We were born with a full set of senses but as Philip Larkin suggests

They fuck you up, your mum and dad; they may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra, just for you.

Larkin's suggestion is commonly held until it becomes a belief, another chance to escape the responsibility to feel our own feelings and know our own mind.

Now we have access to what I call a rehumanising process. It's an argument like this.

Used as we are to being stigmatised and feeling inadequate we can start the long haul of knowing our own mind. With new friends and new ideas we can move to recovery. That process is neither magical nor mysterious but happens when we realise the potential of our fundamental human needs.

Manfred Max-Neef's theory (see www.sorefeelings.com) of doing just that can bring us into a "language that opens the door of understanding that may emerge from the depth of our self discovery as an inseparable part of a whole that is the cradle of the miracle of life"

From now on into this web site we can learn to live with that language. It is not an easy transition. The biggest obstacle can be our built in tyrannies of what ought to be and would be if only we tried harder and took on more etc. Burdened with them we are our own worst enemy and dare not believe we are lovable and what we bring to life is good.

We become essentially human as we realise the potential of our constant and dynamic needs of subsistence, security, affection, understanding, articipation, creation, creation, identity and freedom to choose.

And find our changing attitudes indicate that we are becoming essentially human.

[Maslow has the same needs but arranged in a hierarchy. Manfred insists they are constant and dynamic (after all we eat and sleep every day and normally can't store a surplus) and that makes all the difference.]

Let's start, for example, with the need to understand. You read this page but understand it only as you struggle with it. No one else can do your understanding though talking it through with good enough friends may help if you're stuck, which can be the case.

Obviously we need nutrition and yet whoever grows it and cooks it we have to eat our food and digest it. No one can do that for us. Similarly we have to sleep our own sleep and reflect on our own experience and participate with whomever we choose to meet up with.

So it is with all the needs.

The idea of realising the potential of fundamental human needs can seem incomphrensible to us when our first thought is to buy, beg, borrow or steal - to import - whatever we need.

This is best understood by watching Manfred at work on video. Thanks to Channel 4 with Manfred's blessing allowed us to modify a part of their 1990 profile of him. But in watching it you need to suspend judgement else in our neo-liberal affluence you'll be tempted to deny its usefulness.

However all our needs are constant and dynamic and cannot be buried, forgotten denied or overlooked. They, as it were, insist on being satisfied. And that spells big trouble.

But we are becoming human. This is an enormous undertaking.

We find our identity (another need) as we encounter each other so that between real friends we are committed to the relationship.

As we get used (and it can take years) to the idea of realising the potential of our fundamental human needs we find ourselves with new values, new ways of thought, a new resourcefulness and new friends.

In that new confidence we can test any problematic experience to see whether we can, or can not, realise the potential of our basic needs in that situation. We can act on that basis, to go or not to go. This constant vigilance can stop us wallowing in the past.

An intrinsic part of the miracle of life is that we are social animals designed to work together. Were we nomadic farmers doing what needs doing by bringing our flocks to new pasture the whole family would flourish as they realise the potential of their basic human needs.

We can't be nomadic herdsmen but that same corporate skill can enable us do well enough as carers. But if we're educated in the spirit of competitive capitalism we can't develop that innate skill and the whole system suffers as one party wins whilst the others lose out.

Then, and maybe only then, can we start to see through the tyranny of working and family environments driven by concepts such as the ideal and being called. We can begin to wean ourselves from destructive thought habits of stigmatisation and grow up as viable loveable and ordinary people.

Be wary of Normal people who want us bright eyed and bushy tailed. But they will ridicule and criticise us as we struggle to speak of our new understanding - of becoming human.

We move into that new understanding in an exercise called a Connexion.