If you were to Google ‘Counsellors in Dundee’ or in fact therapists in any city in the UK, you’d be faced with pages of choices. So how do you choose who you’re going to call first? And, more to the point, who can help you get the fastest, most lasting results?

At Healthy Chat we use a therapy call Human Givens. It’s called that because it integrates a great range of techniques proven to be effective in getting a person’s innate emotional needs met and thus bringing them back on track to living a fulfilled, happy life.

Here’s how the Human Given’s College explains why it gets such strong results fast:

“We are all born with innate knowledge programmed into us from our genes. Throughout life we experience this knowledge as feelings of physical and emotional need.

These feelings evolved over millions of years and, whatever our cultural background, are our common biological inheritance. They are the driving force that motivates us to become fully human and succeed in whatever environment we find ourselves in. It is because they are incorporated into our biology at conception that we call them ‘human givens’.

Given physical needs: As animals we are born into a material world where we need air to breathe, water, nutritious food and sufficient sleep. These are the paramount physical needs. Without them, we quickly die. In addition we also need the freedom to stimulate our senses and exercise our muscles. We instinctively seek sufficient and secure shelter where we can grow and reproduce ourselves and bring up our young. These physical needs are intimately bound up with our emotional needs — the main focus of human givens psychology.

Given emotional needs: Emotions create distinctive psychobiological states in us and drive us to take action. The emotional needs nature has programmed us with are there to connect us to the external world, particularly to other people, and survive in it. They seek their fulfillment through the way we interact with the environment. Consequently, when these needs are not met in the world, nature ensures we suffer considerable distress — anxiety, anger, depression etc. — and our expression of distress, in whatever form it takes, impacts on those around us.

People whose emotional needs are met in a balanced way do not suffer mental health problems. When psychotherapists and teachers pay attention to this they are at their most effective.

In short, it is by meeting our physical and emotional needs that we survive and develop as individuals and a species.

There is widespread agreement as to the nature of our emotional needs. The main ones are listed below.

Emotional needs include:

Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully

Attention (to give and receive it) — a form of nutrition

Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices

Emotional intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are, “warts ‘n’ all”

Feeling part of a wider community

Privacy — opportunity to reflect and consolidate experience

Sense of status within social groupings

Sense of competence and achievement

Meaning and purpose — which come from being stretched in what we do and think”

At Healthy Chat our primary focus in on helping each client get their emotional needs met healthily. Not all therapy is the same. Not all searches for ‘Counsellors in Dundee’ will lead you to Healthy Chat. I hope having read this though, that’s exactly what it does.