What If the Base Is Never Stable?

Maslow

What If the Base Is Never Stable?

Human needs are not always a staircase.

The image the pyramid gives us

Satisfy the bottom. Move upward. Eventually, reach self-actualisation. The pyramid makes human development look like climbing stairs: you leave a step behind once you have stood on it.

Many disabled lives do not work like that. The base is not a step left behind. It is weather. Someone may have to renegotiate, sometimes daily, any of these:

• pain, sleep, food and fatigue;
• care, medication and healthcare;
• energy, transport and access;
• money, housing and bodily safety.

And yet the same person may, in the same week, love someone, write, research, parent, teach, advocate, laugh, make art, experience pleasure and pursue purpose. Growth does not wait politely until every basic need is solved. It happens alongside instability, inside it, and sometimes because of the creativity instability demands.

What Maslow actually allowed for

Maslow himself said the hierarchy was less rigid than his own presentation might imply. He described people as partly satisfied and partly unsatisfied at every level simultaneously, and he acknowledged exceptions – people for whom an ideal or a creative drive mattered more than safety. The staircase is largely a product of the diagram. Large-scale research has since supported the more flexible reading: Tay and Diener’s 2011 cross-cultural study found that people often reported “higher” needs being met even when “lower” ones were not.

So the disability-informed correction here is less a rejection of Maslow than a return to the more careful version of him. Many people find a spiral or a web a better image than a pyramid: needs that coexist, that a person moves among repeatedly, that pull on each other, and that can each be partly met while another is in crisis.

“You cannot self-actualise while unsafe” – and the complication

There is a real insight inside that line. When someone is chronically unsafe – in pain, unsure of their care, frightened about money – vast psychological and bodily resources go to survival. It would be dishonest to pretend that doesn’t cost anything.

But real lives also show creativity, meaning, resistance, connection and growth happening amid insecurity. A more accurate version of the line is:

It is difficult to build freely when much of your energy is repeatedly required for survival.

That keeps Maslow’s insight – survival costs something – without making growth impossible until life is perfect, and without implying that a disabled person living with permanent instability is permanently barred from fulfilment.

How the staircase misreads disabled clients

• Sequence as law + a fluctuating base → meaning-work deferred forever. A therapist waits for the client’s life to “settle” before exploring purpose, identity or creativity, and the waiting becomes the therapy.
• Prepotency + exhaustion → depletion read as low motivation. A client looks unmotivated, flat or avoidant when they are sleep-deprived, in pain, overloaded or living beyond sustainable energy. The useful question is: is this person failing to grow – or are the conditions for growth consuming all of their resources?
• “Basic needs first” + the client’s own priorities → the agenda taken away. A client who wants to talk about love or grief is steered back to sleep hygiene because that is “more basic”.
• A stable base as a precondition + a progressive condition → no route forward at all. If the base is expected to get worse, a staircase model has nothing to offer except loss.

In the therapy room

• Check the base without making it the gate. A brief, routine “what’s the base like this week?” – sleep, pain, care, money, energy – lets the therapist pace the session without deciding what the client is allowed to talk about.
• Let the depth of the work move with the day. On a low-capacity day, the session might be shorter, gentler or more practical; on a better day, it might go further. Both are therapy.
• Name survival costs as costs, not failings. Saying out loud that a client is spending most of their energy on staying afloat can relieve a great deal of self-blame.
• Notice the growth already happening. Point to the meaning, humour, care and creativity the client is already living with, rather than treating them as things that will come later.

Evidence and status

• Documented Maslow theory: partial satisfaction and the non-rigid ordering are in “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943) and Motivation and Personality (1954).
• Documented research: Tay and Diener (2011, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) found needs broadly universal but not strictly sequential in their link to well-being.
• This site’s synthesis: the spiral/web image, the reformulated line about survival, the four misreadings, the composite voices and the exchange.

If none of this fits – if right now survival genuinely is all there is room for – that is not a failure to grow. It is an accurate reading of what this season is costing you.

One question to carry: what are you already building, right now, on foundations that were never going to stay still?