What is meant by the need ‘belonging’? Imagine a child who, when being picked up from nursery, says “Anna, Miriam, Julia and I are going to call ourselves the ‘Super-strong Wild Ones’ from today onwards!” Here is a small list of similar activities for adults: feeling connected, dipping into togetherness, pursuing goals together, defending values …
What sort of internal psychological competences are required to be able to follow one’s need for uniqueness? One must be able to handle the envy and jealousy of others in a relaxed way, one needs toleration of fear with regard to criticism, rejection and being excluded, one must feel what is important to oneself and …
What is meant by the need ‘uniqueness’? Imagine a little child on a bicycle who shouts loudly, with shining eyes ‘Look, look, no hands!”. Here is a small, alternative list for adults: being effective, standing out from the crowd and being conspicuous, developing one’s own style in that which one learns and can do well, …
Having a ‘we’ feeling is a characteristic of successful belonging regulation in couple relationships. “With you, I am at home!”. This expresses well the fulfilment of this need in couples. Conversely, some people, in their relationship, have (and this is sometimes hard to understand) a feeling of strangeness, of not being quite at home and …
To affirm the other in that which makes them special is a very important aspect of successful relationships. Affirming means encouraging the other to follow their impulses (even there where you can only share them to a limited degree), to share the pleasure about their successes and lovingly view their incompleteness and quirks. The same …
To live one‘s own distance need as a leader is challenging: everything is observed, everything has meaning. It is noticed where one sits in the canteen, when one looks out of the window, who one speaks to for longer, or not at all. Every frown, every change in tone threatens to gain (too much) significance. …
Without distance, a relationship becomes a straitjacket. Many fail for this reason. Spoken as a cliché: one makes himself responsible for closeness and pursuit, the other for distance and withdrawal. One is frustrated, the other irritated. To do something on one’s own in a relationship is important, not a sign that something is wrong. It …
Those who, as leaders, cannot respond to the distance need of their employees, find themselves with many disadvantages: the difficulty of saying ‘no’ leads to weakness in decision-making and to the tendency of always agreeing with the last person one has spoken to. It also leads to ‘moving targets’, to a lack of commitment to …
When people frustrate the satisfaction of their needs for distance, this often has the following effect upon their actions: mostly they seek symbiotic relationships which are marked by the desire to do everything together. They tend to clinginess and get under the skin of others. They cannot cope well, when people close to them criticise …
What probably happens in the experiencing of people when they don’t permit or seek any or hardly any distance? They find it difficult to be inwardly independent and to be self-reliant. Decisions are easily made with reliance upon others, they do not find it easy to assert themselves against opposition or to go on the …