Map to Compassion

Abstract

This article introduces the Human Needs Map — a sense-making tool that helps orient our minds to human needs that drive and trigger us, disrupting relationships and creating conflict. Initially inspired from fieldwork of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Human Needs Map has developed into a systems model that reveals the interior landscape of our Protective body/mind with needs and emotions in dynamic flux. The model provides a language to speak about the interconnectivity of needs through their synergies and tensions. Naming this emerging and coherent inter-dependency between needs and emotions offers a way to understand emotions as reasonable and provides more vectors to heal, dislodge or re-write narratives and beliefs, which perpetuate conflict. The implication lies not only at the individual level but also at the level of systems change to support the design of social and cultural structures more capable of taking needs and emotions into account. The present article traces the iterative process conceptualizing the model and discovering its internal patterns, followed by a discussion about the Needs system’s adaptive qualities and its role in creating and perpetuating Conflict, concluding with insights for Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding.