Our innate core needs are based in the premise that, in order to survive, and indeed to thrive within our environment, we require connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making.
Such core needs drive our inherent motivation toward attachment. That is, as infants we are born to seek and maintain proximity to a specific figure, the primary caregiver or attachment figure. This proximity-seeking arises in service of survival, protection, orientation, and belonging, ensuring the infant remains close enough to receive the relational-regulatory-response required for continued existence and development.
With this in mind, it can be understood that throughout healthy development we move from periods of complete attachment dependency in infancy, attained through physical proximity, to periods of attachment dependency and orientation in childhood, attained through both physical and psychological proximity. From here, development moves toward attachment differentiation and interdependence in adolescence, attained through a growing sense of felt security, and eventually toward an embodied sense of interdependence, attained through the internalisation of physical and psychological proximity alongside a more solid sense of Self.
Importantly, as we move through these periods of dependency, internalisation, differentiation, and interdependence, we implicitly learn internal and external ways of being alongside patterns of protection that are established and embodied through the provision, disruption, or absence of our innate core needs for connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making.
In this way, core needs may be understood as foundational to the development of Self, shaping how we come to sense, perceive, and interpret our place within Self, Other(s), and the World around us.
