Feelings Point to Needs Being Met or Unmet

After returning from a funeral in Poland, my wife and I enter the stairwell of our apartment building. We have travelled the whole evening. It is after midnight. We are tired and longing to go to bed. But we cannot enter our apartment. Someone has changed our lock!

We are baffled and at a loss. What has happened? Why has someone changed our lock? And where are we supposed to go in the middle of the night? I call both the housing company’s emergency service and the police, but neither has any information about anything happening to our apartment.

We are at a loss, filled with disbelief and confusion. Our needs for safety, security and predictability are definitely not being met. And still, in the midst of the mess, we start taking action… 

Nonviolent Communication (NVC) offers a powerful way to understand ourselves and others. For many, it’s a profound shift – helping us see what’s behind our reactions and opening the door to more honest, compassionate connection. At the same time, no model can capture the full complexity of being human. 

In this blog series, I want to gently explore some key NVC ideas – not to challenge them, but to expand them by placing them in a wider context that includes how we grow and develop, how our brains and bodies function, how culture shapes us, and how the systems we live in influence our choices. My intention is to keep the heart of NVC intact while adding a bit more depth and perspective.

The NVC Approach

One of the key assumptions in Nonviolent Communication is that feelings point to needs being met or unmet. From an NVC perspective, the situation with our apartment provides a rather straightforward example. Our confusion and distress are not simply caused by the changed lock. They tell us something about what is important to us in that moment.

We want to know that we have a home we can enter. We want safety. We want predictability. We want clarity about what is happening. This shift in perspective can make a significant difference. Instead of seeing my feelings primarily as something caused by another person – someone did this to us and made us feel this way – I can use them as signals that direct my attention toward what matters to me.

This also changes how we listen to others. If someone tells me that they are angry, disappointed, afraid or excited, I can become curious about the needs connected to those feelings rather than immediately focusing on what happened or trying to change how they feel. This is one of the things I find most useful about NVC. 

And yet, there is an assumption hidden inside this way of relating and communicating that I have become increasingly curious about. It can sound as if feelings and needs are already there, somewhere inside us, waiting to be discovered. I turn my attention inwards and notice: Ah, I am confused. I look a little deeper and discover: I need safety and predictability.

But is this really what happens?

Are Feelings Something We Discover?

Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a perspective on emotions that challenges some of our everyday assumptions. In her book How Emotions Are Made, she argues that emotions are not simply hardwired reactions that arise in the body and are then recognised by the brain. 

Our brains are constantly receiving signals from our bodies and trying to make sense of them in relation to what is happening around us. Previous experiences, context, and the concepts we have learned all contribute to this process. From this perspective, an emotion is not simply something we detect. To some extent, it is something our brain constructs.

Imagine, as a thought experiment, that several babies were born with exactly my DNA and identical bodies, but were raised in very different cultures. Many years later, each version of me comes home after midnight and discovers that someone has changed the lock to his apartment.

Let’s make the thought experiment even more extreme and imagine that our nervous systems produce identical bodily signals. Would all of us experience those signals as the same emotions? Would we all say that we felt confusion and disbelief? Probably not.

We would have learned different ways of making sense of our bodies and different concepts for organising our emotional experiences. Some cultures have emotional concepts that are central to people’s lives but have no direct match in other languages. People raised in other cultures may distinguish between experiences that I would put in the same category. And some cultures encourage the open expression of certain feelings, while others place greater value on emotional restraint — which may also shape which feelings we learn to notice and pay attention to.

This suggests something more radical than simply saying that different cultures use different words for the same feelings. The concepts we learn, and the cultures we grow up in, may influence the feelings we are able to recognise and experience.

My confusion outside the apartment that night was real. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that “confusion” emerged inside my body as a distinct experience that I simply observed and named. Confusion was also a way of making sense of what was happening in me.

And What About Needs?

Lisa Feldman Barrett writes about emotions, not NVC needs. But her perspective makes me curious about the next part of the NVC assumption.

What happens when I move from:

I feel confused.

to:

I need safety and predictability.

In NVC, needs are generally understood as universal. Human beings across cultures might use different strategies, but underneath those strategies we share the same fundamental human needs. I find this idea both useful and beautiful. But even if we assume that human needs are universal, does it follow that our experience of our needs is universal?

Let’s return to those genetically identical versions of me. Suppose that all of us had somehow also learned needs awareness. We stand outside our respective apartments, experiencing identical bodily sensations yet with completely different cultural histories. Would we all identify safety, security and predictability as the needs most alive in us? Perhaps. And perhaps not.

One version of me might experience autonomy as central: Someone has interfered with something that is mine. Another might primarily experience a longing for support and belonging: Where are the people I can rely on when something like this happens? Still another might connect strongly with order, dignity or responsibility towards family. What will others think?

Even if the underlying human needs were universal, our cultures could influence which needs we notice, how we distinguish between them, how important we consider them, and which ones come to the foreground or stay in the background in a particular situation.

And perhaps we can take the question one step further. When I say that I have a need for autonomy, connection, respect or meaning, am I identifying a clearly defined psychological entity that exists inside me? Or are these also concepts that help me organise and understand something much more complex happening within and between my body, my history and my environment?

I don’t know. But I find these questions both interesting and important to explore.

Holding Our Feelings and Needs More Lightly

None of this makes feelings and needs less real or less valuable. For me, learning the language of feelings and needs has changed what I am able to notice in myself and others. It has given me distinctions that I didn’t have before and helped me move from blame and judgement towards curiosity and choice. Maybe that is precisely the point.

Learning NVC doesn’t only help us discover our inner world. It may also change the way we construct and understand that world. Feelings and needs lists can then be seen not only as inventories of what exists within every human being but also as maps. They offer distinctions that help us navigate our experience. And as with every map, they highlight some features of the landscape while leaving others less visible.

So when I say:

I feel confused because I need safety and predictability,

I can take my experience seriously without needing to treat my interpretation as an objective fact about my inner life.

I can hold it a little more lightly:

This is how I currently make sense of what is happening in me. Confusion describes something about my experience, and safety and predictability resonate as ways of understanding what matters to me.

And then I can remain curious. What else might be here? What might I notice if I had learned different concepts? How might another person, shaped by another family, another language or another culture, make sense of a similar experience?

That night, standing outside our apartment after midnight, confusion, disbelief, safety, and predictability helped me understand what was happening in me. Had I lived another life, in another culture, I might have made sense of the same signals differently.

Feelings may point to needs. But the signs along the way are written in languages we have shaped and learned.

Back to the changed lock

You might be curious about what actually happened with our apartment. We managed to get a taxi to my daughter’s place, where we spent the rest of the night sleeping on her living room sofa.

Several hours after waking up the next morning, we finally found out what had happened. While we were away, there had been a water leak in our bathroom. Wastewater from all the neighbours above us had been flowing out through our bathroom, into our hallway and from there into the stairwell.

Since the housing company didn’t have a key to our apartment, they had broken in. Afterwards, they replaced the lock, but somehow the information about what had happened never reached us.

The story isn’t over yet. The damage is still being dealt with, and the whole situation continues to provide me with plenty of opportunities to examine both my feelings and my needs – and perhaps to remain a little curious about how I construct and understand them.

If you’re interested in exploring NVC through a broader, more integrative lens, you’re very welcome to join the Needs Space platform or read more about it here.

Author:

Joachim Berggren

Joachim Berggren is a certified CNVC trainer. He has been a student of NVC since 2009 and has taught his understanding of NVC since 2010. He writes blog posts, offers workshops and hosts events about NVC, as well as offering individual sessions. He is passionate about and intrigued by exploring human connection and our capacity to grow and evolve as individuals and groups throughout our lifetimes.