When we feel bad about ourselves and are fearful that no one will love us or employ us or eventually want to be seen with us we can go over it all time and time again. Maybe, as in Katy's video, it might all boil over and we'll have the mess to clear up.

The stigma and sense of shame and inadequacy of it all is less depressing than it used to be.

Recipes to beat it are legion. It won't go away by some sort of magic but will knaw away at any slender sense we have of well being.

OR we can see it all as rooted in a qualified satisfaction of our fundamental human needs.

This is another clumsy but significant phrase. It won't go away since it represents one of life's problem areas. A slow to take root anntidote to it is found in becoming human .

Our needs are constant and dynamic and cannot be buried, forgotten denied or over looked. They, as it were, insist on being satisfied. And that can spell trouble.

If we, for instance, snatch and grab at whatever's going we'll end up with qualified satisfaction which is always less than satisfactory.

We can be so desperate for affection that we will sell ourselves short by falling for someone who seems friendly but will use us badly. We will seem to satisfy our need for affection, but it's not even second best; it's a qualified satisfaction, and will end eventually in tears.

We can be fascinated with an idea of how to get on, to make a fortune, to win a war or even simply to be right, until we believe in what is a social construct, one we made for ourselves.

Yet paradoxically in selling ourselves short we can develop a new skill of recognising, being aware of, qualified satisfaction as we experience it. This happens as and when we

• fall foul of or fall in with tormentors, with whoever violates or is destructive
• find ourselves inhibited and confused as though we have no mind of our own
• go along with what is deceptive, phoney, spurious and patronising.
• are seduced by simplification, by quick and easy answers to complex matters.

Seeing through, unlearning or deconstructing these slip shod thought habits is emotionally laborious. Whenever we feel something is not as it could be we can hunt for which ever qualified satisfaction, see above, is disturbing and threatening our sense of well being.

When we feel jaded and out of sorts, and life seems to drag we're probably experiencing that qualified satisfaction. This may not be desperate but the seeds of catastrophe are taking root. In that state others may advise us not to worry or worse still to think positive.

Qualified satisfaction of our needs can be seen as hollow promises. The world is full of them; on bad days we can imagine the world is made of them. Hence our need to discriminate, to smell them coming and see through them.

Yet sometimes we want something for nothing and will snatch at what we say we want. This is a stupid idea which hopefully, with new friends and new ideas we'll grow out of.