7 ways need-responders answer institutional decline

Need-responders fill a service gap left open by lawyers and counselors. Lawyers rely on impersonal laws. Psychotherapists focus more on individual change. Neither aims to fully resolve the relevant needs. Need-responders identify, address and work to resolve all the affected needs in a situation. That removes cause for pain. And that enables each of us to reach more of our life’s potential.

Which do you think is more likely?

All current helping professions sufficiently address and solve all of our current problems.

OR

We can solve our problems only when the helping professions address each affected need.

Do you view lawyers and psychotherapists as fully responsive to your needs? Or as a matter of professional design, do they limit the scope of how much they can actually help you to escape your pain? If yearning for a more responsive alternative, consider these seven ways need-responders could outperform lawyers, politicians and psychotherapists.

Need-responders…

1. Resolve needs over neglecting or easing needs.

2. Reach potential over restricting or privatizing potential.

3. Remove pain over relieving pain or easing symptoms.

4. Adjust relations over forced compliance of adjusting oneself.

5. Address needs over avoiding, opposing or trying to change needs.

6. Inspire investment over inconvenient legal or health costs.

7. Spread love over provoking hate or reinforcing isolation.

Answering institutional decline

Need-responders can either complement or compete

Chart: Helping professions comparison chart

1. Resolve needs over neglecting or easing needs.

Lawyers and politicians generally overlook the specific needs of those impacted by law. The law is kept intentionally vague to cover a wide array of situations. By design, lawyers and policymaker remain poorly equipped to address each affected need shaping individual and shared wellbeing.

Psychotherapists generally help their clients ease their needs, but cannot promise to help them to fully resolve their vulnerable needs. By design, psychotherapists leave out external factors shaping their client’s wellness. They could refer them to activism to address their politicized needs. But with rare exception (e.g., macro social workers), psychotherapists help their clients adjust to seemingly immutable social structures. Consequently, they typically help their clients ease their needs without fully addressing deeper structural needs hindering full resolution of those exposed needs.

Need-responders focus on identifying all the affected needs in a situation, and incentivized each other to mutually seek full resolution of such needs. This includes incentivizing those in positions of power to more effectively respond to overlooked needs. And to inspire such leaders to transform social structures to be more responsive to everyone’s needs. Not to merely ease those needs or relieve pain, but to fully resolve those needs to raise each one’s potential.

2. Reach potential over restricting or privatizing potential.

​Lawyers and politicians tend to constrain human flourishing. By design, they emphasize harm reduction over removing cause for harm. Those adjudicated in the courts or voting in an election are expected to take sides in a battle. They rarely consider empathizing with the needs of the other side. In such a climate, and often from suffering the pain of unmet needs, their life’s potential gets easily deprioritized.

Psychotherapists effectively help their clients pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By design, psychotherapy is kept a private affair preserving personal agency, apart from building social supports to address structural needs. This reflects the hyper-individualism of Western culture. The more engrained to think of ourselves as responsible individuals unfettered by external limits, the more we have blind spots preventing us from considering the whole picture. Psychotherapists risk unwittingly reinforcing a client’s psychosocial imbalance.

Need-responders invites others to join the client’s courage to speak their truth to power. They become freer to pursue their full potential. They cultivate social supports that enables them to find more psychosocial balance. Because wellness is psychosocial, and not merely psychological. They then become less vulnerable to vacillating extremes. With growing support, they can more boldly face life’s discomforts. They can get down to specifics that allows them to reach more of life’s full personal and shared potential.

3. Remove pain over relieving pain or easing symptoms.

Lawyers and policymakers cannot effectively address each specific need that each person has, nor should they. By design, politics and the judiciary only offer a win-lose outcome. The winner(s) at a court or ballot contest get to relieve their pain, often at the losing side’s expense of further pain. This rarely results in better functioning.

Psychotherapists traditionally focus on easing the symptoms of unresolved needs. By design, they rarely enable their clients to stand up to offensive authorities. Nor should they. At best, they help their clients make the necessary changes within their control. They encourage their clients to not expend too much energy to change matters beyond their control. While noble if the client neglects their own agency, prioritizing their own controllable reaction risks flying to the opposite extreme of resigning to powerlessness to damaging power relations and destructive social structures.

Need-responders get to the core problem of unresolved needs on all sides. Fully resolving needs removes cause for pain. Pain only exists to warn you of some threat to your functioning. If your functioning can be fully restored, there is no purpose for pain. Pain is not the problem as much as the threats your pain tries to report. There is no such thing as pain apart from unresolved needs. Besides, reacting to your pain tends to leave you in more pain. Need-responders help you reconnect with the natural purpose of your pain, to help restore you to your full potential.

4. Adjust relations over forced compliance of adjusting oneself

Lawyers and politicians typically hold social power over their clients. By design, the lawyer-client relation is a power relation. So is the elected rep and constituent. Unless trained in the law, such constituents and attorney clients easily deter judgment to their legal reps and policymakers. We more easily bend to their judgment when overwhelmed by a legal need. This tends to force us to comply with legal authority that may serve their own interests more than ours.

Psychotherapists also serve their clients in a power relation. By design, the counselor holds some power over the client in the therapeutic relationship. To receive help, the client must bend to such professional help to address the personal problem affecting their mental wellbeing. With few if any alternative options, psychotherapy aims to help the client to adjust to a harsh environment. It does little if anything to change such a hostile climate.

Need-responders shifts focus away from individuals to relation dynamics. Instead of trying to change individuals, the need-response process aims to change the power relation. Instead of bending to the norms of either a law-centric power relation or a psychological centric power relation, need-responders bend their own presenting power relation with the client into a learning experience. The need-responder use this natural power imbalance to help their client practice, in a safer supportive environment, to boldly speak their truth to power.

5. Address needs over avoiding, opposing or trying to change needs.

Lawyers and politicians rarely if ever address the inflexible needs of the opposing side in a court or election battle. By design, the legal professions privilege both avoidance culture and oppo culture. Few if anyone questions why continually avoiding the elephant in the room—each other’s needs. Few if anyone question the point of opposing the other side’s inflexible needs. Opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. Reacting to their needs under color of law risks provoking them into digging in their heels. What you reactively resist you reflexively reinforce.

Psychotherapists may unwittingly try to get their clients to change what they inflexibly need. By design, psychotherapy help their clients ease their needs without addressing the affected needs of others. Unrealistic expectations may creep in. While you can alter how you access a certain resource, you cannot change how a primary resource evolved to be the best way to restore you to full functioning, and remove your pain. Without addressing the big picture, psychotherapy risks helping the client to adjust to a sick society.

Need-responders address the relevant needs on all sides to a situation or conflict. Because anankelogy recognizes that all natural needs sit equal before nature. The powerholder’s needs are no more and no less important than the needs of the vulnerable powerless. The need-response process replaces mutual hostilities with mutual support. Mutual respect resolves more needs than mutual defensiveness.

6. Inspire investment over inconvenient legal or health costs.

Any lawyer you hire expects to be paid for any legal expenses you incur. By design, the costs of your hired solution to your legal problem lands squarely on your shoulders. If only you will gain from a court battle, only you are to bear the costs. At hundreds of dollars, you may not believe you can afford to hire a lawyer. And the risk of losing could dissuade you. There are plenty of reasons to never hire a lawyer.

Any psychotherapist you hire receives payment as a health expense you incur. By design, the costs of receiving mental health services lands squarely on your shoulders, or your health insurance provider. If you’re the one primarily gaining from such help, others have no clear incentive to financially support your psychological improvement. Lingering stigma may prevent other potential supporters from even knowing of the possibility. Besides, there are plenty of reasons to never even hire a psychotherapist in the first place.

Need-responders present the need-response process as an investment. The more this transparent mutualizing process can enable the client to openly resolve their affected needs, remove cause for pain, and improve functioning, the more others may want to support the cause to address their similar needs. Instead of a private expense, the need-response process provides opportunity to potential supporters—the relatively powerless and powerful alike—to share the costs of improving life for everyone.

7. Spread love over provoking hate or reinforcing isolation.

Lawyers and politicians gain support the more they goad their followers to pick one side against another. By design, politics and the judiciary provoke us to be hostile to one another, to even hate those on the other side. The more they pit us against each other, the less we focus on bettering ourselves and each other. We’re too busy consumed by this provoked hatred to one another.

Psychotherapists rarely invite others into the therapeutic process. By design, this one-on-one focus overlooks potential support from being able to freely bring onboard friends and family to help address publicly affected needs. Fear of stigma that stems from the implied fault of the sufferer tends to reinforce this isolation.

Need-responders incentivizes all sides to identify and address each other’s affected needs. Instead of opposing one another, we pull together on the same team in a mutualizing process—against the real enemy of unresolved needs. This process could shift the stigma onto powerful impactors identified as complicit with high rates of poor mental health outcomes. We first incentivize such impactors with more rewarding motivation. This mutualizing process encourages each to support the needs of the other as their healthiest self would have others support their needs. Anankelogy calls this social love. The more we shift focus away from relieving our own pain to resolving the needs of others (in ways that inspire others to help us resolve our own), the more love we can spread in our world.

Answering institutional decline

The less responsive to our exposed needs, the more public trust in our public institutions naturally declines. If the institution only looks outward, as legal institutions do, then the results will remain poor. If the institution only looks inward, as psychotherapy and similar institutions do, their results will also remain poor.

Trust in legal institutions wane the more the public recognizes how impersonal laws get impersonally shaped and interpreted, the impersonally enforced. The more you get objectified by representatives of the law, the less confidence you feel in what the law can do for you.

Trust in traditional psychotherapy and similar institutions wane the more the public recognizes how it only treats the individual and rarely if ever the social context of our many problems. The more the counselor goads you to adjust to a sick society, the more you get naturally resentful.

Need-response steps in to fill these service gaps. Need-responders look outward and inward, with a holistic approach. Need-responders transcend the norms of alienation to engage each other to address overlooked needs. Need-responders help us pursue our highest potential, together.

Instead of placating individuals trapped in power dynamics, as counselors are apt to do, need-responders provide the tools to bring powerholders and those they impact into a mutualizing process of mutual support. Instead of trying to change the individual to fit into social structures as those systems currently exist, need-responders guide clients to cultivate support for transforming those imposing systems.

Need-responders present as an attractive solution to the problem of institutional decline that has actually been a persisting problem for decades. Need-responders can be equipped to turn these institutional challenges into opportunities. These failing institutions could learn much from need-response, or risk being outflanked by need-responders.

Need-responders can either complement or compete

Need-response invites lawyers, policymakers and psychotherapists—and any helping professional—to partner with need-responders. Need-responders can potentially complement the efforts of the other helping professions to answer institutional decline.

A business associate agreement can set the parameters for the working relationship. While many terms could be open for negotiation, principles of need-response are set in stone. All relevant needs must be identified and addressed. The aim cannot be to merely ease needs or relieve symptoms, but to fully resolve needs. Accountability remains set by empirically documented improved wellness outcomes.

If other helping professions fail to reach a minimal need-responsive standard, then need-responders may end up competing with other helping professions. They may be positioned to resolve needs so effectively that clients may lose hope in trusting the less responsive helping professions.

Need-responders are held to a much higher standard than other helping professionals. To earn the trust to monitor the legitimacy of powerholders and institutions, they must demonstrate their own legitimacy. If ineffective, need-responders risk losing marketability to the other helping professions.

Since this service is so new, we have a long way to establish its effectiveness in a wide array of situations. Along the way, we seek to inspire all helping professions to better understand and serve their clients and constituents needs, with the power of love.

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