one of my favorite personal development books
is The Secret Laws of attraction
and I'm a 20 year marriage therapist
and personal coach and relationship coach
so I've read a lot of different books
and this is one of my favorites
and even though I've read books on
pure reviewed therapeutic models
and different techniques
and different ways of thinking about things
that are more intellectual
or academic or pure reviewed I still find myself
coming back to this book
over and over because it seems to really explain
something that I've seen
over the last 20 years and that is that we all have
a priority way that we organize and hierarchy
our emotional needs so in this book Talane Miedaner
who herself
is a really well known personal and business life coach
she identified a variety of different emotional needs
at the time that I read this book I think she had like 27
emotional needs she had identified at this point
when I've gone back to look at her stuff she's now added
more so she's adding more distinction
either adding needs on or distinguishing
between the ones she already had more specifically
and one of the things I love is that she talks
about this idea
that we all have all of the emotional needs
the way I think about it is like vitamins and minerals
like we all have the need for appreciation
we all have the need for belonging
we all have the need for personal power
we all have the need
to be right about things at times we all have
the need to be loved
we all have the need to be accepted
so we all have all of these emotional
needs very similar to how we all have the needs
for vitamin a and vitamin d and vitamin
B2 and B3 we all need all of them
and when certain needs have not been met
and they're deficient
or when certain needs have been met with like vitamins
or food
but our body can't absorb them and so we therefore
become deficient then those needs
become like priority needs so deficiency can cause
a need to move up and become more important
so one of the things she discusses
in this book is how we all have all the needs
but when you go in and take a subjective
assessment what you'll see is that people report
that certain needs are experienced as higher
and her perspective
is that often one of the reasons that
at least one of our top needs is in the top
is that we're either unaware of it
or we actually have a judgment of that need
and so when something comes in to help us
meet that need we actually
close ourselves off or don't let ourselves
receive it in a healthy way
so it could be that the needs are literally
not getting fulfilled like there's a deficiency
in the availability of it in our environment
or it could be that it's coming to us it's available
but we can't absorb it and so when that happens
those deficiencies move up into our top needs
and if we aren't aware
of that and we're not able to meet that deficiency
in a healthy way then what can happen
is we start to go out and we start to make choices
in an attempt to get those emotional needs
met that we're either unaware we have
or that we're actually judging and when we do that
when we're unaware
or we're judging and we try to get those
needs met in an unhealthy way we get confused about
why we start to pattern ourselves into unhealthy
relationship patterns
unhealthy relationship patterns with ourselves
and how we treat ourselves
or unhealthy relationship patterns with others
and how we allow others to treat
us or how we treat them and so
I come back to this book over and over
because I have found it to be such a helpful framing
for beginning to understand our patterns
and exploring what are the emotional needs
that are getting met
when I play out this unhealthy pattern over and over
so for example if your need for
approval or acceptance is higher
than your emotional need for safety
then you could stay in a literally in an unsafe
relationship where there could actually be something like domestic
violence because
maybe sometimes you're getting
bread crumbs of acceptance or approval
that have felt so deficient for you either
in relationship with yourself you haven't
really Learned how to accept and approve of yourself
and or in your relationships with others
and so you can stay in that unhealthy dynamic
not realizing that you're prioritizing
approval and acceptance unconsciously over safety
once you can learn that approval and acceptance are
more important to your psyche
on some unconscious level than even your
experience of emotional safety is
then you can start to say okay so if this is really
important I need to prioritize it but I've got to find a healthy
way to get that need met
that doesn't sacrifice safety
and so it allows you to start to
integrate needs it allows you to start to integrate
ways of getting those needs met
in more holistic healthy ways or at least
in ways that don't cause as much harm or damage
to other needs
for me when I first read this book it's been over 10 years since I first read this book so
we're now in 2026 I read this book over 10 years ago
and when I read it I took the assessment
she had in here
and I laid out my top four emotional needs
and my top need was safety now again
here she's not talking about physical safety obviously
in order for us to survive
we all have a need for physical safety the way that I
interpreted
what she was talking about here was our experience
of an emotional need for safety
not just that we have the need for emotional
safety I mean we also have the need for physical safety but our experience
of feeling emotionally safe and maybe even feeling
physically safe but it's like the emotional
aspect of the need for safety
that's how I interpreted what she was saying here
and so it was my number one of all of the needs
in hierarchy
and when I told my best friend I said I understand
the other three of my top four
I'm like oh I can really see how those are
like strong emotional needs
I said but I don't understand my top one
the need for safety I was like
I feel like I already feel really safe like I don't I'm not understanding that one
and my closest friend she looked at me and she said
are you joking
are you kidding like she was so surprised that I was
surprised and it really was eye opening to me
to realize that we sometimes
really truly have in our psyche
blind spots about ourselves
and what we're seeing about who we are
what we see that we need
and it was so helpful for her to lay out what she saw and observed
and how she saw me needing
the experience and the emotional
feeling of safety and when she started to explain it all of a sudden it was like
this whole world of understanding
started to come forward and made so much more sense to me
and once I could really honor my need for feeling safe
in the world and in relationships
it's been kind of life changing
and it really is what allowed me
to set healthier boundaries
in the relationships I was in at that time
and I think it's really a part of what helped me
to within the next year or two then have enough healthy
boundaries in place so that when I met my husband
like that situation just flowed pretty well
after having spent
20 years in the dating field and longing for
a committed healthy
romantic partner and relationship
going through this process
reading this book
identifying my top four emotional needs exploring
the one that was especially outside of my awareness
and looking at how to meet that
in a more full complete healthy way
I think was one of the most life changing parts
of my own relational journey
so this has been one of my favorite books to recommend
and I don't know if I hadn't processed it with my close
friend and she hadn't given me her feedback
maybe I wouldn't have experienced
the book as helpful as I did
but because it went the way it went
I ended up really loving this book and I find myself
coming back to it over and over to better understand
how things that we
sometimes think are obvious aren't always obvious
and sometimes things that we think we call moral
can actually have an emotional need aspect
so I think it's a great one to check out if you're
interested
in personal development relational development
that's my tip for today take care one of my favorite
personal development books
is The Secret Laws of attraction
and I'm a 20 year relationship expert
I spent 18 of those years working as a marriage
therapist and I've spent 20 of those years
working as a personal coach and relationship coach
so I've read a lot of different books
and this is one of my favorites
and even though I've read books on
pure reviewed therapeutic models
and different techniques
and different ways of thinking about things
that are more intellectual
or academic or pure reviewed I still find myself
coming back to this book
over and over because it seems to really explain
something that I've seen over the last 20 years
and that is that we all have
a priority way that we organize and hierarchy
our emotional needs so in this book toleine Meidner
who herself
is a really well known personal and business life coach
she identified a variety of different emotional needs
at the time that I read this book I think she had like 27
emotional needs she had identified at this point
when I've gone back to look at her stuff she's now added
more so she's adding more distinction
either adding needs on or distinguishing
between the ones she already had more specifically
and one of the things I love is that she talks
about this idea
that we all have all of the emotional needs
the way I think about it is like vitamins and minerals
like we all have the need for appreciation
we all have the need for belonging
we all have the need for personal power
we all have the need
to be right about things at times we all have
the need to be loved
we all have the need to be accepted
so we all have all of these emotional needs
very similar to how we all have the needs
for vitamin a and vitamin d and vitamin
B2 and B3 we all need all of them
and when certain needs have not been met
and they're deficient
or when certain needs have been met
with like vitamins or food
but our body can't absorb them and so we therefore
become deficient then those needs
become like priority needs so deficiency can cause
a need to move up and become more important
so one of the things she discusses
in this book is how we all have all the needs
but when you go in and take a subjective
assessment what you'll see is that people report
that certain needs are experienced as higher
and her perspective
is that often one of the reasons that
at least one of our top needs is in the top
is that we're either unaware of it
or we actually have a judgment of that need
and so when something
comes in to help us meet that need we actually
close ourselves off or don't let ourselves
receive it in a healthy way
so it could be that the needs are literally
not getting fulfilled like there's a deficiency
in the availability of it in our environment
or it could be that
it's coming to us it's available but we can't absorb it
and so when that happens
those deficiencies move up into our top needs
and if we aren't aware
of that and we're not able to meet that deficiency
in a healthy way then what can happen
is we start to go out and we start to make choices
in an attempt to get those
emotional needs met that we're either unaware we have
or that we're actually judging and when we do that
when we're unaware
or we're judging and we try to get those
needs met in an unhealthy way we get confused about
why we start to pattern ourselves into unhealthy
relationship patterns
unhealthy relationship patterns with ourselves
and how we treat ourselves
or unhealthy relationship patterns with others
and how we allow others to treat
us or how we treat them and so
I come back to this book over and over
because I have found it to be such a helpful framing
for beginning to understand our patterns
and exploring what are the emotional needs
that are getting met
when I play out this unhealthy pattern over and over
so for example if your need for
approval or acceptance is higher
than your emotional need for safety
then you could stay in a literally in an unsafe
relationship
where there could actually be something like domestic
violence because
maybe sometimes you're getting bread
crumbs of acceptance or approval
that have felt so deficient for you either
in relationship with yourself you haven't
really Learned how to accept and approve of yourself
and or in your relationships with others
and so you can stay in that unhealthy dynamic
not realizing that you're prioritizing
approval and acceptance unconsciously over safety
once you can learn that approval and acceptance are
more important to your psyche
on some unconscious level than even your
experience of emotional safety is
then you can start to say okay so if this is really
important
I need to prioritize it but I've got to find a healthy
way to get that need met
that doesn't sacrifice safety
and so it allows you to start to
integrate needs it allows you to start to integrate
ways of getting those needs met
in more holistic healthy ways
or at least in ways
that don't cause as much harm or damage to other needs
for me when I first read this book it's been over 10 years since I first read this book so
we're now in 2026 I read this book over 10 years ago
and when I read it I took the assessment
she had in here
and I laid out my top four emotional needs
and my top need was safety
now again here she's not talking about physical safety
obviously in order for us to survive
we all have a need for physical safety the way that I
interpreted
what she was talking about here was our experience of an
emotional need for safety
not just that we have the need for
emotional safety I mean we also have the need for physical safety
but our experience of feeling emotionally safe
and maybe even feeling physically
safe but it's like the
emotional aspect of the need for safety
that's how I interpreted what she was saying here
and so it was my number one of all of the needs
in hierarchy
and when I told my best friend I said I understand
the other three of my top four
I'm like oh I can really see how those are
like strong emotional needs
I said but I don't understand my top one
the need for safety I was like I feel like I already
feel really safe like I don't I'm not understanding
that one
and my closest friend she looked at me and she said
are you joking
are you kidding like she was so surprised that I was
surprised and it really was eye opening to me
to realize that we sometimes
really truly have in our psyche
blind spots about ourselves
and what we're seeing about who we are
what we see that we need
and it was so helpful for her to lay out what she saw and observed
and how she saw me needing
the experience and the emotional feeling of safety
and when she started to explain it all of a sudden it was like
this whole world of understanding
started to come forward and made
so much more sense to me
and once I could really honor my need for feeling safe
in the world and in relationships
it's been kind of life changing
and it really is what allowed me
to set healthier boundaries
in the relationships I was in at that time
and I think it's really a part of what helped me
to within the next year or two then have
enough healthy boundaries in place so that when I met my husband
like that situation just flowed pretty well
after having spent
20 years in the dating field and longing for
a committed healthy romantic partner and relationship
going through this process
reading this book
identifying my top four emotional needs exploring
the one that was especially outside of my awareness
and looking at how to meet that
in a more full complete healthy way
I think was one of the most life changing parts
of my own relational journey
so this has been one of my favorite books to recommend
and I don't know if I hadn't
processed it with my close friend and she hadn't given me her feedback
maybe I wouldn't have experienced the book as helpful as I did
but because it went the way it went
I ended up really loving this book and I find myself
coming back to it over and over to better understand
how things that we
sometimes think are obvious aren't always obvious
and sometimes things that we think we call moral
can actually have an emotional need aspect
so I think it's a great one to check out if you're
interested
in personal development relational development
that's my tip for today take care one of my favorite
personal development books
is The Secret Laws of attraction
and I'm a 20 year relationship expert I spent
18 of those years working as a marriage therapist
and I've spent 20 of those years
working as a personal coach and relationship coach
so I've read a lot of different books
and this is one of my favorites
and even though I've read books on
pure reviewed therapeutic models
and different techniques
and different ways of thinking about things
that are more intellectual
or academic or pure reviewed I still find myself coming
back to this book
over and over because it seems to really explain
something that I've seen
over the last 20 years and that is that we all have
a priority way that we organize and hierarchy
our emotional needs so in this book toleine Meidner
who herself
is a really well known personal and business life coach
she identified a variety of different emotional needs
at the time that I read this book I think she had like 27
emotional needs she had identified at this point
when I've gone back to look at her stuff she's now added
more so she's adding more distinction
either adding needs on or distinguishing
between the ones she already had more specifically
and one of the things I love is that she talks
about this idea
that we all have all of the emotional needs
the way I think about it is like vitamins and minerals
like we all have the need for appreciation
we all have the need for belonging
we all have the need for personal power
we all have the need
to be right about things at times we all have
the need to be loved
we all have the need to be accepted
so we all have all of these emotional needs
very similar to how we all have the needs
for vitamin a and vitamin d and vitamin
B2 and B3 we all need all of them
and when certain needs have not been met
and they're deficient
or when certain needs have been met
with like vitamins or food
but our body can't absorb them and so we therefore
become deficient then those needs
become like priority needs so deficiency can cause
a need to move up and become more important
so one of the things she discusses
in this book is how we all have all the needs
but when you go in and take a subjective
assessment what you'll see is that people report
that certain needs are experienced as higher
and her perspective is that often one of the reasons
that at least one of our top needs is in the top
is that we're either unaware of it
or we actually have a judgment of that need
and so when something
comes in to help us meet that need we actually
close ourselves off or don't let ourselves
receive it in a healthy way
so it could be that the needs
are literally not getting fulfilled
like there's a deficiency
in the availability of it in our environment
or it could be that
it's coming to us it's available but we can't absorb it
and so when that happens
those deficiencies move up into our top needs
and if we aren't aware
of that and we're not able to meet that deficiency in a healthy way
then what can happen
is we start to go out and we start to make choices
in an attempt to get those emotional needs met
that we're either unaware we have
or that we're actually judging and when we do that
when we're unaware
or we're judging and we try to get those
needs met in an unhealthy way we get confused about
why we start to pattern ourselves into unhealthy
relationship patterns
unhealthy relationship patterns with ourselves
and how we treat ourselves
or unhealthy relationship patterns with others
and how we allow others to treat us or how we treat
them and so
I come back to this book over and over
because I have found it to be such a helpful framing
for beginning to understand our patterns
and exploring what are the emotional needs
that are getting met
when I play out this unhealthy pattern over and over
so for example if your need for
approval or acceptance is higher
than your emotional need for safety
then you could stay in a literally in an unsafe
relationship where there
could actually be something like domestic violence
because maybe sometimes you're getting
bread crumbs of acceptance or approval
that have felt so deficient for you either
in relationship with yourself you haven't
really Learned how to accept and approve of yourself
and or in your relationships with others
and so you can stay in that unhealthy dynamic
not realizing that you're prioritizing
approval and acceptance unconsciously over safety
once you can learn that approval and acceptance are
more important to your psyche
on some unconscious level than even your
experience of emotional safety is
then you can start to say okay so if this is really
important I need to prioritize it but I've got to find a healthy
way to get that need met that doesn't sacrifice safety
and so it allows you to start to
integrate needs it allows you to start to integrate
ways of getting those needs met
in more holistic healthy ways or at least in ways
that don't cause as much harm or damage to other needs
for me when I first read this book it's been over 10 years since I first read this book so
we're now in 2026 I read this book over 10 years ago
and when I read it I took the assessment
she had in here
and I laid out my top four emotional needs
and my top need was safety now
again here she's not talking
about physical safety obviously
in order for us to survive
we all have a need for physical safety the way that I
interpreted
what she was talking about here was our experience
of an emotional need for safety
not just that we have the need for
emotional safety I mean we also have the need for physical safety
but our experience of feeling emotionally safe
and maybe even feeling physically
safe but it's like the
emotional aspect of the need for safety
that's how I interpreted what she was saying here
and so it was my number one of all of the needs
in hierarchy
and when I told my best friend I said I understand
the other three of my top four
I'm like oh I can really see how those are
like strong emotional needs
I said but I don't understand
my top one the need for safety I was like
I feel like I already feel really safe like I don't I'm not understanding that one
and my closest friend she looked at me and she said
are you joking
are you kidding like she was so surprised that I was
surprised and it really was eye opening to me
to realize that we sometimes
really truly have in our psyche
blind spots about ourselves
and what we're seeing about who we are
what we see that we need
and it was so helpful for her to lay out what she saw and observed
and how she saw me needing
the experience and the emotional
feeling of safety and when she started to explain it all of a sudden it was like
this whole world of understanding
started to come forward and made
so much more sense to me
and once I could really honor my need for feeling safe
in the world and in relationships
it's been kind of life changing
and it really is what allowed me
to set healthier boundaries
in the relationships I was in at that time
and I think it's really a part of what helped me
to within the next year or two then have enough healthy
boundaries in place so that when I met my husband
like that situation just flowed pretty well
after having spent
20 years in the dating field and longing for
a committed healthy
romantic partner and relationship
going through this process
reading this book
identifying my top four emotional needs exploring
the one that was especially outside of my awareness
and looking at how to meet that
in a more full complete healthy way
I think was one of the most life changing parts
of my own relational journey
so this has been one of my favorite books to recommend
and I don't know if I hadn't processed it with my close
friend and she hadn't given me her feedback
maybe I wouldn't have experienced the book as helpful as I did
but because it went the way it went
I ended up really loving this book and I find myself
coming back to it over and over to better understand
how things that we sometimes think are obvious
aren't always obvious
and sometimes things that we think we call moral
can actually have an emotional need aspect
so I think it's a great one to check out if you're
interested
in personal development relational development
that's my tip for today take care
