Steph Turner Responds to Your Needs Like No Lawyer Can
13 min read - downloadable PDF
A. Engaging query
Ever made a bad choice? We all have. Does the law now shame you for that bad choice? Shame on them for giving us so many damn poor options in the first place!
Which do you think is more likely?
Your personal choices create your feelings of loneliness, or feeling smothered, so you only have to make better personal choices to never feel so lonely or smothered again.
OR…
There are times you objectively need companionship that you subjectively feel as loneliness, and there are times you objectively require some solitude which you subjectively experience as being smothered.
Let’s see why you would prefer this second option. Let’s get to the point on why we have laws in the first place: our needs. Laws only exist to guide each other’s actions to respect the reality of our diverse needs. Our inflexible needs come first. Flexible laws then follow. This episode’s theme: how your needs exist as objective facts.
B. Branding
Welcome to Need-Response for You, the podcast that speaks to your needs.
I am your host, Steph Turner, the author of You NEED This, the book introducing you to the new social science of anankelogy, the study of need. Other social sciences—such as psychology, economics, sociology and political science—all exist to create answers for our many needs.
Anankelogy gets right to the needs themselves. Now anankelogy brings you the new professional service of need-response as an alternative to having to rely only on lawyers, politicians or judges. Need-response puts your inflexible needs first, ahead of flexible laws. As long as lawyers and politicians fail to faithfully serve your needs, need-response holds them to account for what those laws exist for in the first place: our needs!
Call in and speak your truth to power. Especially if you, or someone you love, has been wrongly convicted. If you need those in power to better respect your needs, then you…need…this!
C. Episode preview
In this first episode, we’re going to put your needs first…for a change. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs for which they exist.
We need a revolutionary new way to better understand and to serve our many overlooked needs. Laws alone cannot respect our specific needs. Our law-based institutions repeatedly fail to serve my needs, your needs, or all of our needs. In this episode, I introduce you to a pioneering alternative to the mere legalism of laws and law enforcement. I assert the higher authority of love.
D. Laws fail me
I’m living proof that politics and the courts fail to responsibly serve needs. Back in 1993, I came out as trans to my trans sister. We soon shared an apartment. Then a neighbor accused us asexual trans siblings of transphobic tropes widely believed back then.
A jury of our supposed peers bought into the coached testimony of this young accuser who was also traumatized by the adversarial judicial process. Both of us were wrongly convicted and—despite being identified as trans—we were sent to men’s prisons for many, many years. I maxed out in 2005 and came home. She “maxed out” by dying in prison.
The young accuser finally came out as gay, but ended up in jail as a repeat drug offender. I ended up on the sex offender registry for life, despite being asexual, and now remain homeless and underemployed. Whose justice needs were actually served here? Were laws prioritized over needs?
E. Needs before laws
Have you ever met a lawyer or politician who truly understands and addresses your actual needs? Of course not!
Let’s face it. The legal system fails us left and right. Politics that shape laws disappoint almost everyone. The adversarial judicial system overlooks most of your affected needs. Both objectify you by forcing you to fit into their win-lose boxes. Both pit the vulnerable against each other to appease elites. Both avoid accountability to how it repeatedly does more damage than good. The whole legal system repeatedly fails to serve your specific needs. It’s not even designed to let you resolve your needs.
Once snatched up in the grip of the so-called justice system, little to no attempt is ever made to address underlying needs. You are immediately objectified into their convenient categories: victim or suspect, complainant or defendant, survivor or criminal. Everyone gets dehumanized on some level. And they dare call it justice.
This impersonal and even dehumanizing system prioritizes their own needs ahead of those being processed through it. They dare call this justice. They do little to nothing to ensure the affected needs on all sides to a conflict get fully resolved. They dare call this justice. They impose privileged state violence to confront interpersonal acts of violence, while benefitting from further violence. And they dare call this justice.
Most violence stems from unaddressed trauma, so the judicial system adds to that trauma—virtually guaranteeing a supply of bodies to traumatize again and again and again. But for what need? Theirs? How well is society served by this dehumanizing approach? How are communities kept safer, and at what human costs? How are families and individuals impacted by this imposing process?
Of course, we must collectively have some way to stop interpersonal acts of violence. Honestly, how well is law enforcement serving this need? How many of us have been duped to accept their lower standard of dehumanizing us to fit their process needs?
F. Understanding needs
Here is a core problem I see in law enforcement: they have drifted as an institution from their founding purpose to keep the public safe, because they are poorly equipped to deal with the needs that shape public safety. I see a need for them to better understand the needs they exist to serve. I am now filling that need, with anankelogy, to get to the source of public safety: our vulnerable needs.
Anankelogy, and its application in need-response—that’s need-hyphenated-response—adds the discipline to address interpersonal acts of violence by identifying and addressing underlying needs.
The judicial system and law enforcement lack this discipline when referring to acts of “crime”. Crime, to be sure, is a social construct easily manipulated by politics. No wonder those with the least political clout are more easily identified as criminal. After all, it is not a crime to traumatize another with a racist label, or with derogatory innuendo, but that is arguably just as violent and impactful and damaging as physically hitting that person.
Need-response takes us up a notch. Where the judicial system aims no higher than relieving your pain from violence, need-response seeks to remove causes for pain by meaningfully resolving the underlying needs on all sides. Where the judicial system imposes win-lose outcomes, need-response seeks win-win outcomes. Where the judicial system pits us against each other as mutually hostile categories, need-response raises the standard by replacing such norms of alienation with a disciplined process of mutual engagement, toward resolving each other’s impacted needs. Think about restorative justice, for example.
Need-response can either work with and complement the authorities, or rise above them. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs for which it exists to serve. No one holds authority over your needs; you cannot stop needing to avoid retraumatization, for example, because some official insists you suck it up and follow their orders without question. There is no sustainable social order without sustainable respect for our impacted needs. Need-response adds this deeper respect in order to result in sustainable good for us all.
G. Saving law enforcement from itself
For the judicial system and law enforcement, this can be a light of hope to improve their outcomes, to responsibly impact communities, and to accountably deliver on their mission to keep society safer. But I am bracing for the very likely reaction of resistance. The one entity granted license to exact violence can cleverly impose that privileged power to resist the higher power of love. It does so all the time.
We are so accustomed to “needing” law enforcement, that most who have never tasted the failings of the judicial system don’t want to question its legitimacy. They see a cop car drive by and feel safer. Those of us who know its failings may feel something different when viewing that cop car drive by. Those of us most traumatized by the system can feel retraumatized when that cop pulls up and starts impersonally interacting with us. When law enforcement neglects their actual impacts on needs fueling problems of violence, they compromise their legitimacy.
Need-response can help them regain this fragile legitimacy. Need-response can help them more successfully serve the needs for which they exist to serve. Need-response can guide the pursuit for justice by addressing equally everyone’s inflexible needs.
In the process, need-response challenges the popular belief that we are governed by laws. No, we are not literally governed by laws but our behavior is always governed by our inflexible needs, which are guided by flexible laws. No legitimate law can forbid you to feel hungry, but can guide your behavior to get food in accord with the needs of others. No reasonable law can outlaw your emotional reactions to your history of endured trauma, but can direct you to not harm others in the process.
Laws work best where they guide us to act in ways that enable our needs to resolve, without interfering with the needs of others. Laws fail where they get in the way of addressing and resolving our needs.
If your need for food goes unmet for too long, no law can insist you not be hungry enough to the point that you get desperate to get some food by any means available. If your need to ease the pain of unaddressed trauma festers too long, no authority can declare that you not get desperate to the point that you would consider almost anything to get rid of such overwhelming pain. Law performs poorly where it fails to address our underlying needs.
H. Laws alone fix nothing
Mindlessly obeying all laws can easily pull you into depression. I know I have to be careful not to sink into depression when feeling powerless about the wrongful conviction I suffered decades ago. I must remain vigilant by staying aware of my impacted needs, to identify and address each one the best that I can. Even if the law ignores them, or wrongly provokes them.
But there is only so much I can do within the law. Now I must transcend the limits of the law with need-response. I have pretty much exhausted law-based remedies for correcting this egregious error. Now I must step outside and above the limits of law. I must get right to the needs that keep us collectively glued to the law. I must stop trusting the institutions of law to see its own network of errors and shortcomings. I must resolve the needs that laws ostensibly exist to serve, either by complementing law enforcement or competing with it from a stance of tough love.
If you need the courts to review your criminal conviction, then perhaps you can relate. If you too are overlooked by current law-based solutions, what can you do? Just resign to your fate? Submit to abusive power? Accept feeling disappointed with our powerful institutions and then just move on the best you can?
Hell no! This injustice was unacceptable back when it happened. It remains unacceptable. And my anger warns me it will remain unacceptable until resolved.
I have exhausted most of my state remedies, and told in their view that the trial court only made harmless errors. You know, there’s another word for their resistance to acknowledge their many harmful mistakes: self-righteousness.
I have applied to several innocence projects, who I continue to find massively disappointing. Most local innocence projects prefer the low hanging fruit of those cases where they can see an easy win in court. You could be fully innocent of all charges, but if the law cannot see a way to correct itself, then lawyers remain dreadfully unresponsive to your justice needs. I’m done with that!
I. Alternative to a broken system
The narrow option of win or lose in court sits at the bottom of this injustice. The reality of needs does not care about win-lose outcomes. Your needs either must fully resolve or you will lose your ability to fully function and suffer some pain, which risks dragging you further into desperate acts for relief. The more law enforcement overlooks the needs it impacts, the less it can legitimately serve our justice needs. Any injustice in the name of justice is no justice at all.
Why do we keep trusting a system that repeatedly makes costly errors to somehow find these tragic mistakes and responsibly correct them? It’s like we keep hitting our heads against a wall. If we keep on doing what we’ve been doing, then we’re going to keep getting the trouble we keep getting.
If the legal system cannot reliably provide just outcomes and safe communities by addressing all the underlying needs, then it’s about time to create a more responsive system.
J. Introducing need-response
Welcome to need-response. A new professional service that gets right to the source: our needs! The source of every problem is unmet needs. Need-response prioritizes each other’s personal needs over impersonal laws that overlook the source of our many problems. Need-response can either complement a humbled law enforcement institution, or compete with it, if it resists the higher standard of resolving needs, for which laws exists to serve.
Need-response applies the new social science of anankelogy, the disciplined study of need. All the social sciences—like psychology, sociology, economics and political science—these all exist to create answers for our many needs. Anankelogy goes straight to the needs themselves.
I introduce this new academic discipline of anankelogy in the book I self-published in 2021, called “You NEED This”. You can sample its contents at my website Value Relating.
Go to value-relating dot com, and look for the “Free Sample” link. Download an interactive sample of the book. Once downloaded, you can enter your birthday and see the seasonal cycles unfolding throughout your life.
Unpack your particular needs like you’ve never understood them before. See the point behind your pressing emotions. Get a handle on your pain. Realize more options for solving the problems pressing in. Compel authorities to respond better to your overlooked needs. That’s what need-response is all about; speaking your truth to power, in a way that compels them to listen with renewed respect.
I can share more of this for you in future episodes. Now I want to dive deeper with you by asking you this intriguing question.
Before this episode ends, you should be able to answer this intriguing question: Why is a need an objective fact? Stay tuned until the end to find out.
K. Shedding light on needs
Now let’s shed some light on your experience of your needs. We do this with various segments.
The first type of segment is called an illustrated concept. It carefully describes one of the many diagrams from the book You NEED This, so you can better visualize your own experience of needs.
The next segment type introduces you to a new vocabulary of terms. These will cast a whole new perspective for you to relate better with your needs, and the needs of others.
Another segment type dives into functioning as part of your experience of needs. More on that next time. There will also be segments introducing you to anankelogical principles and wisdom. And segments exploring more about this new professional service called need-response.
Not every episode will include all of these. The first half of each episode offers a calculated mix of these features to give you the tools for a richer conversation around our many needs. Then I invite you to call in and apply these to your own needs and to your own situation.
L. Today’s illustrated concept
For the first illustrated concept, picture a circle with an upper half and lower half.
The upper half represents you apart from others and apart from things you may later require. The lower half represents being together with others or you being closer to the things you need.
Now imagine this circle split up and down, with a left half and a right half. The right half represents movement toward each other, or toward those things you may need. The left half represents movement away from others, or away from things you no longer need.
At its core, need is about movement, for function. You “need” water when too much water has moved out of your body. You “need” to get rid of excess water when too much builds up in your body. You “need” a friend when requiring others in your life. You “need” to get away when requiring the personal space to be freely on your own. This cyclic pattern sits as the foundation to your many experiences of needs.
Does this help you picture how you experience your many needs? Anankelogy introduces you to many concepts and a new vocabulary so you drill deeper into each of your needs. Next, the segment for introducing you to anankelogy’s vocabulary of new terms.
M. Today’s new vocab
Engaging query
Each episode aims to introduce you to a new vocabulary for better understanding our needs. This episode introduces you to “engaging query”.
An engaging query is a question comparing a widely accepted assumption with a more critical perspective that aims to be more responsive to needs. It starts with an invitation to compare two things, such as “which do you prefer?” or “which do you think is more likely?” The first option seeks to identify a commonly held view that can get in the way of resolving needs. The second option seeks to draw you into a more “anankelogical” perspective, to see the details of our impacted needs.
It may not be a concrete binary. In other words, the two things may not exactly be opposites to each other. The engaging query encourages us to reflect beyond our popular assumptions, to take a closer look at what impacts our needs. It typically steers us from depending upon a generalization to encounter some overlooked specifics. Each episode opens with an engaging query. In effect, it is the opening segment for each episode. Next, an anankelogical principle.
N. Today’s anankelogic principle
Many episodes introduce you to an anankelogical principle or wisdom, to give you a deeper understanding of your needs. And here is the first anankelogic principle to wrap your ahead around: A need is an objective fact.
Let’s start with your need for water. Have you ever said to yourself, “I think I will be thirsty now” and then you felt thirsty? Of course not, you don’t choose your needs. Your needs choose you to act upon them.
Every day, you feel thirsty at times. Your body signals you to drink something, to restore your body to an optimal fluid level, or temperature level. You must have this optimal fluid level to be able to adequately function. Too little or too much fluid, and you won’t be able to do much. A need is something your life objectively requires to function.
Emotions work in much the same way. Emotions exist to call attention to these needs. You feel lonely when your body signals you to attend to your objective need for someone who can love you. You feel smothered when your body signals you to do something about your objective need to be alone by yourself.
Sometimes your objective need to function draws you closer to others. Like when you need help to get through something difficult to face on your own. Sometimes your objective need to function pulls you away from others. Like when you must be free to figure out how to do something freely on your own. There is a time to be alone and a time to be together. There is never a time to dismiss an objective need as something you merely subjectively feel. You must function, and the less your needs resolve the less you function, and the more pain you will feel. And this is the point in the episode’s engaging query opener.
O. Invitation to you
Is any of this hitting home? If your needs are objective facts, does that inspire you to give them more due attention? Does that encourage you to demand more respect from others? Even respect from those in positions of power? If you are hearing this live, go ahead and call in to share how any of this can apply to your needs. The number is 563-999-3760. That number is 563-999-3760.
Comentarios