental human needs that need to be satisfied for someone to have a happy life and a rewarding and enduring relationship.

These are the “secrets”.

Let’s look at each step in detail in the form of steps o...