How do we get back to better functioning?
Anankelogy 101
07 Refunctions
Common refunctions
Introducing refunctions
Nature-based anankelogy links all painful problems to lowered functioning, calling it defunction. Its flipside is anything that improves functioning by resolving needs, calling it refunction.
This list identifies items known to universally raise functioning, by universally enabling the resolution of needs. It is not an exhaustive list. Nor does each item do more than cover the basics. Think of this as a solid starting point.
Estimating good and bad
Basically, you can think of
defunctions as bad
and
refunctions as good.
Anankelogy injects a level of objectivity into what historically gets regarded as subjective and relative morality. The direction of need anchors moral principles to the objective phenomenon of core needs.
Pronunciation guide
anankelogy [n.] (ä'-nä-kĕ'-lŏ-jē): the study of need, specifically here the human experience of need.
anankelogical [adj.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭ'-kâl): of, relating to, or characteristic of anankelogy; referring to the role of need in another subject.
anankelogist [n.] (ä'-nä-kĕ'-lŏ-jĭst): one who studies the role of need in observable phenomenon.
anankelogically [adv.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭ-kâ-lē'): referring to the role of need on some action. E.g., Political views tend to be less rationally deduced and more anankelogically produced.
anakelogic [adj.] (ä'-nä-kĕ-lŏ'-jĭk): same as anankelogical.
Modernity tends to relativize moral principles. Largely because Western history sits in the shadow of once overbearing religious moralizing. Popular culture persists in reacting to this uncomfortable legacy. Now declarations of universal morality provoke suspicion, even kneejerk rejections.
Too many attempts at moralizing admittedly slipped into repressive overgeneralizing. We now find ourselves in the opposite extreme, overgeneralizing morality itself as too subjective and messy for the public good. As if applying moral standards to us all is bad.
See the irony? Morality is immoral? Fighting one overgeneralization with another fails to satisfy our burning needs. Symfunctionality or worse prevails. More pain, more relief-generalizing.
The larger the society, the more generalizing. The more generalizing, the harder to resolve specific needs. Arguments about good and bad persist. In the absence of a common religious creed, politics took over the debates for what is good and what is bad.
There is no good nor bad except for need. Morality serves as code for need. Both symbolically and literally. Whether by religion or by politics—often both—talk of good and bad
1) stand in for talk about easing needs, while
2) laying down a code of conduct for respecting those needs.
A higher standard
The more morality gets relativized and politicized, the less trusted as a guiding star. Whether speaking of politically correct interactions with marginalized groups or espoused family values grounded in Abrahamic scripture, such morality slips into what is widely regarded as a culture war.
The goal posts keep moving. Public morality gets diced up, chopped, and tossed into the blender as just another form of cultural relativism, imposing authority, infringing upon free will, as another oppressive hierarchal construct.
This list attempts to depoliticize our common responses to common needs. By recognizing the pitfalls of generalizing, this list only includes generalizations accountable to testable hypotheses.
Moreover, it checks competing generalizations relative to a certain psychosocial orientation. These items assert itself over arbitrarily crafted human laws. Especially laws serving one set of needs at the expense of another set of needs.
Look for relativity in the generalizing laws serving clashing priorities, not in the core needs themselves. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but sometimes they make a law. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the universal needs it exists to serve.
This list
This list raises the bar on psychiatry and psychology. Nature-based anankelogy recognizes your ability to function depends on both internal biological-psychological factors and external sociological-environmental factors. Wellness is psychosocial, not merely psychological.
Getting back on track to resolve your needs can be challenging. But not impossible. Applying these psychosocial items may seem daunting at first. But you build momentum with each need resolved. Especially when coupled with the removal of items from the defunctions list. In the long run, it is easier to sustain inertia with each resolved need than to disrupt nature’s design for how your needs came to exist.
This list reaches back to how needs are formed. It taps into the higher standard of our indigenous roots, back when all tribes had to resolve their needs or risk extinction. This list prioritizes resolving needs over merely easing the pain of unresolved needs. It recognizes there can no higher standard than resolving all needs for which politics, morality and laws exist to serve.
Better relating
Failed generalizations keep you from intimately knowing your needs and how to best resolve them, or how you impact the needs of others trying to resolve theirs. The more you cling to failed generalizations, the fewer of your needs resolve. Less of your pain goes away. Function declines.
This anankelogical list gives you the tools to relate to your needs better. These items speak first to your core needs. Core needs are universal. Everyone experiences moments of thirst, loneliness, and happiness.
Resources for resolving your core needs are nearly universal. You quench your thirst typically by water, or something water-based. Your loneliness quelled usually by someone expressing how much they care for you. You find happiness often from something giving pleasure. The how for each diverges.
Is not love a universal need? Experiencing oneself loved is a nearly universal. How one receives that love diverges. But the need for love never diverges, is never relative or arbitrary, and can never be chosen as something never needed.
This list reaches back through the ages to uphold universal qualities known to raise human functioning. Not only here and now, but across cultures and across the ages. Now they are framed to fit this era of social science.
Each item below gives you relational knowing testable associations. Unlike the typical failed generalization, these items give you associations for resolving needs in line with others resolving theirs—not at their expense. In short, universally refunctioning.
When applied with dynamic cognition, you can avoid the pitfall of unchecked errors. You craft provisional hypotheses others can independently check. No need to be perfectly right at first. We all learn together.
Relational knowing and impact engaging transcends the normative-descriptive binary noted by experts. Instead of the extremes of premature reaction and staid irresponsive description, you see and take active part toward resolving affected needs. You cultivate your intuition by engaging reality, as your resolving needs demonstrate what is real.
Your amateur hypotheses are kept accountable by those equipped to test hypotheses with social science rigor. You do not need to know
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how to set up a controlled experiment,
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get institutional permission to conduct studies with human subjects, or
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sort out the statistical shortfalls of a convenience sample.
You can know enough on your own to be confident you’re on the right track.
You rely less upon intermediary academic experts. The more your needs resolve, the greater your certitude. Your functionality improves, in line with others improving theirs. You relate better with one another. Isn’t that the whole point?
Simple format
Each entry follows an easy to follow format, starting with its number and title.
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Then a definition follows to state what the refunction is.
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The need experience of the refunction provides more detail.
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Defunctionalizing identifies likely correlations when lacking this quality, framed in relational knowing statements, which can be converted to testable hypotheses.
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Refunctionalizing reframes the same relational knowing statements with the relation reversed, to raise the level of functioning, which can also be converted to testable hypotheses.
Each entry serves as a cursory start to much more that can be explored. But only covered in brief here. Items are grouped by seven general types.
Refunction list pattern
This refunction list follows a pattern for you to get back on course to resolving needs. These may occur as overlapping phases. Or spontaneously out of order as opportunities arise. The list begins what you have the most control over: yourself. Then concludes with what you have the least control over, but can blossom into the capstone of your amazing journey toward resolving all needs.
Character refunctions
Returning to a posture of resolving needs best starts with yourself. A long list of character qualities allows you to take the lead in your own life. You spur others when modeling the higher standard of resolving needs. These laudable traits persistently endure the test of time. Each aptly applies across cultures. Each supports your initiative to resolve needs, and not merely ease the pain of unresolved needs. These 16 items form the foundation for the remaining listed refunctions.
Psychosocial refunctions
You need others to sustainably resolve needs. Others rely on you. Wellness is psychosocial. You certainly cannot resolve all of your needs on your own. You engage others, with their own set of affected needs. You learn how they resolve specific needs, as they learn from you. You coordinate your efforts to support each other’s needs. Your functioning goes up along with theirs. And if your functioning slips, they are there to catch you—as you are there to support them if they fall.
Mutuality refunctions
Once you negotiate your terms for cooperation, you lay the foundation for mutuality. You link what you give to support resolving their needs to their support of you to resolve your needs. You keep each other accountable to positively impact each other. You both ensure your return to higher functioning remains sustainable. You both model the higher standard of resolving needs.
Flexibility refunctions
You position yourself to resolve needs in the face of uncertainties. You work with others and work alone to resolve needs despite setbacks and attacks. You do not let yourself be thrown overboard by every wave or knocked down by every storm. You bend with the wind. You flow like water. You promptly process pain. You keep momentum of resolved needs.
Developmental refunctions
You become stronger with deeper roots. You resolve needs in concert with a growing number of others resolving their needs. Together, you turn seemingly insurmountable challenges into meaningful opportunities. Together, you convert these opportunities into exhilarating successes. You are increasingly known to resolve needs. Your existence becomes indispensable to others.
Power refunctions
You establish a reputation to address those needs difficult to resolve because of institutional limits. Your focus on resolving power-impacted needs propels you to transcend such limits, and then potentially inspire others. You give hope that internal improvements will not be stopped by these external threats. That love overcomes all. Together or alone, you may spur institutions to transform themselves from within. Or you help create innovate ways to resolve needs in spite of these mass institutions. Your return to higher functioning inspirationally raises others’ higher functioning. From love to wisdom, your uncompromising journey to resolve all relevant needs in the face of incredible odds raises you up as a moral leader.
CHARACTER items – PSYCHOSOCIAL items – MUTUALITY items – FLEXIBILITY items – BEING items – DEVELOPMENTAL items – POWER items
1) Love
2) Gratitude
3) Grace
4) Humility
5) Honesty
6) Forgiveness
7) Mercy
8) Justice
9) Patience
10) Perseverance
11) Discipline
12) Quietude
13) Equanimity
14) Resilience
15) Generosity
16) Liberty
21) Dynamic relating
22) Impact engaging
23) Mutual valuing
25) Mutual trust
1. Love
Love, as used here, refers to prioritizing the needs of others ahead of your own. And when others who love you prioritize your needs ahead of their own. Done proactively, your own needs do not go unmet but rather by prioritizing their needs, you inspire them to reciprocate to support resolving your needs.
Need experience
Love, as defined here, is a central social-need. You need others for all those things you can cannot personally do for yourself, or when you cannot provide for yourself. Others depend on you to give them what they cannot provide for themselves. When giving what is needed as an expression of personal worth, the experienced confirmation of value can be called love.
The more you express another’s worth to you without immediate expectation of return, the more loved they likely feel. The more loved you feel when another shows how much you are worth to them, without expectation of return.
Love empowers you to give love in return. They reciprocate your prioritizing of their needs when inspired to prioritize your needs. When going beyond the transactional quid pro quo of economic exchange, the increased sense of meaningfulness unleashes our full potential to greater reaches of refunctioning. This has many names. Often, we call it love.
Defunctionalizing
The less you feel loved, the more alienated you experience yourself with others. You rely more on impersonal rules. You crave more certainty. You struggle more with pain.
The less of your full being you vulnerably share, the less you can trust others. And the more you face life alone. The less you can fully function.
Refunctionalizing
The more you feel loved, the more you experience yourself connected with others. The more you feel loved, the more you feel personally supported. The more you feel supported, the less of life’s pain you bear alone.
The more of your full being—including your most embarrassing secrets—you vulnerably share with another who affirms you through it all, the more you can trust you do not have to face life alone. The greater you can function.
2. Gratitude
Gratitude, as used here, is considering good to receive a resource that is provided outside of oneself. In its secondary sense, it is appreciating the value to oneself of the perceived provider(s), perhaps more than the thing provided. It contributes to one’s psychosocial balancing. And it serves the need for meaningfulness.
Need experience
Your gratitude recognizes your dependence on others to some degree. You cannot provide all your life requires, so you express your appreciation to others who offer it to you. You specifically convey your gratitude when others go beyond transactional norms, such as complementing your choice when paying for something.
Gratitude opens you to be more receptive to the necessary help of others, when you do not think to ask for help. Your body language conveys your humility to receive what you need, that you are not excessively self-sufficient or too proud to admit you cannot provide everything for yourself.
Your thankfulness enhances psychosocial balance. It strengthens your social capital to address your social-needs. The more you are known to appreciate what you are given, the more others are apt to be generous to you.
Defunctionalizing
The less you appreciate others who give you resources you require, the less likely you will be offered more of the things your life requires. The less you express what you need with arrogant self-sufficiency, the less likely you will be offered more of what you (or others you care about) require to function.
The less you receive what you cannot provide for yourself, the fewer of your needs resolve. The fewer of your needs resolve, the lower your functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The more you appreciate others who give you resources you require, the more likely you will be offered more of the things your life requires. The more you express what you need in humility, the more likely you will be offered more of what you (or others you care about) require to function.
The more you receive what you require what you can not provide exclusively yourself, the more needs resolve. The more needs resolve, the higher your functioning.
3. Grace
Grace, as used here, is meeting someone where they honestly are at in their development or in their situation; while humbly allowing others to meet you where you honestly are at in your development or situation.
Need experience
Behind the idea of grace is unearned favor. When you don’t have to work for something you receive as a gift, you experience grace. When giving unconditionally, the giver is being gracious.
Grace flourishes with humility and honesty. When you can humbly admit your honest imperfections, you make it easier for others to meet you where you are at. Grace can only meet you where you are at instead of where you hope to be, present yourself to be, or believe yourself to be.
You may demand another to respect you, then realize they can’t. So you meet them where they are honestly at. You recognize how it only takes one disturbing incident to traumatize the vulnerable, and only one traumatic event to instill a sense of debilitating powerlessness in them. You let go of your rigid expectation for respect when being gracious to their situation. You make it easier for them to be gracious back to you.
Defunctionalizing
The less you humbly admit where you honestly are at, the less open you are to receive from others what you need.
The less you meet others where they are at, insisting on unrealistic expectations of them, the harder for you to relate to them or cultivate any mutual cooperation toward resolving needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can humbly admit where you honestly are at, the more open you are to receive from others what you need.
The more you meet others where they humbly are at, dropping any unrealistic expectations of them, the easier you can relate to them and cultivate mutual cooperation toward resolving needs.
4. Humility
Humility, as used here, is facing the reality of who you are, both your positive and negative qualities. By being realistic about yourself, you can be more realistic with others. You make it easier for others to relate with you, to be generous toward you. As you toward them, when they are humble toward you. More needs can resolve, removing pain and raising functioning.
Need experience
Increasing social alienation tends to increase the divide between who you honestly are along with what you honesty can do, and who others expect you to be along with their expectations of what you can do. Your social-needs like social status and group inclusion pulls you to present yourself as they expect you to be. You may drift into believing it yourself.
Relating to others realistically from your authentic self allows you to attract deeper social connections. When you reveal to others what you cannot provide for yourself, they are apt to be more responsive. You inspire others to drop their guard and reveal themselves more honestly. You grow social capital who crave, just like you, to be accepted for who and what they are.
Defunctionalizing
The less you find others accepting you as you are, the harder to drop your guard to present yourself more authentically. The less others accept you as you are, the more challenging for you to face your full authenticity. The less of your authentic self you can face and acknowledge, and instead be or act arrogantly, the less others who care about you will be as gracious toward you.
Refunctionalizing
The more you find others who accept you as you are, the easier to drop your guard to present yourself more authentically. The more others accept you as you are, the easier for you to face more of your authenticity. The more of your authentic being you can face and acknowledge, the more others who care about you will likely be gracious toward you.
text
5. Honesty
Honesty, as used here, is sharing with others what you admittedly know to be true. Specifically, expressing to others about yourself only what you know to be true. And qualifying how well you know something to be true or untrue of yourself.
Need experience
The flipside, of course, is dishonesty. Deception prevents one or both sides in an interaction to accurately identify and address the relevant needs. Worse, it can spur one to create trouble of avoidable needs. In an attempt to avoid pain of vulnerability, for example, it creates more pain later. Lying often avoids pain of facing what is true.
Honesty serves as a social glue for holding social capital together. You interact with each as you authentically are. You make it possible or others to encounter your actual self, your reality, where you are honestly at.
You can enhance your honesty by avoiding language with multiple or dubious meaning. You discipline your expression to convey exactly what you intend, and check with the recipient’s feedback.
How honest you are depends on the situation. Your level of self-exposure depends on how trustworthy the recipient shows to be with the information. You are not explicitly dishonest when withholding information from someone who could abuse your self-revelation. As a social glue, honesty is earned, and reciprocated with demonstrated trustworthiness.
Defunctionalizing
The less truthful with others, the generally less truthful others are with you. The less truthful with others, the less accurate others have an understanding of your needs, or trustful you are if affecting their needs. The less accurate your exchanged information, the less you can fully resolve needs, and the longer you are kept in pain and lowered functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The more truthful with others, the generally more truthful others are with you. The more truthful with others, the more others have an accurate understanding of your needs, and your relation to their affected needs. The more accurate your exchanged information, the more you can fully resolve needs, remove pain and raise functioning.
6. Forgiveness
Forgiveness is here defined as letting go of anger toward another who acted toward you, or to others you care about, in ways you found objectionable. What you rejected you no longer reject as intensely. This includes releasing anger toward yourself, to release your own sense of shame.
Need experience
Others wrong you when doing something you perceive as (and may well be) a threat to you. Social norms grant you various forms of retribution, from mildly embarrassing the offender to charging the offender with a felony leading to a death penalty. Threatening them in return offers some relief from your pain. But rightful retribution seldom resolves needs, and can provoke avoidable needs.
Releasing your anger frees you to focus on more important matters. Easing your rejection of the person can segue to specifically rejecting their challenged actions. Then segue further to rejecting the conditions behind the offense while affirming the identified offender. You create a clean slate to hopefully make it easier to address the relevant needs more responsibly.
By forgiving the offender, you consider the needs of the other person, and target your rejection to how their unresolved needs painfully impacted you. You cease linking the painful action of the other as essentially the same as that other person. You refuse to let any hatred get a foothold in your attitude toward life. You inspire the offender to be honest and humble, to be more prosocial. You prioritize resolving all the needs involved.
Defunctionalizing
The more you react to an offense with a socially sanctioned retribution, the harder for you to specifically address underlying needs behind the offense. The less you address underlying needs fueling the offense, the less you contribute to resolving these needs or help reduce the threat of recurring offenses. The less you help reduce offenses through forgiveness, the less meaning you can find in your endured suffering of the offense.
Refunctionalizing
The less you react to an offense with a socially sanctioned retribution, the easier for you to specifically address underlying needs behind the offense. The more you can turn the offense into an opportunity to address underlying needs fueling the offense, the more you can contribute to resolving these needs, and in turn reduce the threat of recurring offenses. The more you can reduce offenses through your forgiveness, the more meaning you can find in your endured suffering of the offense.
7. Mercy
Mercy is here defined as letting go any right you have to force a negative consequence upon another deemed to cost you some negative consequence. Where forgiveness lets go of your anger toward another, mercy lets go of your right to punish the other.
Need experience
When subjected to a perceived or real offense, you typically reject it as no fault of your own. Or if you can see some justification for it, you still angrily reject the offense as unfair. You see it your right to exact some kind of vengeance.
By letting go of any justification for revenge, you save space to repair the damage. You still feel angry, but hesitate to act on your carte blanch rejection. You may not be ready to endure the discomfort of the wrong. Despite your intensely emotional rejection, you hold off from exacting any reprisals.
Although not ready to forgive, you make room to address underlying needs. Or you were never intensely angry, but simply see the need to hold of any socially sanctioned retribution. Or scale down the degree of retribution. You put into motion an opportunity for the offender’s self-reflection and humility. You short-circuit violence. You prioritize resolving the needs involved.
Forgiveness lets you step up to the door. Atonement grants you entry. Mercy allows you to leave intact. Forgiveness and mercy are basically unilateral. Atonement is bilateral.
Defunctionalizing
The more you cling to your right to retaliate for an offense, the harder to address the underserved needs that led to the offense. The less room for addressing these unresolved needs, the more likely a cycle of violence can spin out of control. The more you react to offenses with retributions that negatively impacts needs of offenders, the less your pain can be fully removed, which typically perpetuates lower functioning.
Refunctionalizing
The more you let go of any right to retaliate for an offense, the easier to address the underserved needs that led to the offense. The more room for addressing these unresolved needs, the less likely a cycle of violence can spin out of control. The more you react to offenses with alternatives that respect all needs involved, the easier the pain can dissipate and allow for better functioning.
8. Justice
Justice is defined here as solving needs on par with others solving their needs, free from not being able to resolve needs because others attempt to ease their needs at your expense.
Need experience
Justice only exists to serve needs. The idea of justice as each getting what is deserved, good or bad, easily overlooks the evolution of need. Anankelogic justice occurs when needs fully resolve to enable each to reach their peakfunctional potential. Anything less is at best a mere form of justice. At the root of all violence and at the root of all injustice are unresolved needs. Apart from needs to be resolved fairly, there is no such thing as justice.
In contrast to the defunction of justifism, anankelogic justice raises the standard to resolving all needs affected by a challenged interaction. It is not enough to ease the pain of suffered violence, or for the state to strengthen its stance as a paternalistic arbiter of enforcing “law and order.” While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve.
Following nature’s impartiality, anankelogic justice addresses any violent interaction provoking justice needs. Resolving underserved social-needs provoked by systemic forms of violence sits equally important as resolving underserved self-needs provoked by interpersonal acts of violence. Personal, interactional and societal functioning depends on equally resolving all affected needs.
Defunctionalizing
The less two interacting people can resolve their affected needs, the more likely they will fall into conflict. The less both sides of a conflict resolve their affected needs, the more likely the conflict will devolve into mutual irresponsiveness, mutual disrespect, mutual hostilities and potentially into violence. The less all elements of a society can freely resolve their needs, the higher the incidents of violence.
Refunctionalizing
The more two interacting people resolve their affected needs, the less likely they can be in conflict. The more both sides of a conflict can resolve their affected needs, the more the conflict can dissolve into mutual responsiveness, mutual respect, mutual understanding and trust. The more all elements of a society can freely resolve their needs, the lower the incidents of violence.
9. Patience
Patience is here defined as cultivating the ability to wait as long as possible to more fully resolve a need. It stands in contrast to succumbing to more immediate alternatives, aimed more at easing than fully resolving a need.
Need experience
As your needs press you for a response, you can get a sense of urgency to relieve it now rather than later. Your continuing functioning may depend upon your prompt action. The more discomforting the need, the more you feel pulled to react now.
Nature equips you to be ready to prioritize your survival, if necessary. You may even be geared by life experiences to view certain needs as more urgent than they truly are. You may by force of habit react seek the first available option for relief. Unfortunately, first options tend to only ease the need and not resolve it toward fuller functioning.
Without patience, you are more prone to sink into binary thinking. You find yourself vacillating between avoidance and adversarial options. You can find yourself trapped into a flight-or-fight-or freeze mode. By embracing the discomfort of waiting for what can resolve affected needs, your patience preserves your path to a conciliatory route.
You cultivate the discipline to only accept resolving needs. You hold back symfunctional strain. You deepen your contentment by overcoming temptation to settle for less. You hold firm as you sharpen your resilience. You prime your potential to live life to its fullest. Your functioning remains high.
Defunctionalizing
The shorter you wait when reacting to a need, the less likely your chance to resolve the need. The less resolved this need, the more your pain lingers, and your functioning stays lower.
The less you cultivate a reflective response over reaction, the more you risk slipping into a habit of merely relieving pain of unresolved needs. The quicker you routinely react to relieve pain, the more likely you will cultivate a relieve-over-resolve easement orientation.
Refunctionalizing
The longer you can wait to react to a need, the greater your chance to fully resolve the need. The more resolved the need, the less your pain lingers, and your fuller functioning restores.
The more you cultivate a reflective response over reaction, the less likely you will slip into a habit of merely relieving pain of unresolved needs. The longer you endure to resolve needs, the more you can cultivate a resolve-over-relieve easement orientation.
10. Perseverance
Perseverance is here defined as persistently doing what is necessary to resolve needs. It involves diligence in the face of odds over time, to not cave into the temptation to give up or lose momentum.
Need experience
When you cannot reach your goals when expected, or when preferred, you can easily get pulled away from your efforts to keep trying. Other matters grab your focus. Other goals pop up, which can seem more reachable.
When in it for the long haul, you focus on the prize in the distance. And find meaning in the journey getting there. Your meaningful why gets you through every challenging how. You keep yourself appraised if you are still heading in the right direction. Like an entrepreneur, you learn when to pivot to reach that final destination. You don’t look back.
Distractions do not disturb you. You remain steadfast in the face of odds. You know the difference between going all the way and realizing when it is best to cease your efforts. You bounce back when shot down. You keep going and going and going. Resolving your higher needs depend on it.
Defunctionalizing
The lees you can endure distractions, interruptions, roadblocks, challengers, lack of resources, loss of energy, or other such impediments, the less likely you will reach your higher goals in life. The fewer needs you resolve by failing to reach your goal, the less encouraged to set higher goals to persevere towards.
The less you view obstacles as challenges, you are more likely to give up. The less you can shift challenges into opportunities, the less meaning you can find in the journey toward any goal. The less you stretch your capabilities in this struggle, the harder you can get through other challenges in life.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can endure distractions, interruptions, roadblocks, challengers, lack of resources, loss of energy, and other such impediments, the more likely you will reach your goal. The more needs you resolve by reaching your goal, the more encouraged to set higher goals to persevere towards.
The more you can view obstacles as challenges, you are less likely to give up. The more you can turn challenges into opportunities, the more meaning you can find in the journey toward your goal. The more you stretch your capabilities in this struggle, the easier you can get through lesser challenges in life.
11. Discipline
Discipline, as used here, is deferring gratification of an immediate reaction to an affected need for the expectation of better resolving needs.
Need experience
You can either persevere through uncomfortable challenges to fully resolve your needs, or settle to indulge the pain of your unresolved needs with what seems immediately pleasurable. Unless attentive to what you truly need, the distinction can easily get blurred.
If habitually settling to ease your pain, you increase your difficulty to hold out longer to fully resolve needs. Your comfort zone shrinks. Your resiliency goes down. You slip into symfunctional strain. Discipline ensures you develop the wherewithal to resolve all your needs.
Discipline also checks your temptation to rely solely on yourself. You cannot control others, so you may indulge in mythic rugged individualism. To counter this debilitating psychosocial reduction, you humbly lean on others. You trust others to check what you think you know. You function best in life when balanced psychosocially. You realize wellness is psychosocial.
Defunctionalizing
The more you indulge your earlier instincts, the less likely you can fully resolve your needs. The more you settle for the lesser goal of pain-relief, the further you slide into symfunctional strain. The more others see you as habitually indulgent, demonstrated as putting yourself before others, the fewer social opportunities you typically are offered.
Refunctionalizing
The more you defer gratifying your earlier instincts, the more likely you get to fully resolve your needs. The more you develop a habit of enduring for as long as it takes to fully resolve your needs, the closer you draw to your peakfunctional potential. The more others recognize your discipline, demonstrated by putting others before yourself, the more social opportunities you tend to receive.
12. Quietude
Quietude, as used here, means cultivating tranquility in the face of life’s many distractions. Meditation is widely used to cultivate such rectifying calmness.
Need experience
Modern life easily fills with noisy disruptions. You can hardly keep focus. You can hardly hear yourself think. You either counter with more noise—like binge watching television—or find a way to cancel the noise.
Quietude depends on your discipline to shut out distractions, so you can focus more on the important stuff of life. Meditation is a widely trusted tool for just this. Others are stimuli management, minimal consumption, driving purpose, proactive contentment, primed potential and the like.
Distractions are not always incidental. Without the guiding star of life’s most important stuff, you likely seek distractions from life’s unwanted pains. Grounded in purpose and meaning, you trade in entertaining distractions for the serenity of a more peaceful life. You resolve more needs, remove more pain promptly, and draw closer to your full potential.
Defunctionalizing
The more you stay focused on the most important areas of life (like love, interpersonal connection, wisdom), the easier to remain calm during an onslaught of distractions. The more your needs resolve, the less susceptible to pain-relieving conveniences. The less you rely on pain-relieving conveniences, the more easily you can fully resolve your needs toward your peakfunctional potential.
Refunctionalizing
The more you stay focused on the most important areas of life (like love, interpersonal connection, wisdom), the easier to remain calm during an onslaught of distractions. The more your needs resolve, the less susceptible to pain-relieving conveniences. The less you rely on pain-relieving conveniences, the more easily you can fully resolve your needs toward your peakfunctional potential.
13. Equanimity
Equanimity is here defined as the cultivated ability to remain less and less perturbed by adverse circumstances. This can include a capacity to perform seemingly impossible feats.
Need experience
Amidst chaos, your senses naturally go into high alert. The more your senses overload, the easier to lose balance. You can find yourself chasing fires. Your needs rarely resolve, at least not fully, when your senses overwhelm your otherwise serene situation.
The more you can remain calm in the face of repeated disruptions—instead of letting something alarming or potentially alarming force you to react—the more you can stay the course to resolve needs. By remaining composed, you keep open possibility for full resolving affected needs. Your peacefulness inspires others to remain more tranquil. Others see you as a steady rock, not easily tripped up by the many storms in life.
You absorb the blows of life. You respond thoughtfully when it seems understandable to react. You remain consistently generous, gracious, loving. You embrace discomfort to address needs as they specifically are. You do not cave to generalizations that offer relief. You persevere against the strong winds of resistance to resolve needs to ensure higher functioning.
You might even reach a lucid state of mind clear of perturbations that flows with energy to do the seemingly impossible. You walk through a hailstorm of bullets without ever getting hit. You feel yourself in a trance to accomplish superhuman feats. You may appear to thrive on chaos.
Defunctionalizing
The more perturbed by chaos, the less your needs resolve. The more easily disturbed by your situation, the less you can focus on more important matters. The more distracted from addressing and from resolving needs, the more you risk sliding into symfunctional strain.
Refunctionalizing
The less perturbed by chaos, the more your needs resolve. The less disturbed by your situation, the more you can focus on more important matters. The more you remain steadfast amidst confusion and disorder, the more you can reach your full potential.
14. Resilience
Resilience is here defined as consistently bouncing back each time circumstances drag you down. You endure harsh circumstance without long-term damage, and perhaps even thrive from the experience. Not merely from internal fortitude, by also from social supports.
Need experience
Like with equanimity, crises do not keep you down. You orient to trouble with a sense of mastery. You rethink obstacles as challenges you can turn into opportunities. You stretch your capacity for how much pain you can bear.
You turn traumatizing events into posttraumatic growth. You find unexpected contentment as you let go of relief-generalizing distractions. Your endurance capacity increases as you stretch your potential. The greater you can maintain access to what you essentially need, the less vulnerable to circumstances.
The more people in your life you can count upon, the easier to get back up when knocked down. They can help you get back on our feet when you can’t quite bounce back on your own. They also help you strengthen your inner qualities, where you must face life’s difficult challenges on your own. Together, you find the response-ability for when you need to face life responsibly with others or responsibly alone.
This integration of your internal and external resources enables you to absorb life’s overwhelming events. You develop a sense of equanimity that decreases how much you get knocked down in the future. You adjust your expectations, to prepare for the unexpected. You are less deterred by life’s friction. You resolve more needs so you can thrive.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can discern between what you can consistently provide for yourself and what you must trust others to provide, the less thoroughly you can differentiate and integrate details into a stable whole. The less open to changes in the environment, the more likely to suffer the negative impacts from harsh circumstances. The less empowered to challenge privileged influence, the higher the risk to being damaged by structural exaction.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can discern between what you can consistently provide for yourself and what you must trust others to provide, the more thoroughly you can differentiate and integrate details into a stable whole. The more open to changes in the environment, the less likely to suffer the negative impacts from harsh circumstances. The more empowered to challenge privileged influence, the lower the risk to being damaged by structural exaction.
15. Generosity
Generosity, as used here, is giving to others what they need without direct thought of compensation. Less attention is given here to giving what others want but do not honestly need. Another word for this is kindness.
Need experience
Those who wait for others to give first, before giving of themselves, are among the most patient in the world. And among the most loathed. In larger societies of increased social alienation, resources are generally exchanged as an impersonal economic transaction. Smaller societies, including within larger societies, provide for less transactional exchanges. Hospitality is a cultural value in many parts of the world. Being generous with a kind word is valued just about everywhere.
Simple appreciation for one’s giving can be its own transactional reward. Anonymous gifts tend to take this transactional dynamic. Largely from those with abundant resources to give. Generosity from the less endowered will understandably be concerned about draining their resources, and not being able to resolve their own basic needs. They will need to trust their giving will engender a restoration of what they require from somewhere.
You embrace more of life’s full potential when stretching beyond economic norms. Capitalistic economies favor the deep-oriented preference for merit-based exchanges. Socialistic economies favor the wide-oriented preference for covering all basic needs with government assurance. You resolve more needs and find more meaning in life when unbounded by norms of either side.
Defunctionalizing
The less you give to others in need without regard for compensation, the less connected you are apt be with others. The less you let go of your possessions to serve others more in need, the less meaning you may find in accumulating resources. The less you allow your resources to flow through you to others, the fewer needs resolve throughout society.
Refunctionalizing
The more you give to others in need without regard for compensation, the more connected you can be with others. The more you let go of your possessions to serve others more in need, the more meaning you can find in accumulating resources. The more you allow your resources to flow through you to others, the more needs resolve throughout society.
16. Liberty
Liberty, as used here, is the freedom to identify, express and address needs toward their full resolution. It contrasts with license, which is the freedom to ease discomfort of needs without accountability to resolve such needs.
Need experience
The popular notion of liberty emphases an absence of restraints. Anakelogy goes further by emphasizing how this freedom from arbitrary restrictions—whether from authority or from social norms—enables you to resolve needs. Natural restraint exists where resolving one’s needs impacts the needs of others. It is not liberty to resolve your need for thirst from water stolen from another, since consequences prevent further resolution of needs. Liberty depends upon a conciliatory path of mutuality to sustain resolution of needs.
License as the freedom to do as one pleases generally fails to identify the underlying need to be resolved. Or settles for a substitute for that need, leading to symfunctional strain. Once accurately identified, resolving the needs depends on effectively communicating to others affecting the need. Then to address the need unto its full resolution. This liberty involves three general steps.
1. Identify needs. To discern between what can only ease the pain of a need, to what can offer temporary relief from unresolved need, to what can fully resolve a need.
2. Express needs. To articulate affected needs in ways others can more readily relate to the experience, relate to how they affect the need, if at all, and internalize how they can respond to the shared need.
3. Address needs. To act toward resolving the need, even if initial steps involve something less than fully resolving the need, such as transitional pain relief to improve focusing.
Anankelogic liberty recognizes how no one on earth has authority over any need. Needs occur as objective phenomenon. How they are resolved slips into relative subjectivity. Only by allowing for the experience of needs to be freely identified, expressed and addressed in cooperation with the needs of others can objective needs objectively resolve to raise functioning.
This take on liberty can serve as a catchall to cover other character qualities not mentioned above. For example:
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Compassion, to sympathetically connect each other’s shortcomings to specific needs to be resolved.
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Hope, to trust your unresolved needs can resolve in the near future, before succumbing to irreversible misfunction.
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Joy, to maintain equanimous positivity despite negative circumstances; to be in constant link with the central Meaning of Existence in sublime rapture, in defiance of growing threats.
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Empathy, to put yourself in the perspective of another person and experience their needs as if they were your own pressing needs.
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Forbearance, to tolerate painfully unresolved needs with the expectation that self-restraint will engender opportunity to resolve such needs.
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Atonement, to restore or repair damaged relations in order to rebuild trust.
Think of any character quality lauded in sacred traditions and moral codes. Then link them to how they resolve needs across cultures and across the long span of time.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can identify, express and address your needs in cooperation with others, the less your needs can resolve. The less you can differentiate between arbitrary restraints and natural restrictions requiring cooperation, the harder to resolve needs in sync with others easing their needs. The less needs resolve for lack of cooperation, the lower the whole of society can function. And the less likely each can reach their full potential.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can identify, express and address your needs in cooperation with others, the more your needs can resolve. The more you can differentiate between arbitrary restraints and natural restrictions requiring cooperation, the easier to resolve needs in sync with others resolving their needs. The more needs resolve through loving cooperation, the greater the whole of society can function. And the easier each can reach their full potential.
17. Holistic balancing
Holistic balancing refers to the thorough processing of competing yet complementary elements into a whole, to resolve needs and raise functioning. The process involves the thorough differentiation of mutually exclusive elements to remove along with the thorough integration of harmonizing elements necessary to include for full functioning.
Need experience
When experiencing an evoked need, a set of binary options rapidly fires through your mind. Is this need urgent or not? If so, do I need immediate relief or not? If true, can I do anything about it now or not? If yes, is it my responsibility or not? And so forth.
This empowers you to react immediately, before any potential threats make it too late to react. React too soon to ease the painful need, and you risk sliding into symfunctionality or worse. And you could find yourself trapped in binary thinking and dependence on generalizing. Such as contra-opposition for relief-generalizing. Instead of resolving the need, you remain stuck in its pain.
These binary options present initially as contradictory. When afforded time to respond reflectively, you can allow a natural process of differentiating out the more extreme options. Then integrate the most relevant options, so you can resolve the need toward peakfunctionality.
This differentiation-integration process allows you detach from what no longer serves your needs, while remaining connected to what does. You transition from vague to binary to continuum to matrix awareness. You cultivate your intuition to improve your responsiveness to such needs. You stay above the fray of divisive to peacefully enjoy life more and meaningfully.
Defunctionalizing
The more you react to your evoked needs, the more prone to getting stuck in clashing extreme option. The longer stuck in these opposing options, the more likely you rely on generalizing for relief by relying on more competing options. The more entrenched in contrasting extremes, the more at risk for psychosocial vacillation. And the more trapped you are in symfunctional strain.
Refunctionalizing
The more you respond reflectively to needs, the more apt to find complementary opposites that appear as paradoxes. The more you find ways to blend apparent opposites into a working whole, the more of your needs can fully resolve. The more differentiating out extremes while integrating complementary elements toward a working whole, the more easily you experience the natural oscillation of psychosocial balance. And the closer you are to reach your full potential.
18. Psychosocial balancing
Psychosocial balancing refers to cultivating an equilibrium between your pressing social-needs and pressing self-needs. Nature automatically pulls you to balance both through a process of psychosocial oscillation—compelling you to focus on seasons of self-needs and seasons on social-needs.
Need experience
You can do many things for yourself, but not everything. You cannot produce all the food you eat. You must trust others to produce it. You trust (or distrust) the food is safe to eat. Your life is a constant mix of how much you can do for yourself and how much you musts rely on others.
Life is psychosocial. Your self-needs express how much you must do for yourself. Your social-needs express how much you must rely on others. Indigenous wisdom illustrates this with a medicine wheel of four seasons.
Each spring, you transition from self-needs to social-needs. Each summer, you focus on your social-needs. Each autumn, you transition from social-needs to your self-needs. Each winter, you focus on your self-needs.
Nature uses these “seasons” to balance your self-needs with your social-needs. Nature pulls you through this cycle at various levels. From quick cycles you hardly can notice to a lifelong cycle.
Each day, you wake up attentive mostly to your self-needs. But you shift to focusing more on your self-needs each midday. Into the evening, you segue back to your self-needs. Throughout the night, you typically focus on your self-needs.
You start your work week segueing from your self-needs to attending your social-needs in the workplace. You slide back to your self-needs each weekend. Friday night serves as an autumn harvest, to reward you for all that hard work for a mere paycheck.
This psychosocial oscillation also occurs throughout the month. And throughout the natural year. And about every four to five years. Disruption to this natural cycle easily results in the psychosocial reduction of psychosocial vacillation. You swing painfully between extremes of clumsily easing your unresolved self-needs then your unresolved-self-needs.
Your core-needs resolve best when resources for it are accessed equally by you and others. You function best when you can balance how much you do for yourself with how much you can trust others to provide for what you cannot provide for yourself. When you can personally access resources your life requires on par with getting them from others.
Delve deeper into this insight by reading The Medicine Wheel and the Seasons in Relationships. Download the free Four Seasons spreadsheet to apply this to your own life. Download the free Harmony Politics spreadsheet to reveal your psychosocial orientation shaping your politics.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can access resources for yourself on par with accessing resources through others, the fewer of your needs can fully resolve. The more your self-needs resolve more than your social-needs, the more drawn to liberalism as relief-generalizing to ease this symfunctional strain. The more your social-needs resolve more than your self-needs, the more drawn to conservatism as relief-generalizing to ease this symfunctional strain.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can access resources for yourself on par with accessing resources through others, the more of your needs can fully resolve. The more you resolve your underserved social-needs compared to your more resolved self-needs, or the more you resolve your underserved self-needs relative to your more resolved social-needs, the less dependent upon political relief-generalizing. The more independent from generalizing, the more of your needs resolve, the more of your pain leaves, and the higher you can function.
19. Cognitive dynamism
Cognitive dynamism refers to maintaining continual openness to fresh insight apart from what one believes, or to keep accountable one’s beliefs to the most up to date information. This involves tolerance of ambiguity and even embracing uncertainty. It includes openness to disconfirming data, to calling out your biases and any cognitive distortions, to realizing paradoxes, to juxtapositions, to admitting to your own errors despite how embarrassing. It contrasts with the pistiscentricity defunction.
Need experience
You believe what you need to believe. The more your needs resolve, the less likely your beliefs will prioritize your attention for their relief. The less your needs resolve, the more your beliefs bend to do what seems necessary to ease the pain.
Anankelogy recognizes this distinction along four discrete phases, from worst to best.
1. Misfunctionality involves full departure from resolving needs. Desperation for survival sparks cognitive delusions.
2. Dysfunctionality involves deviation from resolving needs. Unbearable pain sparks cognitive distortions.
3. Symfunctionality involves drift from fully resolving needs. The resulting symfunctional strain generates cognitive biases.
4. Peakfunctionality runs on dynamism for fully resolving needs. You stay atop your needs with cognitive dynamism.
In more routine situations, you can rely more on your beliefs. In more novel or volatile situations, familiar beliefs easily trip you up. You can resolve more needs by staying open to new information in newer situations.
According to anankelogy, beliefs without carefully crafted qualifiers run thick with error. Your beliefs prioritize attention to your needs. Errant beliefs prevent your needs from fully resolving. The more pressing the need, and especially the less resolved, the more prone to rely on errant beliefs. You risk slipping into cognitive contraction and into a vicious cycle of symfunctional strain, or worse.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on generalizations, the less you will encounter the specifics affecting your needs. The fewer specifics engaged from clinging to what you think you know, the more you overlook what can resolve your needs. The more overlooked, the more kept in pain and lower functioning.
The less open to input from others, the more your beliefs tend to harden into stumbling blocks. The less aligned your beliefs to reality, the less fully your needs can resolve.
Refunctionalizing
The more specifics engaged from inputs to sharpen what you think you know, the more you can see what can resolve your needs. The more needs resolved, the more liberated from pain.
The more open to input from others, the more your beliefs can upgrade to keep pace with changes. The more aligned your beliefs to reality, the more fully your needs can resolve.
20. Relational knowing
Relational knowing refers to recognizing how two or more things move or change in association with the other. This is based on a basic tool of science. When used with other tools to resolve needs, the gap between layperson inaccuracies and scientific accuracy measurably shrinks.
Need experience
The rise and fall of core-needs reverberates outwards to many relations of rising and falling phenomenon. The more you can trust your water is safe to drink, for example, the less you worry how you will quench your next thirst. Or the less you can trust your water is safe to drink, the more you worry how you will quench your next thirst.
These testable relationships come in four directions.
1) When this goes up, then this over here goes up.
2) When this goes down, then this over here goes down.
3) When this goes down, then this over here goes up.
4) When this goes up, then this over here goes down.
Scientists know these four correlations well. They can tell you that the first item to change is the independent variable. The second item to correspondingly change is the dependent variable. Although it can be tricky sometimes determining which changes first. Some correlations exist in cycles where each reflexively impacts the other. Simply knowing both change in tandem together can be a powerful insight. You can resolve your needs more when seeing such associations.
Relational knowing democratizes this science tool for you. You don’t have to be a scientist to observe two things working together. You cannot afford to wait for (or hire) a scientist to inform you how something impacts your life to some degree of certainty. Or search for and read mountains of scientific literature, which can be challenging to process and aptly apply. You need not lose your autonomy to oft-paternalistic expertise. “RK” lets you control more of your own life.
Scientists will also can warn you that correlation is not causation. RK rolls back the assumption that a layperson, untrained in science, too often sees causation where it does not actually exist. The more you can resolve your needs with RK and other refunctions, the freer you will be from cognitive biases, distortions or delusions. You can sense causation and yet be ready to adjust to invalidating information. You’re less prejudiced by easy answers. You can know enough to set yourself free.
You no longer remain trapped in binary thinking. By thinking in terms of a range of possibilities between the independent and dependent variables, you keep yourself open to a continuum of possibilities. You shift from generalizing to address relevant specifics. The more specifics you engage, the more of your affected needs can more fully resolve. The more needs resolve, then the less pain to distract you from keeping this engaging trend going. Momentum builds.
Each of these defunctionalizing and refunctionalizing sections utilize relational knowing statements, like these below. Each can be “operationalized” by converting the stated relationship into a testable hypothesis. You can feasibly test some of these yourself, with the humility that others can help keep you true to the facts. Framing the relationship as testable can help keep you accountable to engaging the full scope of reality. And keep others accountable to how they measurably impact you.
Defunctionalizing
The less intimately connected to impacts upon your life, the less your intuitive sense of causation is reliably accurate, and more likely a coincidental or spurious correlation. The less you couple your relational knowing with dynamic relating, the more prone to depending on generalized correlations that turn out to be weak or untrue. The fewer needs you resolve while intolerant of ambiguity, the less likely you can maintain relational knowing. The more you cling to generalizations for relief, the easier to lose momentum of relational knowing.
Refunctionalizing
The more intimately connected to impacts upon your life, the more your intuitive sense of causation is reliably accurate, and less likely a coincidental or spurious correlation. The more you couple your relational knowing with dynamic relating, the less prone to depending on generalized correlations that turn out to be weak or untrue. The more needs you resolve while embracing discomfort of ambiguity, the less biased to easing needs. The less biased to easing needs because they resolve, the easier to sustain a momentum of relational knowing.
21. Dynamic relating
Dynamic relating refers to continual openness to updating what is known, or believed to be known. It recognizes those things that do not hold steady at all times. It seeks to update beliefs prone to be in error.
Need experience
This applies the internal mechanics of cognitive dynamism to external relating to your world and those around you. It counters the defunction of popgen resulting in symfunctional strain, and the defunction of relief-generalizing resulting in dysfunction. And to the deeper problems of trusting falsehoods. And it corrects for the defunctions of pistiscentricity, nomoscentricity and normative alienation.
Social pressures to appear smart may trick you into thinking the only way to be intellectual is to hold in all kinds of information on your own. But the more information you hoard, the more of that stuff gets outdated. How can you keep tabs on it all? How can you be sure something changed over here when you were busy tracking information over there?
The scope of your understanding expands exponentially through what you can confidently know through others. And by what you permit others to point out to you. What you know, or think you know, about things pales in importance to what you know about yourself. Besides, you find much more meaning in your life when continually engaging your needs through each other.
As you realize more about yourself, more of your needs can resolve. And the more empowered to help serve the needs of others. Not can you reach more of your peak potential, others can reach more of theirs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you try to be intellectual on your own, the more new information slips by you. The less updated your beliefs, the more your struggle to appears smart seems stupid.
Refunctionalizing
The less you try to be intellectual on your own, the more new information finds its way to you. The more updated your beliefs, the more others regard you as smart and perhaps as wise.
22. Impact engaging
Impact engaging applies relational knowing to needs you affect, and your needs affected by others. It counters the defunctions of normative alienation and nomoscentricity. Instead of complacently relying on impersonal rules to report each other’s needs, you identify and address each other’s affected needs.
Need experience
Laws can only convey the general minimum of your needs. Other cannot know your specific needs, especially those they affect, unless you tell them. Nor can you know their specific needs you affect unless they tell you.
Even if you obeyed every known law, you could still negatively affect the specific needs of others. Obeying laws can leave you overgeneralizing, alienated, and polarized. Impact engaging counters each: degeneralize, dealienate, depolarize.
1. Degeneralize: You walk back broad statements by considering the nuance of details overlooked by untested generalizations.
2. Dealienate: You encounter what each other believes about the situation and its effect on each other’s needs, instead of remaining alienated from what each other believes or disbelieves.
3. Depolarize: You walk back competing generalizations, to consider the oft-overlooked nuance of details in between.
These general steps involve holistic balancing and discomfort embrace. It works best with support from others helping you see things clearly, and impartially.
Applied anankelogy introduces a conciliatory process to resolve each other’s specific needs.
1) Announce the needs you identify as affected by the relationship. You open a dialogue to increase awareness of how each impacts the other.
2) Assess how the relationship affects the identified needs. You introduce measurements because what gets measured gets done.
3) Audit their impact on these affected needs. You’re open to how you impact their needs.
4) Avow to address these affected needs with them in a conciliatory way. If refusing or unresponsive, you pledge to resolve your needs without them—or in spite of them.
The whole process moves your affected needs out of the passive expectations of impersonal laws and into the proactive process of making sure each other knows these impacted needs, and that you aim to resolve them with or without their cooperation. Your liberty depends upon it.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on impersonal laws to cover each other’s needs, the less you address each other’s specific needs. The less you realize how you affect the needs of others, the less likely others realize how they affect your needs. The less you both realize how you affect each other’s needs, the less likely you can resolve these affected needs.
Refunctionalizing
The less you rely on impersonal laws to cover each other’s needs, the freer to address each other’s specific needs. The more you realize how you affect the needs of others, the more you engender others to realize how they affect your needs. The more you both realize how you each affect the other’s needs, the more likely you can fully resolve each other’s affected need.
23. Mutual valuing
Mutual valuing refers to affirming the worth of others as you encourage them to affirm your worth, not only your transactional or social worth to each other, but also your innate worth of simply being.
Need experience
From an anankelogic perspective, “value” points to something or someone regarded as significant for resolving or easing needs. Nature-based anankelogy recognizes three levels of this value in our personal and shared lives.
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Intrinsic value. You are born with the innate value of being a human being. Nothing you or anyone else can diminish or change this level of your value. You are valued because you exist.
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Social value. You are treasured by how much your social manners and skills allows others to interact with you with need-easing results. Or as one who helps ease another’s pain.
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Contributory value. You are regarded according to your economic and other contributions to the needs of others. This level tends to be the most impersonal.
You resolve more needs you encounter the more you recognize these levels of value both in yourself and in others. You may detest the customer railing you with insults, for example, but since you respect their intrinsic value you avoid provoking avoidable needs. You may turn it around as an opportunity to demonstrate your social value. You attend to each other’s social-needs with grace, humility, love, and more. You seek to contribute to their needs while enduring the discomfort of them not yet contributing to your needs. You keep open the path for mutual exchange on all three levels of value.
If you can maintain value to others without waiting for them to reciprocate, you can take the moral leadership to resolve needs seemingly resisting resolution. Instead of sinking into mutual hostilities of lowered functioning, you keep your head above water to resolve needs for improved functioning. As you maintain higher functioning, you can then inspire others to maintain higher functioning. And together sustain mutual value.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can be of value to others who are not immediately reciprocating value back to you, the more challenging to grow social capital. The less you provide the value of such unilateral initiative, the less you can “prime the pump” of resolving stubbornly unresolved needs.
The less you offer value to others, the more you repel others who are ready, willing and able to offer value to you. The less one of you takes initiative to value each other, the less likely each will sustain value of each other.
Refunctionalizing
The longer you can be of value to others who are not immediately reciprocating value back to you, the easier to grow social capital. The more you provide the value of such unilateral initiative, the more you can “prime the pump” of resolving stubbornly unresolved needs.
The more you offer value to others, the more you attract others who are ready, willing and able to offer value to you. The more one of you takes initiative to value each other, the more likely each will sustain value of each other.
24. Mutual understanding
Mutual understanding refers to getting to know more about each other and affirming the value of that increased mutual awareness. It applies empathy for each other’s needs.
Need experience
While stuck in the thick of painful needs, you naturally seek to be understood more than you have room to understand. Can’t they see how much you need them to understand you? If they are also steeped in pain, they could wonder the same about you.
If you seek to be understood, then seek first to understand others. Drop expectations of agreement. Replace with sharing stories of each other’s experiences. See how those experiences give context to each other’s pressing needs. Dare to be vulnerable with a little, and find those rewarding you to be vulnerable with much more. Build on their responsiveness to be more understanding of others who seem less responsive to you. Listen to them the way you need them to listen to you.
To prime the pump of being heard, you take the initiative to truly hear others. You model the standard of how others are to listen to you by listening to them without interruptions. You force yourself to be present in the moment. You set aside your viewpoints to become absorbed in their viewpoints, without losing yourself in the process. You take the perspective of the other to look at their needs as they experience them—more than how you experience it or how you expect them to experience them. You spur momentum of mutual awareness.
Defunctionalizing
The more you wait for others to understand you, the less likely you will be understood. The less you can take the initiative to understand others, the less likely they will understand you. The less you listen to others, the greater the chance for mutual misunderstanding.
Refunctionalizing
The less you wait for others to understand you, the more likely you will be understood. The more you can take the initiative to understand others, the more you engender others to understand you. The better you listen to others, the greater the chance for mutual understanding.
25. Mutual trust
Mutual trust refers to cultivating how much you can trust another by how trustworthy you find them to be toward you, and how trustworthy you are found to be to their trust in you.
Need experience
Your distrust towards others tends to grow in proportion to the number of people in your life. You cannot possibly ensure all these people know how to respect your specific needs. Laws can provide only a minimum for how much you can expect them to respect you. It only takes one hurtful incident to spark distrust.
You build trust by demonstrating how trustworthy you can be to others. You test the waters of their responsiveness. You shrink the pool of candidates to those who are most responsive to you and your needs. Along the way, you check your unrealistic expectations. You let others illuminate your blind spots with grace and love. You trust them with a little, and run with those trustworthy with more.
You spot the difference between believing in things and truly trusting others. You can control what you believe far more than you can control who you trust. You negotiate the minefield of each other’s vulnerabilities. You treat festering wounds with kid gloves where indicated. You show yourself to be the kind of person who keeps a secret, who affirms others in self-doubt, who moves beyond the agree-disagree binary to embrace the indefensible interpretations shaping inflexible needs.
You are not like the intellectual who expects you to agree or disagree with their provocative idea on their own terms. You are more like the sage who encourages others to relate to thought-provoking ideas on their own terms. You encourage others to trust themselves more. You build up mutual trust to improve each other’s functioning.
Defunctionalizing
The more you demonstrate yourself as untrustworthy to others, the more others will distrust you. The less you can cultivate mutual understanding, the harder to develop mutual trust.
Refunctionalizing
The more you demonstrate yourself as trustworthy to others, the more others will trust you. The more you can cultivate mutual understanding, the easier to develop mutual trust.
26. Mutual support
Mutual support refers to providing for the needs of others who reciprocate in providing for your needs. It serves a core purpose for cultivating social capital.
Need experience
Mutual cooperation among our hunter-gather ancestors proved essential for survival. As societies emerged around sedentary village life, cooperation shifted from organic agreements to formulated programs thick with rules. You no longer had to personally know others to cooperate with each other. Each did their assigned role to produce and make accessible various resources.
You can follow every established rule for cooperated living and still fall through the cracks. Impersonal laws can never replace interpersonal support. When others know your personal needs, they can address them more specifically than the impersonal process enshrined in law. Your functioning soars much higher amidst the supported vulnerability of mutual support.
Mutual support fulfills a basic social-need. You can only provide so much for your own needs. You are vulnerable to others to meet all your needs. Others are vulnerable to you for what you provide for their needs. The economy coordinates the barebones of mutual support. Meaningful support occurs between two or more individuals who share specific needs with one another. The community that ensures all of its members receive essential supports functions far better than the community that relies primarily or exclusively on impersonal supports.
Defunctionalizing
The less you are supported by another who personally knows your specific needs, the more likely you will fall through the cracks of society. The more you rely on impersonal supports alone, the more likely your specific needs will never fully resolve. The less you personally support others in need, the less others will support your personal needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more you are supported by another who personally knows your specific needs, the less likely you will fall through the cracks of society. The less you rely on impersonal supports alone, the more likely your specific needs will fully resolve. The more you personally support others in need, the more others will support your personal needs.
27. Mutual responsiveness
Mutual responsiveness refers to responding to the needs you recognize in others, who reciprocates by responding to your recognized needs. It contrasts with dismissiveness.
Need experience
When you express your needs to others, you minimally expect them to acknowledge your needs. You may even expect them to recognize how they impact these expressed needs, at least in some negotiable or debatable way. To your dismay, the dismiss any impact out of hand. They can come up with a number of explanations—all of them discomfort avoidant with no impact engaging.
If you express your needs with little if any tact, you arguably provoked their dismissiveness as a form of self-righteous defensiveness. On the other hand, if you reported your impacted needs with love, grace and other social qualities, you likely pave a path toward mutual responsiveness.
You give them opportunity to demonstrate their value to you, and to others similarly situated. If recognized as responsive to those sensitively in need, others can trust them to be responsive to their sensitive needs. If the recipient fails to respond to your loving, gracious and socially accountable attempts to report such sensitive needs, they risk losing their reputation.
When such irresponsiveness blows up from those in positions of power, their legitimacy could be on the line. If they dare react to your love with callous dismissiveness, you expose their deficiencies. You compete with their responsiveness, with their legitimacy to be in a power position.
The standard applied sets the standard replied. Wherever you engender others to respond to your needs as impactfully you respond to theirs, you raise the standard for mutual responsiveness. Those in power failing to respond in kind betray their power as more coercive than helping to resolve needs. With sufficient support for your greater responsiveness to resolve needs, you position yourself to replace irresponsive powerholders. The needs themselves do not wait. Greater value emerges between the most mutually responsive.
Defunctionalizing
The less you respond to the recognizable needs in others, the less inclined others will respond to your recognizable needs. The less you mutually respond to needs in each other, the less inclined to support each other to fully resolve such needs. The less you help each other to resolve each other’s reported needs, the lower the functioning—more mental health problems and fewer needs resolving, in ways negatively impacting others.
Refunctionalizing
The more you respond to the recognizable needs in others, the more inclined others will respond to your recognizable needs. The more you mutually respond to needs in each other, the more inclined to support each other to fully resolve such needs. The more you help each other to resolve each other’s reported needs, the higher the functioning—fewer mental health problems and more needs resolving, in ways positively impacting others.
28. Recompense
Recompense refers to balancing essential resources you expend with something of equal or similar value so you can continue to function. At a minimum, you do not drain yourself of essential resources. You retain enough to keep going, without sliding into stinginess, so you can stay in position to resolve needs.
Mutuality becomes sustainable by recognizing how the standard applied sets the standard replied. Those in positions of power do not get to subvert how relationships objectively work. Your level of functioning and their level of functioning becomes inextricably linked. Recompense ensures both can balance access to essential resources to fully resolve needs onto mutual higher functioning.
Need experience
You are inclined to be generous during your personal summer seasons. When segueing into your autumn season, you naturally seek a harvest from all your earlier investments of generosity. You intuitively know you cannot give more than you have. You need to guard your accessibility to resources you depend upon for life.
Noble calls for your generosity to others lacks sustainability if you unilaterally give away more than you can afford. If sucked into another’s premature urgency without thought of addressing needs on all sides, your kindness could feed discomfort avoidance. You would do well to see some movement toward responsibility when rights are enjoyed. It’s better to teach how to fish than to give away all your fish.
Unreciprocated compassion can run you dry, run you down into the ground of emotional burnout. You best heed warning signals that your giving could be exploited. Lest you think this applies to your efforts to help the poor, think again. Those in power easily exploit your compliance to norms favoring their needs over yours. They likely don’t even realize the costs you pay to keep them in power. After all, power isn’t really power unless it resolves needs.
To keep accountable the power relations you’re in, you could rightly ask the powerholder, “How much is my compliance worth to you?” Impersonal exchanges tend to be highly transactional. Your endured costs for their benefit could best be conveyed in monetary terms. To link their coercion to your incidence of mental health challenges.
Think about it. When exploited by power relations, you endure growing irritation, you feel repeated disappointment, constant anxiety, sinking depression, and darkening despair. You pay these hidden opportunity costs of emotional labor. The arrangement lacks mutuality—little to no mutual value nor understanding nor trust nor support nor mutual responsiveness. They gain more from you than you from them. Perhaps you should send them an invoice to illuminate these hidden costs.
Defunctionalizing
The more you give to others without consideration of replenishing your stores, the more you sit at risk of running on empty. The less you balance what you give with readiness to receive what you need to keep going, the fewer needs you can fully resolve. The less keep power accountable to the hidden costs it tends to impose, the less everyone’s functioning can improve.
Refunctionalizing
The more you give to others with consideration of replenishing your stores, the less you sit at risk of running on empty. The more you balance what you give with readiness to receive what you need to keep going, the more needs you can fully resolve. The more keep power accountable to the hidden costs it tends to impose, the more everyone’s functioning can improve.
29. Resource accessibility
Resource accessibility refers to maintaining access to essential resources, whether through others or directly. You ensure your needs can effectively and promptly resolve, with little if any interruption or disruption.
Need experience
We are all vulnerable to impersonal supply chains. We must rely others we do not personally know to access most of the resources we need in life. We depend on others for our food security, water safety, healthcare access, security apparatus such as first responders and national defense, and so forth. Many of our social-needs guard our access to such necessary resources.
Besides this vulnerability, we can only access the bulk of goods and services through personal purchases. Insufficient wealth can leave you vulnerable. You feel the stress when unable to freely access essential resources. Or leave you without stable access.
Access to primary resources matters more than access to substitute or alternative resources. Too often, you find easier access to resources that can only partially resolve your needs. Junk food is often cheaper and easier to prepare, for example, than the quality food your body requires. So you put up with mounting residual pain of partially resolved needs. The economy favoring popular substitutes easily leaves you and others in symfunctional strain.
Fully resolving your basic needs, like nutritional food balanced with sufficient exercise, enables you to more readily resolve your growth needs. “Empty stomachs have no ears.” You can feasibly be patient to access resources for your growth needs. Your basic survival needs cannot wait too long. If living paycheck to paycheck, if paying out more than coming in, if unable to earn a sufficient income, if strapped with mounting medical or other debt, if coerced to earn less than you contributions are worth, or any of a number of impediments to access resources to ease needs, your focus easily prioritizes basic needs at your growth needs’ expense.
You do well to develop social networks to increase you access to essential resources. Sometimes, this means bartering. Or utilizing public assistance to ensure resource accessibility. This also asks you to access as much as you can on your own in balance with how much you access through others. Your psychosocial balance boosts your access to necessary resources. The greater your access to resources through a diverse and innovative support system ensures you can more readily resolve your basic and growth needs. To reach more of your peakfunctional potential.
Defunctionalizing
The less stable your access to resources necessary to resolve your needs, the more vulnerable you tend to be to settle for partially resolved needs or pain relief of unresolved needs. The less you can access primary resources, the less you can focus fully on your growth needs, and less of your full potential can be reached.
Refunctionalizing
The more stable your access to resources necessary to resolve your needs, the less vulnerable you tend to be to settle for partially resolved needs or pain relief of unresolved needs. The more you can access primary resources, the more you can fully focus on your evoked growth needs, and the more of your full potential you can reach.
30. Proactive contentment
Proactive contentment refers to strategic satisfaction with what one already has. While being honest about items one could use to improve their situation, they remain composed while making the most of their current minimal resources.
Need experience
Contentment likely eludes you if never reflecting on what you eat, drink, buy, do, or think about how you react to your daily needs. Intentional eating that involves all your senses can help you relate better to your habits of attempted satisfaction.The more you meditate, the easier to cultivate contentment.
Ask yourself why you want what you want, then seek only what you honestly need. If overwhelmed by some need, be sure to keep any pain relief brief. Seek instead to remove that pain by resolving the need behind it. Stay wary of your partially resolved needs. Seek support where necessary to address powerholders preventing you from fully resolving needs. With conciliatory love, make them earn their keep.
As you reflect on each attempt at satisfaction, you can discern which reactions only ease needs or relieve their pain, and which reactions result in removing pain by fully resolving the need. You can spot where you get caught in constant dissatisfaction if absorbed in entertaining distractions, substitute resources, pain relieving habits, or the comforting norms of symfunctional strain.
You can pause and reflect on how much you really need that sweet food right now. With an accountability partner, you can hold yourself accountable to resolve needs over habits of accepting less. You can avoid comparing what you have to what others have. You avoid being vulnerably supplied by the unfaithful. You realize you can go long periods of time without comforts. You can learn by experience to be content with a lean supply of primary resources over a bountiful supply of substitute resources. Mutual support can provide you the flexibility to be radically content. You make sure you access what you earned.
Meanwhile, you optimize resources with humble gratitude. You attract resources when making the most of the resources you already have. You inspire other’s generosity with your own generosity. You learn your body can tolerate more discomfort than assumed. You learn from our ancestors to adapt to the cold of winter and then adjust to the heat of summer without complaint. You rely less on modern conveniences to stretch your resilience. You live life to the fullest by making the most of what you now enjoy.
Defunctionalizing
The less you reflect on how you react to your daily needs, the more vulnerable to discontentment. The less you optimize what you now have, the more you obsess on what you lack. The less thankful for what you have, the more discontentment can get a foothold to derail your focus.
Refunctionalizing
The more you reflect on how you react to your daily needs, the less vulnerable to discontentment. The more you optimize what you now have, the less you obsess on what you lack. The more thankful for what you have, the less discontentment can get a foothold to derail your focus.
31. Minimal consumption
Minimal consumption refers to cultivating your lifestyle to lower your reliance on consumer goods. You make the most of your essential resources. And reduce or exclude your reliance upon luxury items.
Need experience
Modern conveniences easily drag you into feeling you must have them. Once you enjoy the benefits of air conditioning, for example, you wonder how you can ever live without it during the scorching heat of summer.
Many technological conveniences have this insidious pull on you. You could walk a mile to the store, but you habitually jump into your car. Then you drive three miles to a fitness center to walk miles and miles on a treadmill. Literally and metaphorically.
You could instead engage the resources you utilize. You could meaningfully reuse, recycle and repurpose. Not because others tell you it’s a good idea, but to better relate to your needs and how to proactively resolve them. You could meaningful connect yourself to where your resources come from. You could orient your life to minimize its footprint on the environment—not to acquiesce to social pressures but to internalize a deeper relation with the ultimate source of all your needs.
You can cultivate a life of contentment by resolving as many needs as possible with primary resources you produce and prepare yourself. You may find stable equanimity when more independent from addictive conveniences of modern life. You cut out the fat to suck in the marrow of life. Then reach more of your life’s full potential by breaking free of insidious consumerism.
Defunctionalizing
The more you rely on modern technological goods for comfort, the harder to resolve your daily needs. The more your life normalizes consumption of purchased goods, the less you tend to be connected to the environment as the ultimate source for all needs. The less connected to the environment as the ultimate resource to resolve needs, the more vulnerable to economic insecurities.
Refunctionalizing
The less you rely on modern technological goods for comfort, the easier to resolve your daily needs. The less your life normalizes consumption of purchased goods, the more you tend to be connected to the environment as the ultimate source for all needs. The more connected to the environment as the ultimate resource to resolve needs, the less vulnerable to economic insecurities.
32. Situational readiness
Readiness refers to being continually equipped to adjust to rapidly changing situations, so you can resolve affected needs as promptly and thoroughly as possible. It is about expecting the unexpected.
Need experience
When you expect the unexpected, you are less disrupted by disruptions. Your equanimity holds firm. You stay living in the moment. You are present for others who need you to listen intently to how they are affected. You are not easily pulled off your square.
You are less disappointed when less dependent on your expectations. You generally absorb any emotional shock. If knocked down at all, you jump right back up. Wherever a situation exposes your fragility, you embrace the opportunity to grow stronger. You grow stronger wherever you are broken.
You stand ready to be ripped out of your comfort zone. You learn to tolerate more pain than you previously thought possible. You learn to flow with the circumstances. You react less, respond more to the needs at hand. You promptly process each need instead of getting stuck on pain avoidance.
Each unsettling experience grants you the wisdom to be ready for the next. Over time, you gain an arsenal of insight to fit almost any emergency to befall you or others. You turn avoidable needs into opportunities for further growth. You embrace its pain to more fully resolve needs. You reach more of your functioning potential.
Defunctionalizing
The less you stay atop of needs, the less likely you resolve them. The more easily agitated by adverse circumstances, the more likely to revert to pain avoidance than resolve needs. The less prepared for unpredictable events, the less oriented to flexibly adjust to what others need.
Refunctionalizing
The more you stay atop of needs, the more likely you resolve them. The less easily agitated by adverse circumstances, the more likely to resolve needs than revert to pain avoidance. The more prepared for unpredictable events, the more oriented to flexibly adjust to what others need.
33. Stimuli management
Stimuli management refers to proactively limiting stimulation of your sensations, in order to optimize resolving needs. You steer clear from alarming situations that could overload your senses.
Need experience
Modern life can easily overwhelm your senses. Distractions abound. The more your mind has to process, the less likely your needs can fully resolve. If passively letting in all the noise, you probably cannot hear yourself think. You get bombarded with a litany of avoidable needs. You get pulled off your square. To ease the mounting pain, you open yourself to entertaining distractions. You find yourself running in circles.
Or you can turn off the television. You do not have to view that program that sparks your rage. You can do something other than obsessing over things you have little to no control. You don’t have to click through that clickbait to ogle at situations you know can provoke you to overreact. You have better things to do then feed the money-churning rage machine.
You can replace quit pop that bloats your stomach. You can avoid watching movies you know could remind you of past trauma. You could close that popup ad tempting you to waste money, time and more on porn. You could spend less money on tech toys that keep you from pursuing your dream. You could end that toxic friendship sucking up what juice is left in your life.
Instead, soak in inspiring stimulation. Be absorbed in a lifechanging book. Feel the dopamine from more vigorous exercise. Taste the full texture in each bite of your favorite fruit. Hear what others are trying to say as they struggle to find words to express their needs. Embrace the therapy of a loving hug. Listen intently to a child share their fantastic imagination. Relax outdoors with its seasonal weather. Resolve to resolve needs with each stimulation of your senses.
Defunctionalizing
The less you curb your sensations, the harder to steer clear of avoidable needs. The less you stay atop of what you expose yourself to, the less focus you can give to fully resolve needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more you curb your sensations, the easier to steer clear of avoidable needs. The more you stay atop of what you expose yourself to, the more focus you can give to fully resolve needs.
34. Transitional relief
Transitional relief refers to keeping any attempts to ease pain as brief as possible. You aim to lower pain only when you find it excessive. You do not let yourself to become dependent on pain relief. You keep your focus on resolving the source of that pain, and utilize relief to only help you focus on its removal.
Need experience
Ideally, you promptly process every incident of organic pain. As soon as your body alerts to a painful threat, you fully embrace that warning to confront it. You either remove the threat, or remove yourself from the threat, to quickly return to full functioning. You instantly detach from pain.
In reality, of course, you are not always ready to process that pain. Sometimes that pain jabs you at the worst time. It can be too sharp of a pain to get through in that moment. The threat cannot always be swiftly removed. Find someone to help you. The silver lining to most painful problems can be found in forging deeper connections with meaningful others.
In such instances, dulling the pain can help. Stop beating yourself up for apparent lack of willpower. There is far more at play than your individual control. Do your best, but hold others accountable who throw barriers your way. As long as you know you are not avoiding the pain indefinitely. You simply giving yourself room to keep focus. Too much pain easily consumes your focus, and that can slide into a pain of its own.
Temporary relief allows time to process your pain before it crystallizes into residual pain, or sink into biostructural pain. For example, if taking medication to curb your depression, you maintain higher functioning when accompanying support services to help deal with this redirection. If relying on the meds to ignore why your body drops in energy, you risk getting stuck on the path provoking the depression. The pain of it pushes through later to insist on redirecting you.
You can apply the same to anxiety, or when resisting attraction of someone of the same gender, or a number of others discomforting pressures. Relief kept short lets you more likely remove the source of the pain. And then return to higher functioning.
Defunctionalizing
The longer you keep any pain relief, the more the risk of calcifying into residual pain. The longer any suppression of agonizing pain, the longer you can get back to the cause to deal with it. The less you deal with it, the fewer needs resolve. You can get caught in lower functioning of symfunctional strain.
Refunctionalizing
The briefer you keep any pain relief, the less the risk of calcifying into residual pain. The shorter any suppression of agonizing pain, the quicker you can get back to the cause and deal with it. The more you deal with it, the more needs resolve. You find reach more of your potential toward peakfunctionality.
35. Discomfort embrace
Discomfort embrace refers to running to, instead of fleeing from, organic pain you experience in life. You boldly face your pain to allow awareness of the needs such pain tries to report. You remove your pain by resolving this reported need.
Need experience
Most of us can bear more pain than we comfortably assume. After adjusting to an increasing volume of conveniences—like air conditioning, instant relief medications, microwaved food—we grow accustomed to a shrinking comfort zone. We normalize avoidance of discomfort. We normalize a mass increase in unresolved needs. A life full of comfort is a life not fully lived.
By sharp contrast, our distant ancestors flexibly adjusted to extreme cold in winter and to extreme heat in summer. And still thrived. Their lives did not fall apart because they had to endure all that summer heat without an A/C. They related dynamically to each painful need. Their survival required them to resolve as many of them as possible. They could not afford symfunctional strain.
Not that our premodern ancestors always lived up to this resolve-all-needs standard. They had far less stable access to primary resources as we do now. If we oriented our economy to prioritize stable access to primary resources to resolve needs, we could engender a movement to detach our excess dependence on substitute and pain-relief resources.
Like our ancestors, you could then promptly process your organic pain. You thank your pain for alerting you to trouble. You keep your pain relief from unbearable pain as brief as possible. Once you regain focus, you identify the need this pain tries to report. You promptly address the need, which typically reduces the pain’s intensity. You don’t let yourself get trapped into residual pain of unresolved needs.
You quickly go from a sharp pain to removing that pain when recognizing the excess to be removed, and promptly remove it—or yourself from the threat. You cultivate a healthy relationship with this natural warning mechanism. You run to your unpleasant emotions, to learn from them, instead of habitually fleeing from them or suppressing them to appease others. You don’t shoot the messengers.
Embracing life’s natural discomforts tends to be easier with support. A pain shared is a distress spared. By processing your pain with others, you may find better ways to resolve its needs. You may find meaning in otherwise meaningless pain. You can be stronger for your journey through the pain. You may also inspire others to embrace more of their pain. And together reach more of life’s full potential.
Defunctionalizing
The fewer needs you resolve when failing to process its pain, the more pain you suffer. The less of life’s natural discomforts you embrace, the more agonizing the sharpness of its organic pain.
Refunctionalizing
The more needs you resolve by promptly processing its pain, the less pain you suffer. The more of life’s natural discomforts you embrace, the less agonizing the sharpness of its organic pain.
36. Supported vulnerability
Supported vulnerability refers to dropping your guard to at least one trustworthy person who helps you resolve needs. The value tends to be mutual, for another who can trust to drop their guard to reveal more of themselves to you.
Need experience
The painful alienation of vulnerability avoidance can be countered by deeper interpersonal connections. Such connections grow the more you can drop your guard with others. The most guarded tend to be the most alienated.
Of course, you cannot safely reveal all to everyone you meet. Your social universe of psychosocial resources allows you to disclose varying amounts, as socially appropriate. You cultivate mutual trustworthiness for how much you reveal to each other.
Without anyone to relate your deeper self, your life tends to miss its full potential. Here are three examples you may personally experience, at least at some time in your life.
You cannot do as much. You slip into the psychosocial vacillation of having to do too much on your own, then struggle to find help on less than optimal terms.
You trip on many mistakes. You repeat many of the same errors when no one can effectively call out your blind spots to you. You hold back information in fear others could actually affirm.
You bear your pain alone. You have no one to help process your mounting pain. And you may not even realize the taxing load of your increasing symfunctional strain from unresolved needs.
Dropping your guard invests plenty of courage, humility, initially universal honesty, and more. Once you embrace this discomfort and it gets rewarded with love and grace of affirmation, you generally find it easier to drop more of your guard. You build momentum. Especially when you convey your love and grace to affirm others dropping their guard to you.
You may find the most affirming source of such love and grace in your Higher Power. You may be initially suspicious of how capricious fallible humans can be, to honestly affirm you at your most vulnerable. If the wounds of deep emotional trauma have closed you up like a tender flower in a thunderstorm, you may find the only welcoming sunlight in all loving Creator God. This may satisfy just what you need to test the waters of other’s responsiveness to your cautious self-disclosures.
Cultivating this bold openness often demands perseverance. Your first supporter of vulnerability helps you develop another. The more you remain calm amidst chaos, the more others warm up to you and want to know you personally. They likely will test the waters of your trustworthiness.
As soon as you close up to avoid this discomfort, others tend to close up in kind. Your standard applied sets the standard replied. Few if anyone wants to bear your pain without their permission. Grace flows both ways.
Something magical unfolds as you increase how many support your vulnerability. You find more meaning in life. You find it easier to explore and reach your purpose in life. You grow deeper roots into the soil of life’s harsh environments. You know love like you have never known it before.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can be vulnerable to others, the shallower your relationships tend to stay. The less of your honest self you reveal to others, the less others are inclined to relate honestly with you. The less honest with them, the less likely they will be honest and forthcoming with you.
The less people in your social circle who can know you more fully, the far less you can do in life. The less people in your life who support your vulnerability, the farther to finding love and full meaning in life.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can be vulnerable to others, the deeper your relationships can grow. The more of your honest self you reveal to others, the more others are inclined to relate more honestly with you. The more honest with them, the more likely they will be more honest and forthcoming with you.
The more people in your social circle who know you more fully, the far more you can do in life. The more people in your life who support your vulnerability, the closer to finding love and full meaning in life.
37. Stretch accountability
Stretch accountability refers to answering to at least one supportive person who inspires you to reach your developmental goals, and supports your more immediate aims to resolve needs you may otherwise settle for mere relief. Such support stretches you out of your comfort zone, to awaken more of your full potential.
Need experience
Like electricity seeking the shortest path, the unsupported life seeks the easiest path. Take the easier path and you find life gets harder. Take the harder path and you find life gets easier.
But you can find it next to impossible to stay on the more challenging path, especially while carrying the burdensome backpack of rugged individualism. Name someone who you report your goals, and give them permission to regularly or randomly check up on your progress.
Find someone who can continually challenge you to be your best to yourself and to others. Find someone to support you to resolve needs, when you’re most inclined to settle for mere relief. Find someone who keeps you accountable to reach your full potential.
Jumping out of the gate alone tends to go quickly sour without an accountability partner. Your commitments are easier to keep and maintain when you know someone is watching. They can encourage you to guild the inertia to persevere, like the entrepreneur who never fails while finding all the ways something doesn’t quite work.
You then find it easier to embrace discomfort since you are not bearing hardships alone. A pain shared is a distress spared. Your accountability partner can serve as a sounding board to prime your potential. And to keep lean with proactive contentment as you stretch your emerging capacities.
Together, you both can cultivate each other’s easement orientation to resolve needs while enduring the sharper pain. Together, you can find meaning in the pain you share. Together, you are resilient, equanimous, disciplined, and loving. Together, you find the liberty to resolve needs you never could fully resolve on your own.
Defunctionalizing
The less you are kept accountable by another to reach your growth goals, the less likely you are to reach those goals. The less another holds you accountable at the start of an arduous challenge, the less likely you will find the inertia to see the journey to its completion.
Refunctionalizing
The more you are kept accountable by another to reach your growth goals, the more likely you are to reach those goals. The more another holds you accountable at the start of an arduous challenge, the more likely you will find the inertia to see the journey to its euphoric completion.
38. Positive reinforcement
Positive reinforcement refers to affirming the value you recognize in others, and others affirming value they recognize in you. It attributes value to what each expects to see more of, and rewards with further affirmations.
Need experience
Thank you for reading this. There. I affirmed your investment of time and focus in this material. You might feel encouraged to invest more of your time and focus. Positive reinforcement does that.
You reward need-resolving behaviors of others by a universally recognized confirmation of value. Such as gratitude. Or mutual responsiveness and mutual support. You get more of what you need.
This goes both ways, of course. You get more out of life when others affirm you for who you are, and thank you for what you do. Imagine how many of our needs could fully resolve if we praised each other more, thanked each other more, smiled more, appropriately hugged more, and loved each other more.
Defunctionalizing
The less you thank others for what they do for you, the less inclined they are to do what you need from them. The more you take others for granted, the more isolated you tend to become. The less you affirm what others mean to you, the less open they are to you.
Refunctionalizing
The more you thank others for what they do for you, the more inclined they are to do what you need from them. The less you take others for granted, the more others are inclined to help you. The more you affirm what others mean to you, the more open they are to you.
39. Interpersonal connection
Interpersonal connection refers to knowing and valuing one another as deeply as possible. You start to know things about each other not privy to others. You depend on each other. You experience a growth in how much you love.
Need experience
Think of the first person you would call in an emergency. Is that the same person you would contact if caught in an emotional crisis? Who can you count with your deepest secrets? Are you a person another would call if in a personal predicament?
Those who have no one to contact tend to face traumatizing events alone. They lack support when most vulnerable. They tend to bear their pain alone, or project it onto others in annoying ways. They tend to suffer more defunctions than those who name a support person.
They are apt to generalize more, for comfort. The more estranged from specific needs, the more apt to get comfortable with the quiet desperation of symfunctional strain. Problems pull them to extremes. They swing between avoidance and adversarial options—flight and fight. They typically overlook the nuance sitting in between that proves necessary to resolve their needs. They trust binarism, and defend divisive mass institutions.
When you who have someone to contact in a crisis, you tend to suffer less trauma from it. They can support you when most vulnerable. They bear your pain with you. Or refer you to resources to get through it. They tend to enjoy more refunctions than those who can’t name a support person.
They are apt to generalize less, for to resolve needs. Problems do not pull them to extremes. They transcend the flight-or-fight binary with a loving conciliatory approach. They integrate the relevant nuance necessary to resolve their needs. They reciprocate support they receive. They thrive more.
Defunctionalizing
The less you can trust someone with your whole being in a crisis, the more adverse the impact from that event. The less connected with at others in your life, the less you generally get out of life.
Refunctionalizing
The more you can trust someone with your whole being in a crisis, the less adverse the impact from that event. The more deeply connected with at least one person in your life, the more you generally get out of life.
40. Spiritual attunement
Spiritual attunement refers here to continual openness to a foundational connection with all life and with all constructive reality. This includes inexplicably resolving needs, such as miraculous healings or when compelled to act in a way that ineffably avoids an unknown danger.
Need experience
Have you been in danger without knowing it? Consider this short scenario of you open to a Source beyond. You sense danger right around the corner, but dismiss it as irrational. You keep walking toward it, but now you feel inexplicably compelled to stop. You feel you must go a different route. As you approach from another angle, you spot actual danger. You somehow have been spared from real trouble.
This is one example of spiritual attunement. Here are a few more.
1) Engaging all-powerful Reality beyond own limits. E.g., intuitive warning of danger like the story above.
2) Interpersonal connection and mutual support. Your wholeness with close others becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
3) Inter-life connection. What I do to harmless ants sets a karmic standard for some fate can do to me.
4) Interbeing. You experience a oneness with all existence. You holistically differentiate aspects of your unique identity and then integrate your deepest sense of being with all existence.
Spiritual attunement speaks to openness to a trustworthy 'beyond' to resolve needs.
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open to ineffable healing.
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open to mysterious yearning to forgive the unforgiveable, to be generous to the stingy, to love those who hate you and may always hate you.
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open to the transitory discomfort of a disciplined life for the imminent joy meaningful existence.
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open to intuitive insight amidst an overwhelming crisis.
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open to spontaneous wisdom.
Perhaps you can think of more aspects of spirituality enabling you to resolve needs. The rich tradition of the world’s enduring religions and their scriptures speaks to this foundation of spiritual attunement. It is doubtful any religion would last so long if it didn’t contribute to resolving needs like the need for meaning, for purpose, for restoring to wellness, for forgiveness, mercy, justice, grace and love. If you differentiate its need-resolving good from its popgen pain-relieving bad, you can better appreciate how religion provides a culturally relevant solid vessel for the universal fluid of enigmatic spirituality. It would not continue to exist if not persistently resolving some fundamental needs.
Think of Creator, God, Allah, Ultimate Reality, Power, Great Spirit, Universe as the perfect source for resolving needs from the original milieu of how needs were first created. Think of this source as the ultimate psychosocial resource—a profound integration of external and internal resourcefulness. You cannot provide everything you need for yourself. Sometimes you need more than what others you know can give you. Sometimes your needs can only resolve because you keep an open connection to this ineffable aspect of life.
Defunctionalizing
The less open to the beginning of need’s creation, the less your stubborn needs may resolve. The less you connect with others, the less you vulnerably expose what you require to resolve needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more open to the beginning of need’s creation, the more your stubborn needs inexplicably resolve. The more deeply you connect with others, the more you honestly expose what you require to resolve needs.
41. Safe & secure
Safe and secure refers to guarding yourself, including others you care about, from threats of harm—from unnecessarily provoking your need to be sound in body and property.
Need experience
Safety focuses on inadvertent threats. Security focuses on intentional threats, from those seeking to ease their pain at your expense. The safer and more secure you can remain from threats, the more you can focus on other needs. With fewer basic needs disrupted, the more focus you can give to resolve your higher growth needs.
This applies to securely accessing resources you require for your life, and for those dependent on you. Such as food security, safe water, income security, air security, security from state violence, and so forth. Threats come in all kinds. Some arrive in sheep clothes. Others come in the name of providing you safety & security. You can resolve more needs by remaining vigilant about all forms of threats. And tactfully avoiding circumstance needlessly put you and others in harms way.
Threats from others typically indicate unresolved needs. Love is a better response than sustained anger. You deal with threats as a set of needs to be resolved, to ease and then end the tension. Or you overreact in ways that actually escalates the painful threat you hoped to avoid. The result can fall along the focal range.
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At-rest security. Your loving emphasis to resolve relevant needs encourages the other to engage with to resolve the conflict.
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Aware insecurity. Your emphasis on saving yourself alienates the other.
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Alert insecurity. Your defensiveness provokes the defensiveness of the other.
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Alarm insecurity. Your desperation for survival likely sparks a cycle of violence.
Your first reaction to threats is to either handle it yourself or call for help. If threatened by violence, you cannot always call the police. Or trust the police who arrive to be equipped to properly serve the situation. You could resolve more needs by ameliorating the nonlethal threat yourself. You can lean in to learn what the other needs of you, or needs from others. You increase the safety & security of all with a love-focused nonviolence approach. You willingly absorb their outbursts, to let them vent, to decompress, to deflate the tension.
You can recognize your safety & security is ultimately tied to the safety & security of others. You don’t have to own their responsibility for their own threats of violence. You can believe in them to be responsible enough to retreat from any threatening posture. You can challenge every source of threat to responsibly resolve their needs. You then can increase the safety & security of us all.
Defunctionalizing
The less you are kept from avoidable needs created from threats, the harder to focus on resolving other needs. The more defensive you are to apparent threats, the more you risk escalating the threatening situation, by overlooking the unresolved needs behind that threat.
Refunctionalizing
The more you are kept from avoidable needs created from threats, the easier to focus on resolving other needs. The less defensive you are to apparent threats, the more you can spread safety & security by shifting focus on lovingly addressing the unresolved needs.
42. Love-focused nonviolence
Nonviolence refers specifically to resolving needs without any use of force or threat of force used to compel compliance to another’s wishes, but instead to prioritize serving their unresolved needs without reference to one’s own needs.
Need experience
Violence easily begets violence. Guarded reaction provokes guarded reaction. Few needs resolve while normalized mutual defensiveness consumes focus to relieve pain.
From Gandhi to Dr. King, nonviolent resistance raised the bar of moral leadership. You contend with others from a stance of earnestly caring about them. You don’t seek their harm, but instead to hold them accountable to respecting the affected needs on all sides of the conflict.
By loosening up to prioritize other’s needs, you can be less guarded. You remain open in conflict. You remain vulnerable so all can see your affected needs. If the other sides resorts to violence, even with the sanction of the state, you do not stiffen up. You can absorb blows to your head with less risk to traumatic brain injury.
You instantly discount reciprocating violence with violence because you experience the other as a foundational extension of yourself. You recognize to hurt them is to ultimately hurt yourself. You keep open the potential to resolve needs, even as you writhe in pain. But your intent is less to avoid pain and more resolve all the unresolved needs causing pain. You willingly endure momentary suffering for the benefit of resolving needs. You seek to curb any cause for further suffering.
Instead of fighting each other, you wrestle with ideas for addressing each other’s affected needs. Instead of fighting extreme positions, you wrestle with the truth until you find the position most responsive to each other’s needs. Instead of arguing your case to be won at their expense, you employ what we call contra-engaging.
Contra engaging is inviting contrary views to be included that accountably improves the functioning of all involved. The intent is not to prove oneself right and the other wrong, but to relate better to each other. To humbly acknowledge neither can know all there is to know to be totally right. To replace any thrill of victory with mutual cooperation to resolve affected need.
Fighting for the sake of fighting rarely resolves needs. Swinging between avoidance options and adversarial options rarely if ever results in resolved needs. A loving conciliatory approach can turn challenging conflicts into opportunities to resolve more needs than contained in the originating conflict. Violence is just weakness externalized. Love overcomes violence by powerfully addressing the weakened needs behind the violence.
Defunctionalizing
The more you resort to violence to repel conflicts, the less likely the needs behind the conflict will be adequately addressed or fully resolved. The less you show any concern for the needs of those threatening you, the more your defensiveness can escalate the tension into violence.
Refunctionalizing
The more you respond to threats with love, the more likely the needs behind the conflict will be adequately addressed or fully resolved. The more you show your sincere concern for the needs of those threatening you, the more your intent can defuse the tensions from turning violence.
43. Cultivated intuition
Cultivated intuition refers to learning from the experience of fully resolving needs that raise functionality. You learn insight that subsequently automatically informs you during the same or similar situation for such a need.
Need experience
Anankelogy recognizes how ‘bias’ prioritizes your needs. If you endure many unresolved needs, your views tend to be more skewed toward what may ease those needs. If your needs readily resolve, you experience little if any cognition contraction. Your attention is not compelled to ease needs that are readily resolved.
While actively anankelogizing (i.e., intentionally fully resolving needs), you can trust your experiences to inform you what is relevant and what is universal for resolving such needs. With freer focus, you can distinguish between what is more relevant to the situation and what applies in common to all situations—and perhaps universally to all needs.
You not only gain knowledge, but you gain wisdom. You learn what effectively and efficiently resolves needs for higher functioning. Your higher functioning then enables you to experience more resolved needs, to learn more wise insights. Your mind connects the dots. You quickly realize how to resolve the next need that comes along.
You learn to balance intuition with reason. You learn to trust your emotions to report your needs, and to suggest a reaction in case your survival depends on it. But you develop the wisdom to reflect on how best to respond in every situation. You apply reason in novel situations. You rely on your intuition to guide you in more familiar situations. The more your needs resolve, the more you find your intuitive responses reliable.
Defunctionalizing
The more you experience your actions easing pain, the more your beliefs narrowly distort to what it finds for relief. The more your symfunctional strain, the harder to focus on how things as you are compelled to see how things ought to be to ease pain.
Refunctionalizing
The more you experience your actions resolving needs, the more your insights reflect wider reality. The less your symfunctional strain you must endure, the easier to focus on how things are instead of how things ought to be to ease pain.
44. Primed potential
Primed potential refers to cultivating what one can do toward resolving own needs and resolving the needs of others. This includes countering resistance to resolving needs, typically from others settling for indefinitely relieving pain of unresolved needs.
Need experience
If you repeatedly settle for substitute resources or pain-relief, you risk missing your life’s potential. Symfunctional strain easily sucks the juice out of you. You end up feeling like a cog in some wheel. You intuitively know you are more than a part of someone else’s machinery.
If your impact at work is limited, your efforts at home is likely more impactful. Keep yourself accountable to your family members to resolve needs. As much as possible, you do not settle for mere pain relief. You tolerate substitute resources for temporary relief, but replace them as soon as possible with primary resources. You play video games for hours to burn off some irritation, for example, the invest time in engaging your family’s needs.
You start where you can grow the most impact. Then implant what you learn elsewhere. You meet up with others for mutual support. You share past traumas and explore ideas for overcoming them. You consider activism. You do interviews for podcasters. You publicly decry imposed relief that undermines your potential, and the potential of others. You grow social capital to explore your potential to resolve more and more needs. You stretch yourself to meet new challenges. In the face of pushback, you shine. And thrive.
Defunctionalizing
The less you fully resolve needs, the less encouraging to resolve other unresolved needs. The more often you settle for substitutes or pain-relief, the less often your needs can find opportunity to fully resolve. The fewer needs resolved, the more the risk of getting trapped in symfunctional strain or worse.
Refunctionalizing
The more you fully resolve needs, the more encouraging to resolve other unresolved needs. The less often you settle for substitutes or pain-relief, the more often your needs can find opportunity to fully resolve. The more needs resolved, the closer you can reach your peakfunctional potential.
45. Driving purpose
Driving purpose refers to finding meaning in one’s existence by experiencing oneself as essential for resolving needs in others. You find your why for enduring any how.
Need experience
Startup entrepreneurs typically get to know their future customer’s needs down to the finest detail. If you ask them, they may tell you they live to serve their customers’ or clients’ needs. At least the specific needs the entrepreneur is positioned serve.
Entrepreneurs can tell you that this passion to serve such needs inspires them to overcome repeated barriers to success. What may seem like hard work to outsiders comes more easily to them. They put in 16-hour days and get by on little sleep to serve their clients. Many work almost for nothing during the lean startup phase. Love to fulfill their clients’ needs keep them going.
Whose needs are you well-equipped to serve? What needs are you best positioned to satisfy? What if you are the only one who can help? If their needs could remain unresolved without you, and they eagerly will pay you well to serve their needs, you may find your purpose in life.
You can best find your purpose in life by addressing some need. Especially an underserved need. When they view you as essential to serving that need, they may conclude this need will not resolve without you.
As you draw meaning in your passion to serve the need, you get into a flow. The energy to resolve these needs seems to come from nowhere. You spend hours working on it. Instead of draining you, the effort energizes you. Practically nothing can stand in your way. You never fail because each momentary setback teaches you a new path toward success.
Satisfying this need in others gives you a purposeful ‘why’ to keep going on through every challenge. Your ‘why’ carries you through every challenging ‘how’ to reach each milestone, and beyond. You find how to turn each challenge into an opportunity. Your existence is indispensable. You resolve needs that would not be resolved without, and that is something profoundly valuable.
Defunctionalizing
The fewer needs you resolve for another, the harder to find your purpose in life. The less you passionately enjoy serving these needs for others, the less energy you likely find to help make it all happen.
Refunctionalizing
The more needs you resolve for another, the easier to find your purpose in life. The more you passionately enjoy serving these needs for others, the more energy you find to help make it all happen.
46. Anankelogize standard
Anankelogize standard refers to resolving needs on a public level toward peakfunctionality. It serves as the objective high mark for measuring outcomes and impacts. It contrasts with the lower symfunctional standard of easing pain of unresolved needs, which generally perpetuates pain and lowers functioning.
Need experience
Anankelogize means to fully resolve need. Not only on a personal level, but on a public or even global humanity level. It can be measurably indicated by decreased incidence of mental health problems (i.e., decreased rates of severe anxiety, lower rates of major depression), improved functioning, and reaching more of one’s peakfunctional potential.
Mass society tends to pull us all towards symfunctionality. Mass institutions serving public needs rarely aspire to anything higher than what normally can result in widespread symfunctional strain. This anankelogize standard applies to each mass institutions listed here. Each of these sit atop of that mass institution’s function array.
1) critical justice. Fully resolving justice needs of all involved. It takes into account the justice needs of all affected by any situation of injustice. It transcends the conventional distinctions between violator and violated, prosecutor and defendant, and between personal justice and social justice. All involved restore to secure and equitable functioning, and not merely pain relief from loss.
2) critical politics. Fully resolving public needs of all involved. It takes into account the public facing needs of all sides. It transcends the conventional distinctions between liberal and conservative, voter and leader, and between individual and state. All specifics behind politicized needs restore to full functioning.
3) critical wellness. Fully resolving health needs of all involved. All restore to full personal wellness in ways leading to full collective wellness. It transcends the conventional distinctions between sick and healthy, insured and uninsured, and between expert doctor and layperson patient. All restore to their full wellness potential.
4) critical economics. Fully resolving economic needs of all involved. All can securely access essential resources to sustain their lives. It transcends the conventional distinctions between producer and consumer, sales revenue and paycheck, and between the well-resourced employer and isolated worker. All can access resources necessary to reach their full potential.
5) critical learning. Fully resolving educational needs of all involved. It prioritizes resolving the learning needs of all, independent of cultural norms of education or educational institutions. It transcends the conventional distinctions between instructor and student, pass and fail, and between merited credentials and demonstrated wisdom. All knowledge is honored for its need-resolving value to humanity and to all life.
“Critical” is an arbitrary term, which could be replaced by something more meaningful. Critical refers to the discipline of addressing all relevant needs, instead of favoring one need over another. Fully functioning requires all needs receive critical attention. Anything less tends to slip into symfunctionality.
Each replaces the premature reaction of how ‘need-easers’ insist things should be with how to actually resolve the needs the mass institution serves. Not so much by subjective “democratic” measures, but by objective measures correlating empirical verifiable peakfunctionality.
Each transcends the binarism of conflicting interests. Each replaces norms for relief-generalizing with holistic balancing toward full functioning. Each brings out more of our untapped potential to love one another, as we all crave the love we finally can take the initiative to give.
Mass institutions rely on generalizing categories. The adversarial justice relies on opposing categories of accuser and accused, among others. Politics relies on opposing categories of liberal and conservative, among others. Healthcare relies on opposing categories of insured and uninsured, among others.
These generalizing categories serve either as a cognitive filter end point, or as a cognitive lens starting point.
As a cognitive filter that clouds your view of relevant details, you tend to miss reality. You overlook essential details necessary to resolve affected needs. You then typically incur more pain, as your unresolved needs unpleasantly compel your attention. You likely cling harder to generalizing, as it offers some relief from the mounting pain—while also complicit in that unrelenting pain. The more you attach to these opposing generalizations, the less the underlying needs resolve. In a tragic irony, you then depend even more on these opposing generalizations.
However, as a starting point cognitive lens, you transition from the categories to the relevant detailed nuance these generalizations cannot capture. You detach from generalizing to get to the specifics necessary to resolving the affected needs. You appreciate these categories cannot capture the reality necessary to move on. You resolve needs largely in spite of these categories. Instead of settling for easing needs, you follow the standard of resolving needs.
Defunctionalizing
The more we cling to conflicting interests geared more for relief, the less we can resolve needs to remove its pain. The less we love each other by refuting each other’s need to relieve our pain, the less we can support each other to resolve our conflicted needs.
Refunctionalizing
The more we transcend conflicting interests geared more for relief, the more we can resolve needs to remove its pain. The more we love each other by affirming each other’s need over our own pain-relief, the more we can support each other to resolve our conflicted needs.
47. Conciliatory resolution
Conciliatory resolution refers to addressing each other’s situation-affected needs in mutual interest, apart from avoidant or adversarial options. It raises the standard to ensure all the needs involved get resolved.
Need experience
Your first reaction to conflict tends to be flight-or-fight-or-freeze. If confident you can handle the foe, your body’s energies prepare you to fight. If less than confident, your body prepares you to flee or freeze. You instantly consider your avoidance options and adversarial options.
Avoidance options. You are coerced by power to acquiesce to power-favoring terms. You are unlikely to prevail if you resist their terms. You adjust because it seems better than alternatives.
Adversarial options. You reach a breaking point. You cannot take any more. You file a complaint, you litigate, you protest, you leave negative online reviews. You seek some relief from all the pain.
Conciliatory options. You consider their relevant needs on par with your own relevant needs. You link how much you can sustain respect for their needs with how much they respect yours.
This conciliatory process asks you to identify, express and then address each other’s affected needs.
1) Identify affected needs. Sort out the specific needs this power relation impacts. Leave out peripheral matters. Focus on primary resources to resolve these needs. Avoid pain avoidance.
2) Express affected needs. Once you have identified your affected needs, and recognized theirs, you report them. You invite dialogue. You encourage mutual understanding and mutual responsiveness.
3) Address affected needs. Together, you mutually support resolution of the agreed upon needs. They either cooperate or risk you reverting to your adversarial rights.
When applied to mass institution power relations, a more thorough need-response process goes deeper to resolve these institutional mission needs (i.e., justice needs, politicized needs). Need-response applies anankelogy to your public needs. (And is to be covered in the follow book: We NEED This, Introducing Need-Response as applied anankelogy.) The process has three areas.
1. Degeneralize: You walk back broad statements by considering the nuance of details overlooked by untested generalizations. From trusted generalizations to essential specifics.
2. Dealienate: You encounter what each other believes about the situation. You face your impact on each other. From normative alienation to mutual understanding.
3. Depolarize: You replace mutual hostilities with mutual valuing. From mutual defensiveness of privileged opposition to engaging and supporting resolution of each other’s affected needs.
Institutions need this accurate data to make better decisions to fulfill their mission. They need your testimonial to legitimate the public revenue they receive. Ultimately, each institution depends on the population they are commissioned to serve. Once put on an equal playing field with a conciliatory resolution, both sides can resolve more of their needs and reach more of their individual and collective potential.
Defunctionalizing
The less the goal is set to resolve needs, the more excusable to settle for symfunctional strain or dysfunctional pain relief. The later in the process specific needs are asserted, the less accountable the institution to facilitate its resolution. The less responsive an institution to this engaging conciliatory process, the lower its legitimacy.
Refunctionalizing
The more the goal is set to resolve needs, the less excusable to settle for symfunctional strain or dysfunctional pain relief. The earlier in the process specific needs are asserted, the more accountable the institution to facilitate its resolution. The more responsive an institution to this engaging conciliatory process, the higher its legitimacy.
48. Competitive legitimacy
Competitive legitimacy links the right of institutions to impact you, or even interact with you, on the basis of how well they help or allow you to resolve needs. It holds all leaders and their institutions up to a peakfunctional standard.
Need experience
Anankelogy links legitimacy to how well an authority or rule results in resolution of affected needs. The more needs resolve due to the authority, the more legitimate that authority. The less needs can resolve, or when it provokes avoidable needs, the less legitimate.
Legitimacy balances rights and responsibilities.
The anankelogic understanding of a right is a recognized path to addressing need dependent on external qualities. It suggests your vulnerability to others.
The anankelogic understanding of a responsibility is a recognized path to addressing need based on internal qualities. It implies other's vulnerability to you.
Resolving needs requires both in equal measure. Wellness is psychosocial.
Once an individual does all they can to resolve a need, impediments beyond their control are to be challenged. It doesn’t matter if such impediments stand immediately before them from another individual (of relatively equal standing) or from others claiming privileged authority. The individual responsibility to resolve a need depends on the right to resolve that need through the collective responsibility of others. This typically means the right not to be impeded by others, including authority. And sometimes it means the right to be supported by others.
Yes, authority also has rights, and responsibilities. Authority must access certain resources to perform its functions to serve public needs, or mission needs. Those under or served by authority must access certain resources to have the capacity to properly interact with authorized institutions. The rights of one can never negate the responsibilities of the others. And responsibilities cannot negate rights without losing some degree of anankelogic legitimacy.
Where less motivated by conformity to impersonal laws to be more internally motivated by love, authorities are to demonstrate they are more responsive to needs than alternatives. Institutions relying on authority that privileges less than fully resolved needs risks losing legitimacy.
Anankelogy presents legitimacy levels corresponding to functionality levels:
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Peakfunctional legitimacy – Resolves own needs in a way that actively resolves the needs of others.
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Symfunctional legitimacy – Serves own needs in a way that does not disturb the needs of others.
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Dysfunctional legitimacy – Relieves pain of own needs in a way that upsets the needs of others.
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Misfunctional legitimacy – Serves itself by exploiting the lives it is tasked to serve.
This runs the gamut from positively impacting all needs to dismissive of the needs of others to negatively impacting all needs. Who loves more by demonstrating the greatest sustainable responsiveness to the reported needs merits the greater legitimacy to serve those needs. But if short of enabling full resolution of needs, they could lose their earned legitimacy to another more responsive to such needs.
It is both the right and the responsibility of those impacted by mass institutions to assess the legitimacy of such institutions, including units of that institution. Love for prioritizing resolutions of needs compels such accountability. With public endowed resources, it is the ‘response-ability’ of institutions to be responsive to these assessments. Responsiveness and responsibility go hand in hand. The data could prove essential to help legitimate their continued funding. Or to defund what is not working, to shift funding where more responsive to affected needs.
Subunits of an institution can compete with each other for earned legitimacy of measurable responsiveness to affected needs. Institutions may face competition from grassroots organizations demonstrating greater responsiveness, even if only on a humble scale at first. For example, community-based restorative justice successes.
Such merited trust includes how an institution can publicly admit its imperfections. Self-righteous defensiveness that closes off mutual understanding easily compromises legitimacy. For example, it is now easier for accused citizens to admit their human imperfections than typically for police and prosecutors to admit theirs. Boasting institutional needs as more important than mission needs sounds alarms of abused authority. And unmerited legitimacy.
When applied to institutional legitimacy, it may look something like these.
Judicial legitimacy. Both security & safety and justice needs resolve. All damaging conflicts of interest are removed. Sources of violence are thoroughly and ubiquitously addressed. Both personal and social justice needs receive their due attention. Victimizers are held accountable to their harm by answering to victims with a community compelled recovery program focused on restorative justice. Any procedural justice is kept accountable to actual justice outcomes. Success is not measured by arrest quotas or conviction rates, but by lowered rates of violence and increased rates of higher functioning across the board. And by how much love and mercy permeates the community.
Political legitimacy. Politicized needs freely and fully resolve. Partial resolutions or pain relief are never heralded as successes. Both self-needs and social-needs resolve on par with each other. Psychosocial reduction does not get reinforced. Psychosocial vacillation shifts to organic psychosocial oscillation toward more frequent balance. Generalizing may start conversations only if transitioned to specific needs. Each political gain respects those enduring the costs of the political loss. No more privileging hate in the name of debate. Each side merits power in how they show their love for the other.
You do not win in this contest for merited legitimacy by making others lose. You win when all sides more freely resolve their needs. When all sides freely demonstrate more need-resolving love.
Defunctionalizing
The less an institution effects resolution of needs, the less it merits legitimacy. The more authority prioritizes institutional needs over mission needs, the lower its legitimacy.
Refunctionalizing
The more an institution effects resolution of needs, the more it merits legitimacy. The more authority prioritizes mission needs over institutional needs, the higher its legitimacy.
49. Psychosocial flow
Psychosocial flow refers to unleashing your energy to resolve needs by syncing internal potential with external supports.
Need experience
This builds on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow. It is a mental state where one is fully immersed in an activity, from which they derived enjoyment and energization. The diagram above comes from Csíkszentmihályi’s work. This one replaces the bottom right corner’s “relaxation” with “depression” to fit anankelogical observation.
Unlike the original, this one recognizes the potent synergy of psychosocial balance. When higher social supports meets internal resiliencies, one finds they can do more when the must do more. They experience the liberty to resolve needs.
They may revert to security when their stressors and their vulnerabilities remain low. They do less when they can get by with doing less. They can comfortably slide into apathy. Or this is kept brief, lasting only as long as one’s personal autumn harvest or winter solitude.
But when stressors rise while support remain low, they suffer increasing anxiety. A situation provokes their social-needs when least able to resolve them. When their vulnerabilities go up while their resiliencies remain low, the risk depression. The combination provokes their self-needs when least able to resolve them.
When external social supports combine with internal personal resiliencies, they can tap more of their potential. When sustained over time, they may experience unbounded energy to passionately serve their life purpose. Their primed potential can soar. They can more easily reach the anakelogizing standard to fully resolve needs. They can face conflicts with love-focused nonviolence.
Think of the WWII medic Desmond Ross, who as a conscientious objector saved the lives of 75 fellow soldiers during the bloody battle of Iwo Jima. Think of John Lewis who risked lethal head injury in 1965 while crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge to register blacks to vote. Think of Crazy Horse confidently riding into battle knowing no bullets would strike him. Think of athletes who find their optimal performance zone. Think of passionate artists. Countless others who unleashed their potential to perform amazing fetes.
Now imagine how much you could do if all you needed came together to passionately resolve needs. Envision yourself fully supported to serve some underserved need you are essential to resolve. Consider how far you can go with your own sharpened internal capabilities. See yourself loving to resolve needs that you are best equipped to resolve. Then feel yourself loved for it.
Defunctionalizing
The less your self-needs resolve on par with social-needs, the less energy you can find to lovingly resolve needs. The less your internal qualities are equipped to face external circumstances, the less likely you will experience a flow of energy to rise to the occasion.
Refunctionalizing
The more your self-needs resolve on par with social-needs, the more energy you can find to lovingly resolve needs. The more your internal qualities are equipped to face external circumstances, the more likely you will experience a flow of energy to rise to the occasion.
50. Anankelogic wisdom
Anankelogic wisdom refers to intuitive insight into how to fully resolve needs. It tends to fit any individual, group or entity across cultures and time.
Need experience
Let this be a catchall for refunctions not yet listed. You know it is wise to eat well and get plenty of exercise. You know it wise address other’s needs on the high standard of how you would have them address your needs. You also know it is wise to not fill these pages with every imaginable way to full resolve needs.
You can read back from the beginning to pick up your own cues for better resolving needs. You can see how needs formed, how emotions convey needs, how needs are objective phenomenon and more. Now you can link the world’s wealth of wisdom to these mechanics illuminating of our various experiences of needs.
I have never aspired to be intellectual as I have aspired to be wise. I did not want to learn stuff just to know more stuff, or look smart. I didn’t earn several college degrees to prove anything. As a transspirit, I am continually compelled to seek wisdom to resolve needs in every possible scenario imaginable.
I realized long ago that I am endowed with a gift of wisdom. When others asked me a question. I wouldn’t know the answer until they paused to let me speak. I was so amazed that I sought out others to ask me questions, so I could learn this wisdom for myself. This book is the culmination of this life of wisdom.
You are invited to engage this material with your own insights, your own experiences, your own perspective on resolving needs. I do not claim to have all the answers. This is no panacea. This is to spark a grand conversation to resolve needs, including needs I cannot even imagine now. I welcome you to contribute your own wisdom to this nature-based perspective. The best wisdom is not what you find in words but you find in lived lives. May we all help each other more to resolve more and more of our needs. One loving act of wisdom a time.
Defunctionalizing
The less you understand how needs function, the harder to pick up wisdom for resolving needs. The less we learn from each other, the worse off we all will be.
Refunctionalizing
The more you understand how needs function, the easier to pick up wisdom for resolving needs. The more we learn from each other, the wiser we all will be.
YOUR INPUT
Consider this refunctions list, and the defunctions list, as an engaging dialogue among all of us burning to resolve needs. This list of items, along with their current descriptions, is not the last word.
Possible additions
Fifty is an arbitrarily convenient number of items. Perhaps you can think of ones to add. Perhaps the list could include other character qualities, such as compassion, hope, kindness, joy, empathy, forbearance, and others. Perhaps you think two or more items could be collapsed into a single item.
The next iteration of this work could include improvements you and others suggest. Over time, this accessible anankelogy version is to be refined by applied and academic anankelogy. These early drafts will then be tested by reality using social scientific methods.
Need-response eliciting more
This initial introduction to accessible anankelogy sets the stage for introducing applied anankelogy. It is to provide the first tools for what can be called need-response, which applies anankelogy in our lives. This includes both an informal need-response and a professional field of need-response.
As need-response evolves as a new field—focused on fully resolving needs in ways other field do not—we can learn more. New items to this list may be added. Some items dropped or condensed into other items. Each list applied the dynamic knowing refunction to remain engaged with all there is to know about needs.
We must start somewhere, however imperfect. We must resolve more of our needs. You can best add to this conversation by finding what works and doesn’t work for resolving your needs. You may find as more of your needs resolve, the less your thinking gets clouded by biases.
Psychosocial bias
The more your needs resolve, the clearer your discernment between defunctions and refunctions. The less your needs resolve, the more these unresolved needs commandeer your energy and attention to prioritize for their relief. If overwhelming, you tend to revert to what seems to make the most sense without digging further to face disconfirming evidence.
If deep-oriented from social-needs (like cohesion) resolving more than self-needs (like autonomy), you will be naturally drawn to the character refunctions (the first 16 listed items). You will value their emphasis on what you can individually do, apart from societal pressures insist what you must do with little to no regard for the impact of such collectivist pressures on your life.
If wide-oriented from social-needs (like inclusion) resolving less than self-needs (like self-expression), you will be naturally drawn to the latter structural items (challenging powerholders). You will value their emphasis on what you collectively can do to counter the power structures with little to no regard for the impact of such power imposes on your life.
If clouded by such psychosocial reduction, your grasp on the objective path for resolving needs can easily be compromised. Impact engaging and dynamic relating can mitigate this. Another tool being applied here is contra engaging, to posit the opposite of an assertion to test how each side impacts needs.
Contra engaging
You don’t know what you don’t know, as sure as I don’t know what I don’t know. Handling anankelogy in this abridged manner cannot possibly address all of your diverse situations, specific experiences and their consequential needs.
To ensure these assertions do not gloss over the nuance in your life, or in mine, reframe an assertion as its opposite. Invite discussion of missed possibilities by considering the opposite might be true or valid in some way. This is called contra engaging.
For example, you could reframe “all needs sit equal before nature” as “all needs do not sit equal before nature.” Not to be contentious, but to see if the first given assertion misses anything. Not to take some polarizing stance, but to attract attention to any overlooked nuance shaping needs.
You could accept these listed defunctions and refunctions as received wisdom. Or you can restate each one as an opposite assertion, then test its validity. Assuming a generalized statement can stand alone without context risks errors in beliefs. Your input can keep us engaged with an everchanging context shaping our many needs.
Together, we can keep a dialogue going, throughout time, to adapt to newer situations. To learn not to hastily react to what seems right, but later proves wrong. Contra engaging learns this from Native American tradition and from Jewish tradition.
We can learn from the Native American tradition of every voice in the tribe giving their input on a monumental decision, and then sitting on that first conclusion without premature action. No false urgency. There is time to chew on it some more later. To leave room to address more needs.
We can learn from the Jewish tradition of “wrestling with the truth” where the canon evolved from deeply contemplated inputs drafted around the margins of the original text, then endured the test of time. “We’re just talking here.” No premature actions.
Let us keep a healthy suspicion of generalizations that risk missing some important things. Including any generalization I laid out here. We must test how we know what we think we know, to improve how we respond to our many needs. Life is far greater when more of our needs resolve.
In the tradition of my Haudenosaunee ancestors, I do not “sell” this inspired creation of anankelogy as individually owned intellectual property but offer it free to all. Once I put it all out there, according to indigenous principles, it no longer belongs to me. It belongs to us all.
I do accept donations. I do not require a lot of cash; my bill collectors do. This is how a latter-day Native like myself can balance both worlds. Thank you.
"THANK YOU FOR PROVIDING THIS ANANKELOGY INFORMATION FOR FREE
No information collected, just click to send $1.
If you are ready, willing and able to contribute more, then who am I to stop you?
Go ahead and click here to express more of your gratitude. And to offer any testimonial of what this means to you.
Thank you for thanking me serving your needs.
with this $1 gift. Thank you."