Understanding your needs
847 words
In this post I introduce you to a new academic field. Only here will you learn about this new paradigm for understanding your needs. At least until it gets picked up and spread like wildfire. Just wait and see.
Everybody speaks on something near and dear to your heart. But none of them really get to the point. It can almost feel like they’re talking about you behind their back.
You know what I’m talking about? From pundits, politicians and professors, everyone talks about your needs. Your need for safety. Your need for a stable food supply. How you’re going to pay your bills. And so forth. But never delve into how you experience them.
Until now you had no critical means to look squarely at how we experience our needs. That all changes with this new academic field of anakelogy (ä'-nä-kĕ'-lŏ-jē). Anakelogy is the study of need.
With anakelogy you get to understand the experience of need itself. And for now you will find it only here.
Anakelogy fills a gap left by other social sciences, by focusing on the specific experiences of need these other fields ostensibly serve.
Value Relating is the only support service currently qualified to critically appraise with anakelogical insight our diverse experiences of need and apply this insight toward our many problems.
Anakelogy provides Value Relating with one-of-a-kind tools for improving your responsiveness to your problems, including the phenomenon of diverse need experience orientations, psychosocial wellness, and the tools to overcome polarization in our politics and elsewhere.
Anakelogy introduces you to “Need Experience Orientations”
Now we can appreciate how each of us experiences needs in often fixed and yet healthily different ways.
Easement orientation: from a fixed urgency to relieve discomfort to a healthy compulsion to fully resolve some alarming need. Value Relating can assess which way you lean overall, and toward specific needs.
Convention orientation: from a fixed alignment with given social norms (“cisconventional”) to a fixed transcendence of social norms (“transconventional”) when addressing our needs. Value Relating can assess which way you tend to lean.
Psychosocial orientation: from a fixed reliance on mostly internal supports (like self-sufficiency) to a fixed reliance on mostly external supports (like aid from others). Value Relating can assess which way you lean by assessing your political leanings.
Anakelogy gets illustrated here with diagrams
Accessible anakelogy keeps this new field simple. One of the ways to help keep it accessible and practical for just about anyone is through illustrative diagrams. Here is just a sample.
Others are to be added.
Anakelogy can deepen your grasp of “psychosocial wellness”
Now you can appreciate how situations beyond your control impact your needs. Indeed, according to anakelogy, you can only maintain wellness with the cooperative help of others. Wellness takes at least two to maintain.
While your behavior remains ultimately your personal responsibility, your options are never divorced from your social environments. Psychosociotherapy seeks to relieve your needless shame from popular overemphasis on self-responsibility.
How well you can ease your needs depends on the quality of your relationships. Psychosociotherapy seeks to improve that quality.
The flipside to psychosocial wellness are many “psychosociopathologies.” Value Relating helps you see how your problems are not all about personal pathologies.
Anakelogy provides a path toward “post-polarization”
You can now find a way out of our current toxic climate of political polarization. Think of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Value Relating replaces our crumbling political conventionalities with a post-conventional alternative.
Value Relating is creating an eCourse to liberate us from stifling political polarization; Defusing Polarization: Understanding Divisive Politics.
This course draws material from Steph’s book-in-progress, Politics Defused: Moving Beyond Political Polarization.
Other helpful critiques of polarization may soon to follow.
Lastly, Value Relating is primarily the brainchild of Steph Turner. Steph exists outside of most divisive norms to more fully resolve needs, even at great personal cost.
WHAT’s any of this to YOU?
You feeling the pinch of political polarization? Or are you avoiding it all, turning off the news, defriending social media voices, and hoping for the best? Are you a Trump supporter disgusted with all the negativity from the press, from social media, and even from some of your friends? Or are you anxious about this shift in political winds, fearing the loss of political gains made in recent years?
If you’re hoping we’re taking political sides you will soon be disappointed. The only “side” we’re taking with politics is the side that leads to the resolution of all of our needs—on both sides of the political aisle.
You say you’re liberal? We got something for you.
You say you’re conservative? We also have something for you.
You say you’re independent or third party? Yep, we’re here for you too.
You likely are all feeling unsettled by our polarized politics. We’ve got an answer we think you’ll like.
Whether you love politics or hate it, or see yourself as too apolitical to care, we’re here for you.
In short, we currently focus on overcoming political polarization. Other services will emerge as we see the market’s response to this offered solution.
Let us know what we can do for you in light of political polarization, using the contact form on the Contact page. We look forward to engaging with you on this critical need for our times.
BIONOTE: Steph published an eCourse to take the "bite" out of political polarization. Understanding the diversity of needs, the course explains, finally unpacks our political differences. Anakelogy gives you to the tool to finally appreciate how politics can prove so divisive--because you can't change your intractable needs any easier than they can.
