Chaos Theory and Healing

Terms to remember:

Trauma: A state of intense emotional pain, oftentimes triggered by the experience of shame and anxiety.
Dissociation: An unconscious process which separates the experience of trauma from ongoing self experience
Enactment: If trauma cannot be thought of and "mentalized", it will become enacted when the self system interacts with relevant contextual cues
Attractor State: Concepts or ideas, oftentimes grouped as a category, which possesses enough psychic energy to draw consciousness towards it.

Chaos theory is one of many frameworks that is taking over the sciences: from ecology, to biology, to physics, to computer science - it seems every branch of human theoretical thought is being led to the same conception of reality: the system or network point of view.

Psychoanalysis was taken in this direction in the 50's with the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, and later on by interpersonal and relation psychologists. This development has occurred instep with the development of cybernetics, chaos theory, systems theory, complexity theory, all of which look at the particular in terms of the dynamic relationships between parts.

To explain: everything in human life and mind is embedded in a "interpersonal field" or "relational matrix" or "dyadic interlocking" which are all different ways to express the fact that human thought is constantly being influenced by the relational dynamics inherent in communication. Not saying anything says something. Saying something in THIS way helps determine a range of conceptual possibilities of response for the hearer. When insight "comes" upon us, we seldom - if ever - recognize that it emerged from the interplay of back and forth dynamics - something which "he" said which 'allowed" this perception, which led to this perception in him, and finally, this "perception" in me, which was consummated in the "insight" or thoughts I had about this situation.

Trauma - and it can be little - has suprisingly powerful effects in organizing the "self system' of the mind.

A fictional illustration: Dad calls to his son to come to the kitchen. When he comes, his dad is drinking beer with a few of his buddies and he asks his son to do that thing he likes: the impression of so-and-so. The son is feeling excited, but with a little bit of anxiety. He does the impression, but he sees that his dad doesn't think its all that good. His face is saying "that sucked". And his lack of response is making him feel a strong feeling of shame. His buddies are going "ah, hum, yeah..it was good", but it doesn't feel authentic. Can he tell, though? no, he cannot. Whether they liked it or not is "displaced" by the shame he's experiencing but his dads obvious disapproval. Which draws him to "think" that even they didn't like it. In the future, he will "dissociate" the experience of himself as taking a exciting risk in front of other people. When asked to do an impression, he wont. He's been traumatized by his dads response - by the shame - by the self experience of himself as vulnerable and shamed in front of other people.

This is what trauma is - and how it works in shaping the personality - and dissociation is the unconscious "splitting" event which pushes from conscious awareness - as if the opposite of an attractor state - that experience which is too painful to be held in awareness.

One could well argue that this idea is consistent with evolution: adaptation. If a certain experience "threatens" the cohesiveness and stability - or sanity - of consciousness, it is removed from conscious expression as a way to keep affect/emotion within tolerable limits.

But dissociated contents are not simply dormant. This is where enactment comes into play. Enactment is something EVERY one of us does. Just as trauma and dissociation exists in every personality - a basic mechanism of human consciousness (and all mammalian consciousness, really) - enactment is the unconscious means of discharging the energy of the trauma if it wont find expression in conscious awareness.

Enactment happens all that time. It's oftentimes called "projection". But projection implies that someone is "using" you as if you contributed nothing to the projection itself. When people enact something, one person embodies the "not-me" or "bad-me" content being 'projected' from the other persons mind. At the same time, the person who feels he's being "projected" upon - no doubt, the "bulk" or intensity of the projectors enactment is greater than his own - still, he will feel "defensive" and in this defensiveness he is experiencing his own enactment, albeit, smaller and less damaging than the other - but his response allows the projectors projection to fall into a feedback loop, what is called a "mutual enactment", where each party is basically saying to the other - unconsciously - "no, YOU'RE wrong, not me".

We all know this very simple reality, but we probably haven't seen it analyzed in the manner that leading thinkers on the subject, such as Philip Bromber, Peter Fonagy and Donnel Stern, have delineated it.

All mental illness - all problems within consciousness - big issues like borderline personality disorder, depression, bi-polar, and smaller issues like obsessiveness, paranoia, neuroticism, or bitchiness, follow the dynamics of chaos theory, or non-linear dynamics.

So the question is, how do we extricate ourselves from the positive feedback loops - where our unconscious enactments of dissociated trauma cause us to interact with people in ways that cause them to respond with their own enactment of a dissociated trauma? A vicious feedback loop that oftentimes is revolved by either a break in the relationship, or some act of repression, suppression of the "negative" feeling so that you can build positive rapport.

This is where "attractor state" comes into the situation. First of all, you need to learn about whats happening within your mind - what are you dissociating from? What do you have trouble experiencing - consciously recognizing as a part of "who you are"? These are the evidences of dissociated and traumatic material. When you allow yourself to think about these things - to know their etiological origins in experiences - and to accept that they merely represent possibilities that occurred in the absence of awareness, than you can allow yourself to cultivate "attractor states" - or ways of perception that allow you to see situations that usually evoke a dissociation in a manner that allows you to "mentalize" or think about the subject without dissociation.

This can be anything you do, since every thought represents a metabolic activity - and every thought which organizes feeling overtime can become a powerful attractor state; so that the thing which usually caused you to get antsy - anxious - if you allow yourself to simply accept and experience the dissociated material - to think of it and allow it to co-exist with another perception - you can really break down the pathological process and regain a happy life, and with it, a deep sense of mastery over your perceptual experience.

originally posted by: Astrocyte

So the question is, how do we extricate ourselves from the positive feedback loops - where our unconscious enactments of dissociated trauma cause us to interact with people in ways that cause them to respond with their own enactment of a dissociated trauma?

I think your question kind of got lost within your message. Did you mean how do we not get caught up in another's negative feedback loop? I understand that it is defined as positive as it is contributing to the negative response but the question does appear confusing the way it is presented.

The answer is simple, I like to call it WHOOSHKA, it's the thought of accepting the negativity of others to a point where you perceive it passing right through and continue on somewhere behind you. Not easy to do, yet with practice it can be achieved without disengaging from the person trying to transfer their crap onto you. Whooshka......

Also chaos is an escalation of control rather than a lack of it, realize that little pearl and your halfway to understanding Human Motivation and it's resulting behaviors...

a reply to: subtopia

Oh, I should have defined that. A positive feedback loop is a dynamic where the effect "feeds" the cause. And thus reinforces, or "positively acts upon" the general flux of the system.

A negative feedback loop is the opposite - something which counters the dynamics of a system.

As for the second part - while I can get what you're saying, my entire post sought to emphasize the dyadic and field-like effects of communication. The implication of this awareness being: we should ALSO observe ourselves instead of simply focusing on others and finding out whats "wrong" with them.

The problem is, whenever we come upon a thought stream - or find ourselves motivated to act - were liable of falling into an enactment. And this is because what we experience as "emotions" are actually personality profiles - self states, as they're called in relational psychology - which don't exactly "go away" when we experience them. Rather, they INFLUENCE the core of our thought streams: once you 'recognize' something wrong in the other, you're probably going to say something in a way that "enacts" a dissociated affect/self state that you're not doing a good job paying attention to.

Such is how the human personality is structured. It is literally TIED into a relational field with other minds and rely upon basic dissociative processes - switches between self states - in order to maintain "self continuity" - which requires that we "feel good".

If you're still following, ultimately, this means understanding others means understanding ourselves - since the entire situation is defined by context - and unless we have more information about the factors involved - ourselves, the other, environment - were likely to fall into a state of delusion about what were seeing in the other person. And so, lose compassion.

That to me is ultimately what life is about - why I started this thread. How compassion underlies it all. How we treat others - how we treat ourselves: it's all ignorance. Ignorance of how our own minds experience - and adapt - to the pressures of our own experiences - and how we project these fears, so many of them, on other people. And together, we all suffer for it.

a reply to: subtopia

Well thats not how it is defined by science.

Chaos - unpredictable

Rigidity: predictable.

In most if not all metapsychologies, chaos refers to too little control, and rigidity to too great a control.

As someone who studies psychopathology, certain disorders can be described as "too much control" - this being dissociative conditions. On the other hand, bi-polar disorder would be a pretty handy example of too little control. Unpredictable mood swings which follow complex rules and dynamics - if even predictable. That might be more biological than contextually dependent.