How can I adequately describe my experience in this exact moment? Objectively, I am sitting at my computer writing this, but there is so much more going on around and within me that defies my ability to articulate.
Much of what is happening only appears in my awareness if I shift my attention away from writing. Then I notice a crick in the neck, a frisson of unexplained excitement, a certain stodginess in my thinking. At the same time, the majority of what is going on in my body, my environment and in my deeper psyche is inaccessible and unfathomable. I can’t feel my liver metabolizing or my eyes transforming light into neural signals. I don’t really know what prompted me to start writing or understand where these ideas arise from. Experience is essentially mysterious.
But as therapists we are expected to be experts in understanding and influencing every kind of experience in all its complexity. In reality, we mostly rely on bits and pieces of training, supervision and experience to guide us. We may espouse a particular approach or set of techniques, but we are never quite sure if what we do is directly in accord with the protocols. Each therapeutic session is filled with the unexpected and the uncontrolled and we are often flying blind.
I believe we need better ways to map and model the formless territory of relationship, experience and therapeutic change. The ordinary ‘scientific’ way of studying the world is inadequate. It tends to reduce and disconnect complicated information into simpler elements for examination and explanation using an analytic materialist, reductionist paradigm. This might have its place when describing a rock but makes no sense when applied to a human being.
Once we dismantle human experience, it loses coherence and meaning. There is a wholeness to who we are that cannot be explained in terms of bits and pieces. Human beings are more than the outcome of neuronal firing, more than the sum total of their behaviors. Our explanations must take into account that we are alive, conscious and aware of ourselves. They should illuminate ordinary common-sense experiences of ourselves and the world and move beyond the obvious into new realms of understanding.
In contrast to reductionism, a dynamical way of thinking is holistic and systemic; it addresses the issues of human complexity, relationship, connectivity and integration.
Since the groundbreaking work of Von Bertalannfy, systems theory has been used to explore how complexity arises out of simpler building blocks. Anything that is made up of interrelated parts, organized coherently so that the connectivity between the parts gives rise to a greater whole, is a system. If we look around us with this viewpoint, there is very little that does not fulfil these criteria. Systems theorists are concerned with connections and patterns, with relationships and coherence, with dynamic movement that maintains stability of structure and form.
Erich Jantsch in his unifying vision of the Unfolding Universe explains:
…this new understanding may be characterized as process-oriented, in contrast to the emphasis on “solid” system components and structures composed of them. …Emphasis is then on the becoming — and even the being appears in dynamic systems as an aspect of becoming. … a system now appears as a set of coherent, evolving, interactive processes which temporarily manifest in globally stable structures…
It asks interesting questions: “How does life arise out of simple material elements; how are living organisms similar to each other; how are minds and experience organized_.” Conrad Waddington, a highly innovative geneticist, calls this approach and its concepts, “Tools for Thought”. These tools allow us to explore unfamiliar territory, take mental leaps, notice the unexpected and mysterious.
Because of its lack of linear trains of cause and effect, systems thinking seems strange at first. It does not match how we are implicitly taught to view the world. there is a need to stretch the mind to embrace a larger context. If you stay in a ‘little mind’ mode, if you require certainty and simple cause and effect explanations, then this approach is uncomfortable. However, once you extend your understanding into widening circles of connection, in which you play an essential part, then there is the excitement of seeing the world in a different way.
In this work, recognition of the systemic nature of human experience is fundamental. The major focus is the individual, so I tend to neglect the important fields of social interaction excepts as it is represented in experience. This is not to underestimate its impact. However, we can also approach social reality from the point of view of each person’s experience of that reality. The social world exists in our inner representation of that world. That representation reflects in symbolic and process terms, the parts of that world that are personally relevant. For example, your experience of me through this writing, is a relational phantasm – we are connected and disconnected. Yet what is true is that you will experience this relationship (whatever it is) in your own unique way; it is, in some sense, a reflection of all your relationships. It is part of your system of experiencing.
Systems Concepts
Many concepts of systems approach have found their way into psychological discourse. Boundary, process, emergence, redundancy and feedback are familiar terms. However, in systems theory, these concepts are used in specific ways. To bring them to life, as each concept is defined, I will apply it to everyday experience. Out of that experience we can then begin to explore its application to the process of psychotherapy.
We start by examining the central concept of emergence. This, in itself, returns the element of creativity, unexpectedness and mystery into our understanding. Emergence is the pattern of wholes that arises out of the relationship between parts. Parts and wholes, and their defining boundaries are the next focus of attention. These concepts may be more familiar than the more technical equifinality, redundancy, homeostasis and homeorhesis that are explored in the latter sections. However, these rather forbidding terms describe cogent and fascinating aspects of living systems that are essential for a more complete understanding.
Emergence
Emergence is the coming into being of a new and unpredictable whole out of the interrelationship and organization of constituent parts. It is the sense of patterned completeness that defines anything that is not broken, dismantled or dead. Everything around you and within you is made up of collections of elements of ever decreasing size. Yet it is all ordered — organized in incredibly complex ways. Out of the connection between elements, coherence arises.
For example, bodies are never random collections of organs and limbs. You cannot predict what a human body could be or do from seeing those organs in a heap. An ant’s nest is more than and different from a bunch of ants living together. You cannot understand how the ant colony works from examining a single ant. It is the unique relationship between organs or ants that create something unexpected and miraculous.
Each morning, as we wake, our consciousness begins anew. For a few moments, or sometimes a lot longer, we are not quite sure who or where we are. Once fully awake, our familiar sense of self asserts itself, we become oriented to the external world and the activities it requires. Personally, it is my vulnerable time. I am easily disrupted by extraneous noises or demands; I react in a more primitive and less coherent manner than I would like. Where was I and my normal consciousness of self while I slept? What is happening as I awake?
From a systems perspective, I am experiencing emergence. Waking from sleep, first my consciousness and then my normal sense of self emerges anew. This happens automatically. My experience of who I am and the world around me begin to coordinate. If I have under slept, my self, in the sense of a controlling identity, is fragile; it has some difficulty forming. Then self-awareness is less and my ability to organize myself and my actions remains somewhat incoherent. There is a subtle sense of un-integration and internal disconnectedness. When I have slept well, I come together as an integrated individual, with a sense of intention, thoughts, feelings, sensations and actions that are organized and intact. I emerge into my normal self.
Emergence is one of the ever-present mysteries of life. Life itself, and most of the complex aspects of living things, arise complete out of patterns of constituent parts relating and interacting. We cannot entirely predict how or what will become manifest from examining those parts. We cannot guess at a thought by looking at the brain. Only when parts of an organic system are organized in a particular manner does life manifest. If something is alive it will create a whole and more coordinated response to the environment around and within it. It will not only be organized, but it will organize itself, both internally and externally. Living organisms seek coordination; it is not imposed from outside.
Emergence accounts for those taken for granted but unexplainable phenomena that makes us most human: the capacity to love, be creative, become more aware of ourselves. These essentials of humanness emerge whenever there is sufficient integration of our self and experience. This is not all or none; there are gradations of our emerging humanity that exists in an open-ended continuum. We can all become more loving, more creative, more self-aware; there is no end point to integration. Emergence allows for possibilities that are unimaginable from any limited viewpoint. The adult world of conscious control is far beyond an infant’s awareness. The rational mind cannot encompass the realm of spirit. There is a discontinuity; we cannot know what we may become before we get there.
Psychotherapy Explorations:
When two people enter relationship, they create a new pattern of experiencing. Neither participant may know consciously what exactly that is. It is unlikely that the colony of polyp that constitute a Portugese Man-of-War jelly fish, have any conception of the total invertebrate. Parts are typically unaware of the whole. Similarly, as therapists entering each therapeutic relationship, we cannot know fully what may be created.
Emergence is all around us. Whenever there is connection and integration, something else comes into being. The therapeutic system is therapist and client in relationship; that creates the container of therapy. Within that container, at any moment, experiences integrate. Therapist ‘intuition’ emerges, complete, out of a multitude of bits of information about the client. Client insight integrates personal understanding into a coherent and impactful meaning. Trauma is resolved as dissociated ‘parts’ of the client’s self becomes reconnected to the whole. Every successful session is an emergent completeness that travels with clients out into their lives.
Obviously, something emerges in therapy that is ‘”greater than, and different from, the sum of the parts”. Clients come because they have tried and failed to reach resolution of their difficulties on their own. They are looking for a new and wider context of experience. They are groping for a new whole that is just beyond their grasp — hoping to find a synergy that will unlock the door to healing and growth.
In the first therapy sessions, it looks like two people together exploring the client’s problems. Actually, it is better described as two people exploring how to connect so that something different can come into being. Through time and a certain renunciation of individual control, a process forms that carries both participants forward. Potentials emerge – potentials for healing, growing, developing. At first these occur primarily within the therapy session. Gradually they become available elsewhere. A new wholeness comes into being, both in the therapeutic relationship and in the experience of the client.
The concept of emergence neutralizes prediction and control. Control is an illusion when we work to allow something beyond our expectations to arise. Emergence is a basis for therapeutic humility. We can guess, but never be certain, how a person will be when they are more whole. We cannot know how each person needs to come together into a new pattern of experiencing. Every moment becomes an experiment in which unexpected possibilities may appear. We are a part of something. We partake of some greater whole.
Wholes and Parts
Science has traditionally tried to explain all things in terms of the workings of its constituent parts. The search for more and more fundamental particles in physics is an example. In psychology, the behavioral approach believed that stimulus and response constituted the building blocks of learning and thus human actions. Accepting that emergence exists, puts an end to that way of looking at things. What emerges is a living phenomenon, whether it is a cell, an organ, a body or a person; it is not only made up of parts but is also a part of some greater whole. Each whole, in turn, becomes a part of something greater than itself.
Arthur Koestler coined the term ‘holon’ to describe this phenomenon – everything is both whole and part at the same time. Whether it is seen as either one or the other is determined by your point of view.
Let us take experience and sense of self as examples of the relationship between parts and wholes. Reading this, you are thinking about what I am saying, trying to make sense of the words and meanings. That is the mind part of your experience. These descriptions may be interesting, irritating, exciting or boring to you. That is the heart or emotional part of your experience. Certainly, you see these pages, the printed words — you feel the touch of the paper, sensing the pressure of the book in your hand. Those are the body, or sensory parts of your experience. As you read, you turn the pages, adjust your posture, stop to look out the window, get up and take a break, maybe even talk to yourself. Those are the action parts of your experience.
With all those parts of experience coming and going, competing for your limited attention and awareness, how do you maintain a singular sense of self? We have described the self as an whole that emerges from the integration and connection between differing aspects of experience. Yet that is not the complete picture. You also know that when you finish reading, put the book down to talk to someone, although you are still yourself, there is a different feel to that self; your immediate identity has shifted.
Once you are awake, you experience yourself as a coherent individual acting on the world in a purposeful manner. However, within this sense of your total identity, there are many differing aspects of experience – many different aspects of self. You are not the same person reading this as you are driving your car, being with clients, playing with children. Your person has many facets, many parts that somehow are included in who you are. As you connect with yourself, with differing situations and people, become a therapist, spouse, return to your family of origin, you emerge into different selves.
There is not one self but many selves, connected in a field of ongoing process. Each self is, in some sense, an illusion, created each moment anew. We experience continuity, a carrier wave of identity through the relative consistency of process Nothing is lost, but there is no single thing that is the self. Self is ever changing – integrating, disintegrating, reintegrating – according to our needs and the forces from the inner and outer worlds. With development and growth, the self moves toward greater organization – it emerges into a further level of coherence.
The universe is stratified into many differing levels of organization. Each level has its own logic, its own inherent position within the whole such that a discontinuity exists between each level. A thought cannot be explained by the structure of neurons, though it inherently depends on them. A person cannot be explained by the structure of his or her thoughts. Each can only be understood in its own terms, its own form of logic, it own way of being. This is the nature of hierarchies.
Natural hierarchies are not power hierarchies. Unlike our social models of hierarchy, influence is exerted from ‘bottom up’ as much as ‘top down’. A jelly fish is not ‘better’ than its constituent polyps. It does not control their functioning. However, it is more successfully integrated into its environment than each tiny polyp would be alone. The relationship is a mutually beneficial cooperation and coordination of parts and wholes.
Tension between parts and wholes is at the root of many of our difficulties in understanding. We have two opposing perceptions of any reality — we see elements and try to analyze those parts to understand the whole. Or we see the whole and neglect the elements that constitute it. Analysis and synthesis are like visual illusions that are mutually exclusive. Only by balancing these perceptions, as in binocular vision, can we come closer to reality and achieve a sense of what is relevant and important.
Therapeutic Explorations:
In therapy, this binocular vision is essential. We must always see the whole person, expanding and emerging into ever-increasing integration. At the same time, we also must notice the details of their process — the way they think, feel, act in the world. Without some sense of the elements of experience, it is difficult to find those aspects of process that are blocked; our approach becomes too global. Without appreciating the wholeness of the person, we are in danger of supporting dis-integartion rather than integration.
The intention of therapy is about creating more complete wholes; it is integrative rather than reductive, synergistic rather than analytic. We examine elements of experience in order to understand their meaning and place in the whole. Specific memories, dreams and experiences are important as part-selves in as much as they begin to relate to each other more completely. Always, the aim is to foster a more coherent sense of the whole Self that relates to others and the world fully.
Wholeness relates to all aspects of experiencing. As we explore memories and past experiences, we see the broken pattern, the reasons why some aspect is not available for integration. Our system is designed to make us whole again regardless of the damage we sustain. Most cuts heal and become part of the background of our physical experience. Most painful losses become transformed into the raw materials for our sense of the meaning of life. When physical or emotional healing does not occur, something is wrong. Some part has become disconnected or divorced from the whole; the system has lost some of its self-organizing and self-repairing functions.
Dis-integration is the main cause of ongoing distress and disturbance. Body functions, memories, sensations, emotional reactions, thinking, behavior – all can become split off from the wholeness of the Self. Cohesion is threatened, experiences and actions are disorganized and the sense of self becomes unstable. This results from any experience that does not support or validate the individual wholeness of a person. Trauma, unmet needs, developmental disturbances, overwhelming life events — each can have an additive negative effect on the ability to become more integrated and complete. These disturbances then form their own field of influence that effectively blocks the natural inclination to transform and transcend.
This intention towards wholeness applies as much to the therapist as to the client. The therapist must embody and model integration of the Self. It is a truism that we cannot lead our clients to places we have never been – we cannot foster completeness from a position of fragmentation. So therapy demands that the therapist is constantly on their own integrative journey. This is more a matter of intention, striving and awareness than reaching some final perfection. Integration is never all or nothing, it fluctuates in its own rhythmic pattern depending on our state and circumstances. However, it part of the therapeutic task to endeavor to become the most that we can, to reflect the possibilities of what it is to be human.
Boundaries
What defines a holon? How do we know that a part is a part and a whole is a whole? There is something that creates form and shape, that defines separateness and individuality. This something is the boundary—a dividing line between this and that, a perimeter skin that surrounds and differentiates.
Boundaries are so much part of our everyday experience that we hardly notice them. Looking at the world, we see objects separated from one another. As my 7-year-old son would say when drawing, “Everything in the world has a black line around it. It must be there; otherwise, everything would run into everything else.” These are perceptual boundaries, but boundaries include all modes of distinction. Measurements of time and space; concepts, contexts, and meanings; inner and outer worlds of experience; all forms of process; everything that is distinct has a boundary.
Boundaries differentiate, protect, connect to the surrounding environment and allow positive energies to enter. Boundaries tell us who we are; they create separate identity. They are also our place of connection and relation to something more than ourselves. They are the “skin” of the living system — a permeable membrane that protects integrity and maintains relative autonomy. Life requires that organisms remain relatively ‘open’ to their environment. The necessary energy and information must enter the living system to fuel the life processes and maintain adaptation to the changing environment. Without food the organism will eventually wither and die. Without information, we cannot learn or develop. Everything remains static.
As you read this you are experiencing the flow of information across your mental boundary. The book stands out against the fuzzier background of the room. The words and sentences and paragraphs are clearly separate from each other. You feel the paper at the boundary of your skin, a flexible sheath protecting your sensitive internal organs from disease and damage. All around and inside you, your permeable boundaries are taking in what they need and filtering out what is irrelevant or harmful.
Each time you come home, you sense the change in your way of being and relating as you walk through the door, you have crossed the dividing line between the outside world and home. You live in a house that extends the protection around your self; only those invited are allowed in. You share your intimate thoughts and feelings only with those you trust. You know the difference between one thought and another and between thinking and feeling. Each of these are examples of boundary conditions – that place of separation that creates a difference — that distinguishes inside from outside, one thing from another.
To understand and manage something we must know its limits – where it begins and ends. In everyday life, we impose distinctions on our experience in order to chop it up into manageable chunks. Our human form is designed to perceive differences. From birth we begin to differentiate sounds, shapes, colors and outlines. Like my son, we see the world with lines that separate object from background, figure from ground. Without these distinctions our experience would formless, ‘a buzzing, booming confusion’.
As language develops, we begin to make increasingly fine distinctions between differing concepts, physical feelings and emotions by attaching words and concepts to experience. Two years old is the age of distinctions: yes from NO, me and mine from you and yours, blue from green, one from two from lots. Hot is easily distinguished from cold, but the growing child takes time to learn the gradations between warm and cool. In adolescents we have the difficult task of making sense of increasingly complicated feelings and experiences. How do we differentiate irritation from annoyance from anger and rage – or feeling low from feeling sad, depressed or despairing? Without these distinctions, emotions and impulses are hard to manage, experience and the sense of self is full of confusion.
Possibly the most important distinction we have to learn as we grow up is the difference between, “me” and my experiences, and “you” and your experiences. Human beings do not automatically have a clear self-boundary, it shifts and changes with time and circumstance. Some people never achieve a coherent self and these are usually seen as “mentally ill” with psychotic delusions that confuse inner experience with what is happening outside in the world. Most of us, for most of the time (except when we are asleep and dreaming), know who we are and where the world begins. Yet we often do not notice that our sense of self expands and contracts, waxes and wanes.
Part of our sense of self can extend beyond the boundaries of our skin. We reach out into the world to include valued people, objects and relationships; we open ourselves to love and connection. Only when under threat do we retreat into our skin; then we feel fearful and constricted. With terror, the self may actually become smaller than the body, retreating into the realms of the inner world. More normally, our self expands and contracts according to the situation and our state. With those we love and trust we become ‘big’ enough to include then in our self-space. This is the reason why death or divorce are so painful and debilitating; part of our self is lost when that other person is lost.
Individuals, families and organizations have typical ways of handling boundaries. These range in a continuum from the rigid and rule bound to a state of ‘boundarylessness’. Rigid systems are more closed. Loose systems are so open that there are no clear distinctions. In the middle ground are those functional systems that are more or less open – that allows energy and information to flow in and out in a controlled and coherent manner. Closed systems create a sense of defensiveness, over-control, oppression and restriction. Lack of boundaries create disorganization and chaos (in the negative sense) with feelings of loss of control, anxiety and insecurity; relationships are indeterminate and confusing.
Closed rigid systems perceive themselves to be under threat — they maintain separation in order to protect themselves. For an individual, the rigid, closed self-boundary becomes an impervious wall, like the shell on a snail, to protect the fragile inner world. The person is defensive, overcontrolled and ‘tight-assed’. Usually, that person perceives the threat as external but it may, just as easily, be internal. This may be a response to earlier threatening experiences such as trauma. Or it can be learned, passed on through generations of family patterning. These rigid families are punitive, rule-bound, alienated and concerned with form rather than substance.
Obsessive-compulsive disorders reflect extremely rigid boundaries. These individuals experience the world as full of threatening chaos – germs, pollution, mess, ever-present dangers. They attempt to control this chaos through compulsive ‘magical’ rituals. Yet these rituals always fail to create the sought after sense of safety; the threat is really from the inside and not external. Barricades to keep the threat out, also imprison. The person is more and more trapped with just those things that are most disturbing.
At the other extreme, boundaries that are too permeable let everything enter and exit. Over-sensitive, reactive individuals who are unreliable and lost in fantasy, have permeable boundaries. These individuals are often born into families where chaos reigns; there are few and fluid rules – no times for meals or bed, no separation between adult and child. There may be neglect or random sexual intrusion. As clients, these individuals seem dependent and impulsive. Their inner world is formless – emotions overwhelm their thinking, fantasy and projection distort their sense of external reality.
These extremes of rigid or permeable boundaries are not the norm. Most normal boundaries fluctuate from relatively closed—when we feel under threat—to open, when we are safe and enjoying ourselves—to loose, when we become overwhelmed. Boundaries reflect the state we are in. When they are weak, we tend to over-extend ourselves, get over-involved, run late, be unable to set limits. We become overwhelmed, unable to face the demands made on us. If we hold unrealistic expectations of ourselves and our resources, it becomes easy to lose the boundary.
Then we may swing to the other extreme. We get resentful or angry and withdraw. Trying to stem the never-ending tide of demands we restrict ourselves and the outflow of connection to others and the world. Then rules and regulations become paramount and anything spontaneous becomes suspect. In our more functional times, we can allow events to impact us but also take time to recognize what we are experiencing, how we need to make sense of things. There is a quality of letting things in, processing them and then letting them go again; this is the way of the open system.
Therapeutic Applications:
Boundaries are somewhat of a catchword in modern psychotherapy. Most often the term, “poor boundaries,” is used disparagingly to describe clients who are difficult to manage, comes late, do not pay on time and generally gives the therapist ‘the run around’. These people do not follow the normal ‘rules’ of a good client. In particular, those labeled as borderline or narcissistic are seen as most problematic. These diagnoses are used to describe individuals with inadequate self-boundaries. But the most often these labels reflect the therapist’s experience of confusion and disorganization that occurs through resonance with the client. Therapist resentment and frustration leak across their own normally tight internal boundaries in a most disturbing manner! When we talk about the boundaries of others, we may be describing our own boundary discomforts.
In therapy, boundaries create the form that contains the process of healing. There is nothing magical about the 50-minute hour, the regular appointments and set payment, the therapist restraint in sharing personal information. All of these aspects may be negotiated and modified according to client needs and the demands of the situation. What is most essential are clients’ experience of containment; they must know what to expect and be secure in the knowledge that the therapist acts in their best interests. The therapist put presence, skills, knowledge, understanding and self at the service of the client. In exchange, clients pay money, attend appointment and engage with their own process to the best of their ability. These are the essential disciplines of therapy – the form that channels process so that something greater may emerge.
If the therapeutic boundaries are too rigid, as in some types of psychoanalysis, the process withers and dies – or it limps along in hope of some future enlightenment. Then the therapeutic boundaries are defensive and function to protect the therapist. This is particularly true in many public mental health services. Much of the paperwork, regulations and limits on the number of sessions safeguards the organization and employees from dangerous litigation and the overwhelming need of recipients.
On the other hand, if therapeutic boundaries are too loose, dangerous disorder results. Sexual exploitation, inappropriate and extreme interventions, lack of consistency or restraint, are all boundary disturbances. These inevitably lead to confusion and increased distress of clients. If clients have to be vigilant, trying to predict what migh happen next, there is little security and attention for the therapeutic tasks. Certain “innovative” therapists view basic boundaries as too restrictive. They rebel and attempt to create a more open approach. Too often the result is extreme and damage results. Creativity is not synonymous with chaos.
When the client and therapist are secure in the container of therapy, boundaries open and close in a rhythmic dance. As a client begins and finishes each session, he or she crosses an invisible line that divides normal everyday experience from that of therapy. For some there is a sense of relief that the expectations and conventions of social intercourse no longer hold. For others there is the apprehension of entering an unfamiliar territory. Whatever the individual experience, each client and therapist should agree that this time and space is sacrosanct.
The country of therapy spans both inner and outer worlds. It encompasses the totality of actual and potential experiences. The therapist invites each individual into a unique region and begins to help map out the topography. The map highlights landmarks, what is of more or less relevance, how to travel the different terrains and, most important, how to get from here to there. Without a clear separation between therapy and non-therapy, without a map that provides distinctions and direction, both participants are lost and wandering. When it is time to leave, the therapist escorts that person to the border and attempts to see that they have what they need for their life – the boundary closes.
Crossing a boundary is a time of transition and vulnerability. How a client enters and leaves a session is of extreme importance. It shows, in cameo, the ways that person deals with the process of change. Care must be taken in inviting clients into and escorting them out of the room and the session. These acts define the birth and death of the special process that is the session. Every process must have a defining beginning and end, otherwise it never takes form – it remains a portion and not a whole. Noticing how a client approaches beginnings and ends, shifts of content, renegotiations, tells us about their experience of boundaries. Some want them cut and dried; others try to keep it all loose. All must find their own best way to define and differentiate experience.
Within each session, boundaries rhythmically shift and change. To engage certain processes, the therapist intentionally modifies his or her self-boundaries. When working with external events and experiences, there needs to be a clear sense of separation between each person. To think, plan and explore options of action, the relationship between therapist and client mirrors that between the person and the world. To act effectively on the world, we need to have a sense of separation, an instrumental approach that require the self-boundaries to remain intact and firm. Teaching, coaching, practicing, advising – require a transfer of information from one distinct self to another.
At the other pole, when participants are engaged with deeper unconscious processes, there is a certain merging or symbiotic connection; self-boundaries are looser. The therapist intentionally allows fantasy and imagination to resonate spontaneously in response to the deeper process of the client. Experienced healers enter subtle alternative states of awareness that allows boundaries to become more permeable. This facilitates attunement between client and therapist. Information and energy flows between and within this larger relational system; each person is resonating to the experience of the other. This ability to merge and flow with the other person mirrors the nature of unconscious processes — inarticulate, integrative, flowing and shifting organically as in dreams. We enter the unconscious by becoming like it. We return to the outer world by reflecting its inherent nature.
Therapy demand versatility. A therapist adjusts constantly to the shifting processes of the session – here creating a clear boundary, there allowing a rigid demarcation to dissolve. Flexibility requires a firm foundation; we cannot know how to modify boundaries if we are unable to recognize them. It is dangerous to merge with a client before developing a solid sense of self. The therapist may be overwhelmed by the wash of unconscious material. It is untherapeutic to stay superficial behind tight and safe boundaries. Clear, open, substantial, flexible boundaries are primary. Then there is the possibility for profound change – a transformation of outmoded forms of process and a movement that reflects the nature of life.
Homeostasis and Homeorhesis
Homeostasis
Everything that is alive is changing. How then, do we experience ourselves as stable and consistent individuals? Living beings struggle to maintain relative equilibrium, or homeostasis, internally and in relation to their environment. Every part of an organism maintains relationship with all others that is both coordinated and cooperative. Although a part may have relative autonomy, it cannot become so independent or competitive that it threatens the whole. Homeostasis is the process of self-regulation — each part in mutual interaction with every other so that relative oscillating stability results. This regulation occurs through multiple loops of feedback. Unlike the simple thermostat that stabilizes room temperature, every living function influences and impacts every other function in a vast complex interactive network.
The most obvious example of this network is the neuronal interconnections of the brain. Through excitation or inhibition at the synaptic level (rather like the binary 0 and 1 of machine language in a computer), individual neurons communicate with thousands of others, telling them to either ‘turn on’ or ‘turn off’. When there are more messages from this multitude of connections to ‘turn off’, groups of neurons become dormant – their function subsides. This in turn allows other neuronal groups to become more excited to the level when they will send a signal to turn on the original group. Through this self-regulating rhythmic brain process, we are able to hold a thought in mind, make a smooth coordinated movement, see and appreciate a beautiful image. Without it, all would be chaotic, our experience jumbled.
We see this confusion and chaos in those with severe damage to the frontal lobes of the brain. This area seems to be particularly concerned with regulation, particularly inhibition, of complex emotional reaction and social behaviors. With damage, the person becomes unable to control their feelings or impulses. They laugh or cry inappropriately and excessively, they lash out when angry, they are unable to modulate a train of thought but keep going on and on over the same ground. They have lost their equilibrium. Without self-regulation we begin to spiral into a process without form.
When we are hungry, we eat; when we are full, we stop eating. When we are tired, we sleep and dream; when refreshed we awake naturally. Eating and sleeping satisfy naturally occurring needs; they are self-regulating. When metabolism or appetite becomes disturbed, eating gets out of control. An eating disorder develops. When anxiety or depression intrude, sleep cycles become disturbed. There is a feedback malfunction in the communication loop. All experiences or behaviors that spin out of control have become disconnected from the whole. The whole system always tries to find a new way of adapting to this threat, to recover homeostasis. This may work for a while but ultimately more and more parts become affected and the dysfunction spreads.
Such is cancer or a dog phobia or sociopathic behavior. Cancer cells grow without order or cooperative relationship with the needs of the body. A dog phobia is fear of all dogs, big or small, fierce or benign, regardless of disconfirming feedback from the canine population. The sociopath is disconnected from the value system of his or her society and out of touch with the inner experience of humanness. In each of these cases, some part has come lose from the whole and is no longer amenable for development or change.
All human difficulties are disturbances of inner or outer relationship. Dysfunction is disconnection. Any part of our human system that loses connection becomes a threat to the whole. When we are whole and healthy, all aspects of us relate and integrate. The greater the coordination of parts and wholes, the more resilient and stable the person. Integration is health.
Homeorhesis
However, as life becomes more complex there is not just stability but also growth. Living systems have the capacity not only to maintain homeostasis and integrity, but to move beyond themselves in a process Conrad Waddington_ terms homeorhesis. This is the ability to change the change process, to learn about learning_, to become aware of awareness. As growing fetuses in the womb, we move beyond simply being alive, towards a birth of consciousness. Somewhere in our early development, before the age of three, that consciousness becomes rudimentary self-awareness.
My two-year-old daughter comes running in as I write. She keeps enthusiastically repeating “me, me”. I ask her to show me and she leads me by the hand to a recent family photo. She points to each person in turn, naming them – Mummy, Daddy, Bubba. Then she points to the picture of herself and with gleaming excited eyes, exclaims, “me, me”. She has found and recognized herself.
Some of us can still find those first moments of knowing that we are here and aware of ourselves. I remember a flash of awareness at four-year-old: No adult had any sense of what it is to be me, a child. I live in a different world from them. I told myself that I would never forget what it is to be four. Sadly, that is not completely true. Time and the complexity of adult experience has overtaken that simplicity. That child exists with me but is integrated into a web of memories and personal history. Development is irreversible; it forever changes our relationship with every experience that has gone before.
While we see that stability and equilibrium is maintained by the feedback process, development is generated by more complex feedforward loops. These generate instability by reinforcing certain trends until a “crisis” results. Then the system reorganizes in a different way. In general, the human system attempts to become more integrated – such is development. However, some crises may not result in growth but in further disorganization. This is exemplified by “spiritual emergencies” that become psychotic episodes. The individual does not have the inner and outer resources to achieve a fuller integration, and thus regresses.
At certain points in life, contradictory information or intensity of experience threatens our balance. In the face of this threat, we may withdraw and disconnect in an attempt to maintain functioning. Or we can embrace the chaos of change and allow our whole system to reach a new level of integration and openness. This the process of transformation – the discontinuous shift from one level of being to a greater and more adaptive state. It is not just change within a particular framework, but a new and creative relationship between aspects of our experience, not just change within the parts of our self, it is a change of the self in relation to life. We can grow, transform and transcend.
Therapeutic Applications:
Therapy always has two levels: the recovery of personal equilibrium and the transformation of the self. Technically, this parallels a symptom focus as opposed to an intention to facilitate character or personality change. Most clients come to therapy to rid themselves of some distressing experience or to find a different way of living. They are phobic, depressed, anxious, lacking in self-confidence, unable to cope. They want the therapist to help them recover or create a more tolerable way of being. They are out of balance with themselves and the world.
However, once they recover or find their balance, many ask the question, “Is this enough? Is there more?” Once change is set in motion, deeper and more profound forces begin operating. It seems as though the client has been forced or tricked into psychotherapy by intolerable symptoms. Those symptoms disappear as the person begins to engage with an underlying urgency to transform. Work on the whole Self becomes immediate and pressing.
Why each person comes to therapy is a mysterious and profound question. Conscious intentions are only part of the story; if the client knew it all, they would need nothing further. I assume there are always two main levels of motivation occurring — the wish to achieve a comfortable stability (homeostasis) and the urge to evolve and transform(homeorhesis). You could say these are the sticks and carrots of therapy. The stick is the problematic issues – the sticking points! The carrot is hope for a more tranquil and fulfilling way of being. This draws us onward into the unknown. We run from pain; we look toward hope.
These motivations are often organized as complementary opposites; when one is conscious the other is unconscious. A person wanting to get rid of a symptom may be unconsciously needing to transform their whole self and life. It is the spiritual or existential dimension that is missing. A person professing to be looking for spiritual growth may really need to resolve fundamental childhood issues. They have leapt over their problems with life to focus on the numinous. These clients need to be led gently back to the obvious and fundamental difficulties they are having.
Whatever the conscious motives, it is the therapist’s task to always keep both poles in mind. Complete therapy resolves distress and disturbances in a person’s life. It also sets in motion the momentum of more profound change. We do the client an injustice if we do not help resolve the immediate imbalances. We neglect the true work of therapy if we are not always seeking a greater transformation to a way of being that is beyond expectations. There is always more to grow into.
Equifinality and Redundancy
Life is prolific. There is always more. Unlike machines, living things are inherently flexible, creative and abundant in the ways they survive and grow. There is more than one way to skin a cat (because we are alive and the cat used to be). There are always different routes to the same destination. Equifinality is this multiplicity of means to a single end. As a specific form of redundancy, it means that living organisms are never trapped into a rigid mechanical response in the journey toward wholeness. You can always get there from here.
Redundancy is everywhere; nature enjoys complexity and fertility. As we look at the natural world, it is obvious that there is more than enough – more bacteria, more bugs, more mammals, more leaves on trees, more seeds than is absolutely necessary. Yet nothing is ultimately wasted. All that remains unused is recycled, feeding yet more proliferation.
Complex living systems work to stay alive. Every part of an organism is intimately and intentionally involved in maintaining life. So living systems have more capacity than they use – just in case. There must always be redundancy, the needed additional resources to maintain life. If a part breaks down, there is another part waiting in the wings. Redundancy is the opposite of efficiency. We think that redundancy means waste, too much of a good thing. There is no waste in nature. There are only resources, used or unused.
As you read this, your use two eyes creating somewhat distinct images of the page. The text is in two dimensions, so those images are redundant. We can get around perfectly without 3D vision, we do not really need all that hair, more than one kidney or lung. We have lots of extra capacity and connections in our neuronal networks. We can feel and wish for things beyond reckoning; we think without limits, imagine beyond that. We are more than is required. There is no restriction to our humanness.
Essential to our humanity is language. As we write or speak, we seldom use the same phrase or sentence twice. It is more than a linguistic rule, it is built into our very being: “be creative in all expression”. Our modes of communication grow more diverse each day. Originally, speech and signing were the means to pass information to others. Now we have all the electronic communication tools of the present. All serve the same end — but the channels to that end are myriad. Something in us is never content with restriction or limits.
Creativity reflects this absence of limits. When we are hungry, we seldom eat the same food again and again. We look for new receipts to appease our hunger. The goal of nourishing our bodies can be met in an infinite variety of ways and we delight in finding new and creative foods.
No matter what the food, our digestive system attempts to breaks it down to produce the nourishment and energy we need. All foods are fuel for our body, just as all information is food for our minds, all relationship feeds our hearts. Our system takes in whatever and uses it. Sometimes, what we ingest is indigestible or poisonous. Then our bodies respond by ejecting what is noxious and mobilize the forces of healing. Sometimes information or relationship can be toxic. Then our minds and hearts become sick. But we should never underestimate the powers to heal. We all have more resources than we know. There are many paths to wholeness and holiness.
It is when man is out of harmony that waste comes into being. Waste is fueled by greed and anxiety – the never-ending grasping after more than is necessary to fill the unending emptiness of fear. Psychological waste is the useless suffering of a stuck pattern, an expenditure of pain and energy that leads nowhere. There is nothing more wasteful than unused potentials to grow and blossom. A tree does not refuse to flower or set seeds. How then can we ignore the call to transformation and transcendence.
The nature of nature is more. More ways to become whole, more capacity than we need, more potentials than we realize. There is no end to what is probable, no restriction on possibilities. Humanness is limited only by our imposed limitations.
Therapeutic Applications:
The movement towards wholeness is inherent in the life force. Carl Rogers_ called this the formative principle that exists as a common integrative impulse. He believed it is not only an aspect of human development but also of the universe at large. If this is true, as therapists, we can trust clients always to move towards greater integration. All positive influences and experiences are used to further this ultimate purpose of wholeness and connectivity.
This applies to life in general and therapy specifically. Therapy is condensed experience that feeds the inherent potential for growth. All therapeutic approaches, as long as they work towards this wholeness, will naturally increase integration. If we are in the service of life, rather than un-life, and we do no harm, the person will use the therapeutic experience in their journey towards increased humanness.
It follows that there can never be just one approach to therapy. There will always be diversity and creativity in the therapeutic process; it must reflect the nature of individual therapists. To be most effective, therapists apply many different approaches that support and stimulate potential for change. Like life, the therapist must be abundant. To create enriching experiences, therapists must be rich in experience. We have to strive to become more than enough. Then the client can choose those experiences that they most need.
Whatever our theoretical perspective, the final end point or deeper purpose of each person’s human development is not for us to know. It is a hidden mystery. All roads, that travel in approximately the right direction, lead to Rome. We must rely on that and do what we can to facilitate the journey.
We can be sure that the journey will be towards a more whole experience of Self for each individual. It will not only be a shift in experiencing but a transformation of being in which change itself is acknowledged as essential. The person moves from a static concept of self and the world towards a sense of the flux and flow of experience that is process. In the next section I explore the nature of this human process and how it relates to experience.
Endnotes
_ Capra, 1983, p. 266.
_ Ibid.
_ Von Bertalanffy, 1969.
_ Jantsch, 1980, p. 6.
_ See Bateson, 1972, in his classic series of essays exploring “an ecology of mind”.
_ Waddington, 1977.
_ I am using self here in its ordinary meaning – the sense of coherent individuality that carries our normal and ongoing identity. When self has a small “s” it corresponds to the ego or “I-ness”, sometimes called the small self. When Self is capitalized it refers to the totality of all aspects of that person, both conscious and unconscious.
_ Waddington, 1977.
_ See Bateson, 1972 and his discussion of logical types and deutero-learning.
_ Rogers, 1980.