Three questions for you to consider:

• What do you want?
• What do you need?
• Who are you?

I (Ron) have heard a lot about what people want in life. Likewise, I have heard a fair bit of what they need.  But sadly, from the people I see in my office, I hear only a bit about who they are. Let’s explore these three words: want, need, and am as a way of looking how we can be more mature in life, be more understanding, more productive, more creative, more accepting, more loving, and ultimately happier. Importantly, if we want to be these things, we have to have a good understanding of ourselves in order to be the other things in life. I hear the people who come to my office use a lot of “I want” and “I need” before they are able to say, “I am”. As a result, much of my initial work, and sometimes my continual work with the men that come to see me is helping them understand who they are so they can find appropriate ways of getting what they need and some of what they want.

Am

This is a very simple concept as well as a very complex concept, but it is essential to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as was stated 250 years ago in America’s Declaration of Independence. What I am, or who I am is another of the many important undefinable terms that we need to have in life. We have noted many times how all physics is based on the three undefinable terms of mass, time, and distance, and likewise, the very central ingredients of life like, love, life, and God are also undefinable. It is interesting that God as depicted in the Hebrew Scriptures identified Him/herself as “I Am.” We know what these undefinable terms, such as time or love are, by experience. Likewise, we know who or what we are by experience. The more we note our experience, the more we understand what we are and who we are.

We frequently use terms like temperament, personality type, gender, or culture to understand what someone is, but this does not define what it means to exist. We can also observe what someone does, whether in work, play, or social engagement, and understand a bit about what it means for a person to exist. The more we understand someone, the better we are in accepting the person, even things that we don’t like about the person. Likewise, the more we observe our own behavior, thoughts, and feelings, the more we understand who we are. The task of good psychotherapy is to help the individual understand who s/he is. Too often therapists focus too much on what the person wants or needs.

Want

Infants do not distinguish between what they want from what they need because, for the most part, their wants and needs are the same. This is largely true for the child who is between one and two years of age, but when that child reaches an initial sense of budding independency or self-hood, the child must learn that there is a profound difference between wants and needs. The years 2-6 are crucial in developing the “I am” because these are years where children get much but not all of what they want and may not even get all of what they need. Psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists identify these years with the development of what they call “self,” or what we might call “I am.” An infant of 1 has no sense of “I am” and the 2-year-old has only a marginal sense of this matter. It is when a child reaches the approximate age of 2 or 3 that s/he begins to have a sense of self because now the child’s wants far exceed its needs. This is a terrible time of life, first for the toddler, who used to get almost everything s/he wanted because their wants and needs were very close together. But now, the toddler can “toddle around”, they can walk and talk, scream yell, leading to their seeing more and wanting more. It is at this stage of life, namely 2-6 that most emotional and social problems begin because nobody has a perfect life during these years.

Parents of preschoolers are doing their best to distinguish between their children’s wants and needs. The result of people having not adequately migrated the difficult waters of wants and needs during toddlerhood leads to a lack of a good understanding of the differences between wants and needs. Most parents these days tend to give too much to what their children want, which is indulgence, leading to their kids never growing up, that is, being able to distinguish between wants and needs. Earlier decades and centuries we had the opposite: kids didn’t get their basic needs met, much less their wants. The results of children being given too much or children not being given enough leads to adults not having a good sense of self. “Self” is composed largely of wants and needs, namely meeting as many needs as possible and meeting as many wants as is reasonable.

I know of many people who use the term “want” frequently while feeling that there is something wrong with the world that they don’t get to have what they want. One young man often talks about what he wants with some outrageous thoughts of being a star athlete, a well-known actor, or some kind of benign dictator of the world. When I hear these things from him, it sometimes seems nearly delusional, but this young man simply has not learned to distinguish between wants and needs so he lives in the area of wants all the time, however unrealistic his wants are. I see a few people who were not provided with their basic needs and are afraid of asking for anything, wanting anything, or saying anything. People of both sides of the wanting spectrum do not have a good sense of self, much less a good understanding of other people. They are, in a very real sense, still four years old emotionally. Most importantly, they have not had the freedom of learning by trial and error or learning through criticism and approval. They are deathly afraid of both. Whether they think that they should have everything they want or that they will never get what they want, they have not distinguished between wants and needs. Everything they want seems to be a need.

Need

Unfortunately, but revealing, is the fact that people often use the term, need, when they really should use the term, want. In other words, they confuse their wants and needs, just as toddlers confuse these concepts. I hear people say that they need to have more sex, more money, more freedom, and the like when I think they are really talking about wants. Indeed, it is necessary to have money and freedom in life and it is desirable to have sex, but these things are secondary to what real needs are. What are real needs?

Real needs amount to safety, nurturance, and comfort. Importantly, these are the three desirable elements of infancy. Of these three things, the most important and the most basic need is for safety. Then comes nurturance, and hopefully followed by comfort. Importantly, if I don’t have a sense of safety, no amount of nurturance or comfort will suffice. Without a basic feeling of safety, I will live a life looking for safety in some way, often in ways that are not good for me and probably not good for my social environment. People fall into addictions, whether chemical or behavioral, because they are looking to assuage their lack of safety with something akin to nurturance and comfort. We have discussed this developmental model of needs and wants in our books, particularly, I Want to Tell You How I Feel.

We all need these three basic needs (safety, nurturance, and comfort) that ideally, we received in our first years of life. Unfortunately, many people received one or two of these basic needs but not the third, e.g. some people were fed well but not comforted, while others were comforted but not fed well. Many people were raised in an environment that was not safe, whether because of frequent gunshot sounds, hearing parents yell at each other, or being left alone too often. Dr. Gabor Mate’, who wrote the very valuable book, Scattered, was raised with parents who went through the horrors of the holocaust, namely with parents who were anxious all the time. His profound suggestion is that this unsafe environment led to his ADHD, and suggests many people who suffer from ADHD were raised in environments that felt unsafe.

The most important aspects of need in life are breathing, sleeping, eating, and drinking, these followed by some form of comfort, which we might call love. If we think of my real basic needs, we will see that it is the combination of these four elements that sustains life. Indeed, as an adult, I need to be loved, but I will not be successful in the loving process, whether giving or receiving, if I have some kind of unsafe feeling rattling around in me. Emergency rooms are frequented by people who have panic attacks believing that they are dying from heart or lung disease. These panic attacks are symptoms of not feeling safe. Equally importantly, people who suffer from addictions have found ways to feel safe by eating too much, gambling too much, or doing anything “too much,” all of which never really satisfies one’s soul. Furthermore, a lack of safety keeps people from being creative, productive, socially active, and community minded. They are too interested in feeling safe to consider something that may be a more advanced need, namely some form of love. People who do not have their basic needs of safety, nurturance, and comfort will not be able to love right because they have not been loved right. They are still seeking the ideal love a parent has for an infant that matures into encouragement, challenge, and sacrifice.

Summary

It all starts with “I am”, which is developed by thousands of experiences of wanting, which then lead to thousands of times of not getting what you want together with a few times of getting what you want. If you over-use the term, need, or feel that your basic needs are not met, consider that you have not been loved right. Possibly, you have not successfully found a way to distinguish between wants and needs. If, on the other hand, you never use the term, need, you might consider that you were not given some basic needs in life and came to believe that you can do everything for yourself and don’t need anyone else.

You might check out our book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, What’s Your Temperament or our blog, Wanting It Both Ways, for a bit more of our ideas of being oneself.