Base Needs

Last week I attended a 5-day non-violent communication (NVC) intensive. It was wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to communicate more clearly or to know themselves more thoroughly. While there are many things that I took away from the retreat there’s one I’d like to share today.

Some time ago I was fortunate enough to have a highly skilled friend of mine come to my home and teach an NVC intensive for my house and a few close friends. One exercise we did was centered around finding our base-level need. We had decks of cards with needs on one side and feelings on the other. We went through the deck and brought out the 7 that felt most important to us. We then reduced it to 5, then 3, then 1. It was fascinating to see what everyone chose and to see what my own was.

I felt that my base need was a need for peace.

It seemed to me that I most easily found inner peace in the presence of external peace. This didn’t seem surprising to me considering the consistent level of conflict in my home while I was growing up. Considering the arguments and verbal fighting that went on all the time I longed for peace, ease, and relaxation.

I am often complimented for my attention to detail and groundedness. It is my belief that both of these characteristics are direct byproducts of the environment I grew up in. They helped me survive in times of tension and scout out likely triggers of conflict so I could resolve them before they were noticed. I’ve started to pay attention to this quality in others and question whether their childhood had similar characteristics; so far the model holds.

During one of the break-out sessions at the retreat I didn’t feel pulled to any of the proposed sessions so I went to one held by one of the main facilitators simply to see him in action, listen to his word choices, delivery, and all that. The session was simply on making requests. We were to think of a request we wished to make that felt like a 2/10 then look for the need associated with that request. I started by thinking of some requests I’ve been wanting to make within my home around furniture, aesthetics, and room organization. When I looked for the need associated with the requests I found that peace didn’t make sense within it. My desire for peace was influencing my strategy for making the request but it wasn’t what was at the bottom of the request itself.

I was using peace as a strategy when I was breaking the changes into small, specific proposals. Each of which were designed to be hard to derail or have taken over. If I could make the proposing and executing of the idea smoother then there would be less opportunities for conflict which would disrupt the peace.

What I found was that I wanted to matter; to believe that my voice could be heard without being hijacked or belittled.

I just wanted to propose some upgrades to our furniture and now I’m struggling with my sense of self-worth and mattering. Wasn’t I supposed to be selecting a 2/10? How did I get here? This clearly doesn’t have to do with my housemates or the furniture, it’s running deeper than that.

Turns out I didn’t do a lot of listening or observing in this session since I was so thoroughly turned inward. I was taking the lens of having a base need of mattering and looking through it across my life to see how it fits and how it was different or more accurate than a need for peace. I’m not fully convinced that my need to matter supersedes my need for peace. So far it looks that way and this idea is so new to me (3 days old as of this writing) that I’m willing to let it settle and see what rises to the top.

I was feeling a strong sense of sadness as I looked across my life through the lens of mattering. Not because of the narrative of not mattering but from facing the possibility that I had been wrong about my base need for all this time. There was a sense of losing ground. After getting past the initial feeling of wasted time I was able to see it as one step back, two forward. Having a clearer vision of my base need helps me with my empathy and patience with myself. This ultimately brings me closer to myself which helps me be closer to others.

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If you want to take a look at this yourself here’s an incomplete list of needs. Read through them and write down any that strike you in some way. Get a list, then prune it down to as few as possible. Take whatever remains and slowly project each need across your life to see which most clearly falls into place.

When doing this I found that certain needs were encapsulated in others for me. My need for communication actually serves my need for peace. My need for integrity really comes from my desire for freedom.

As with any self-assessment, be on the lookout for the difference between what you want your base need to be instead of what it actually is. It can feel empowering to say, “my base need is definitely ‘celebration of life’, behold my magnanimity”, when the more base need could be to know and be known.

And, as I found in the story above, be open to being mistaken. Peace felt so correct, so visceral and relevant. Take your time and be gentle with yourself.