So what exactly are emotional needs...?

A lot is made of the concept of emotional needs in schema therapy and it is every schema therapist's ultimate goal to help their clients meet their own emotional needs.

But what are they? For starters it is quite an abstract concept and more importantly for our clients that come to schema therapy often their needs have not been met for so long they kind of "turn them off" and don't know what they are any longer.

The easiest way to think about it is to consider a newly born baby. Such a baby is completely helpless and reliant upon its parents to meet all its needs. Some of the needs are practical, changing nappies, being fed, being kept warm or cool, but some of them are emotional needs. A baby relies on its parents to keep it safe and protect it from harm, to be reliable and not to let them down, to show it love and that it's important and valued, to be attentive to it and reactive when it's hurt or upset.

Imagine what would happen if the baby's parents, for whatever reason, cannot fulfil those needs. What does the baby learn? It learns that people are unreliable, that the world is dangerous, that people cannot be trusted, that's it has no worth or importance. Does this explanation make sense?

When the baby becomes a toddler it starts to explore the world a little more. It might venture to take a few steps, but then if it becomes scared it returns to the arms of its parents to comfort it. Now, imagine if the parent wasn't there to pick the baby up when it falls, what does it learn? That parents don't care about it, that it can't do things on its own, that the world is scary and painful.

Those building blocks of learning are what we term "schemas" and, perhaps unsurprisingly, have a long-lasting effect on babies and children and stay with people into adulthood. The more difficult someone's childhood, the more damaged the adult becomes and the stronger and more pervasive their "schemas" are. The worst thing is that they can't behave in ways to fully meet their own emotional needs, because they have never had them met! This then can lead to many problems in emotions, with anger, in relationships and even at school and work.

We schema therapists believe that you do have the right to feel loved, to feel protected, to feel valued, to receive praise for their successes, but also empathy and care for when things don't go so well. It starts with your therapist helping you meet those needs in the therapy sessions and then we work together to generalise it to the important parts of your lives. If your emotional needs are being met, you no longer have the difficulties you've been experiencing.