The Needs Underneath
The Hurt
The Core Needs Collection™ is a three-book series on the five core emotional needs that shape your past, your present, and future.
It was never really just about what happened.
Underneath almost everything is a need.
Your emotions. Your reactions. The patterns you repeat, the beliefs you hold about yourself, the way you fight, love, work, rest and talk to yourself. Most of it traces back to the same source: core emotional needs, and whether they were met, missed or wounded.
After comparing roughly 90 psychological frameworks, five needs came up again and again, all met or wounded through relationships:
Safety · Esteem · Trust · Connection · Autonomy
For nearly everything, the need is the root. Once you can name which one is in play, what used to feel random starts to make sense, and what makes sense can be worked with.
Core needs are the foundation and best facilitation of all of these:
Reparenting, shadow work, rewriting limiting beliefs, emotional regulation, working through triggers, coping styles, codependency, boundaries, generational trauma cycle breaking, and more.
You can’t change what happened - but you can choose what happens now.
Book 1: Missing Pieces
The needs that explain your hurts that no one ever explained to you
What you get:
You’ll learn the facets of all five core emotional needs that sit underneath most of your relationship pain like what they looked like met and unmet in childhood and adulthood.
You’ll see how unmet needs drive patterns in romance, friendship, family, work, rest, conflict, boundaries and self-talk.
You’ll recognize your own coping strategies, like hypervigilance, perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-independence and subjugation, and see how they block the very needs they try to protect.
You’ll get a guide to creating your own personal core emotional needs history and see which of your needs went unmet the most.
You’ll understand what each core need meant for you, specifically, in every phase of life.
You’ll learn how to grieve what you didn’t get, so you can stop waiting for it from people who can’t give it.
Potentially: dozens of aha moments that make a lot of things make sudden sense.
Book 2: Bad Blood
When a Cut Becomes a Crime Scene
What you get:
You’ll learn to tell whether you’re facing a new injury, an old wound reopening, or both.
You’ll stop hurt from turning into retaliation and drama and stop losing relationships you didn’t need to lose.
You’ll learn why cutting back undermines your own needs, and why handling a hurt with dignity is in your own best interest.
You’ll get a clear, repeatable process for any hurt
You’ll get word-for-word scripts
You’ll learn to spot ambushing, hypocrisy, double standards, blame-shifting and contempt
You’ll get eight possible diagnoses of a conflict, so your response fits what actually happened.
You’ll get six options between “stay” and “cut them off,” with sample language for each.
You’ll learn how to end a relationship humanely when that’s the right call.
You’ll never be asked to tolerate abuse, forgive on demand, or drop your boundaries.
Book 3: Good Company
Choosing What Meets You When You Know What Needs Meeting
What you get:
You’ll learn the three qualities that a person must have in order to be good company and how to spot them over time.
You’ll learn exactly what good company does when they’ve wounded one of your core emotional needs.
You’ll learn to tell the difference between what feels right and what’s actually good for you.
You’ll learn to give people different levels of access based on how they behave, not just their role (family, friend, boss).
You’ll learn how your job, home, routines, communities, media and inner voice either support your needs or work against them, with small, realistic first steps that don’t require upending your life.
You’ll learn how to become good company yourself, so you don’t recreate old harm in new relationships.
Three books. One arc.
Sold together on purpose.
Understanding your past without knowing what to do when you get hurt again leaves you insightful and still stuck. Knowing how to handle hurt now without knowing how to avoid it in the future leaves you circling the same issues forever.
Each book picks up where the last one leaves off, and the tools you build in one carry into the next. Read alone, each book is useful. Read together, they’re a complete way of working with your needs: past, present and future.
What Makes These
- and all Growth & Gold Books -
Different
It goes underneath. Not more labels for symptoms. The five needs that explain them.
Short means finished. Each book is a quick read. You’ll actually get to the end, and every page is doing work.
Tools, not theory. Inventories, scripts, processes and practices you can use the same day.
No toxic positivity. No toxic blaming. Straight talk about what hurt you and what you’re responsible for now.
Built in sequence. Past, present, future - an order that makes sense and leaves no part of your growth trajectory untouched.
This is for you if:
You’ve dated the same person in five different bodies and you’d like to know why the hell that keeps happening.
You can name your attachment style, your love language and your enneagram number, and you’re still crying in the car. Or punching things. Or singing “All by Myself” at the top of your lungs.
You’ve either blown up a relationship you wanted to keep or swallowed something you should’ve said, and you’re done doing both.
You’re tired of keeping the status quo just because they’re family, they’re fun or they’re familiar.
You’re a coach, helper or clinician who wants a framework clients actually get on the first try. (Using it with clients? See our page for therapists.)
This might not be for you if:
You want a magic fix by Friday. These books will change how you see things fast. The work still takes time.
You’re in crisis right now. Please call or text 988, or reach out to a licensed professional. These books will be here when you’re ready.
You’re looking for a savior. The only person who can save you is yourself. This is a toolkit for just that.
You actually love reading 12 different chapters all saying the same thing.
You like your psychology wrapped in so much jargon you need a glossary to get through it.
You like your self-help soft, full of affirmations, and tiptoeing around what you really need to hear. Candy tastes good but has no nutritional value.
You’ve Got Options
Our Signature Core Needs Collection comes in two different versions.
Discreet by design: shipped in a plain kraft rigid mailer with no branding on the outside. What you’re reading is your business.
Shipping: US only · USPS Media Mail
The Classic Edition
These are pocket sized books that contain only the text of the books. Purchase the journals separately after you read them and decide which ones you want most.
The Journal Edition
These are half-letter sized and contain the book first and then the associated five-minute journal. Each journal template helps you apply the principles of the book to your life so that you can begin benefiting immediately.
None of these books leave you alone.
They’re accompanied by the best freaking tools and guides in the game.
For each book, you’ll find the principles and major teachings turned into worksheets that will help you apply them to your life with ease.
Find them in the digital products section of our shop.
About the Author
Sara is a Master’s student in a CACREP-accredited Clinical Mental Health Counseling program and the founder of Growth & Gold. She wrote this series after learning about core emotional needs rocked her world and not being able to find anything about them stated plainly on the first page of Google search results. It’s time for that to change.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. The series is built as one arc, and each book relies on tools from the one before, so it’s sold only as a set.
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Short by design. Each can be read in an afternoon or only a few sittings]. Only one is longer than 100 pages (in the pocket size.)
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Yes. The order is Missing Pieces, Bad Blood, and Good Company. Each later book references the one before it.
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No. This is what therapists would call “psychoeducation.” Psychoeducation is a part of therapy but not the whole thing.
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The books are for personal reading. For using Growth & Gold materials with clients or groups, see our page for therapists.
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Unfortunately we can only ship in the contiguous 48 U.S. states for now. Digital products can be purchased if you use a VPN set on a U.S. location (because the EU charges sales taxes on digital products and we are not set up to remit those.)
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We do not offer a digital version at this time, but we might in the future. We understand the appeal but personally find that processing and healing happens much better when we’re away from screens.
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UNOPENED (still sealed in the wrapping) sets can be returned within 14 days, shipping paid by customer.
Opened sets may not be returned, since these are able to be read so fast.
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Gifting something of a sensitive nature like this can be tricky, but it can be just fine depending on the relationship. We would never, ever advise you gift this set in order to “teach someone a lesson.” If you desire to teach anyone a lesson that badly, please do read them yourself first.
Five needs. Three Books. One clear path to understand your past, handle your present, and choose your future.
