The Science of Connection in a Disconnected World
An Arizona sky
Life has a way of bringing things together. Science tells us so. The fact that living things tend to come together when all else in the universe is falling apart, gives me hope as a psychotherapist. Living organisms are living precisely because they defy the second law of thermodynamics. It says that all things will move toward a state of entropy. In the non-living world when things come apart, they disconnect, and lose their structure and function. On the other hand animals like us grow to connect and become more complex, developing structures and functions that resist entropy and bend toward creativity. As homo sapiens, our organism goes so far as to create cultures capable of supporting more life long after we are gone.
Or not. We live in a culture where periods of domination have led us to take things apart without understanding how they are connected. As if we are on the side of entropy. At these times a lack of life preserving information in our initial decision making has left us with uninformed when it has come time to fix things. Nowhere is this more noticeable to a psychotherapist than in the mental health field where solutions often boil down to forcing things back together or giving up entirely on more life sustaining efforts. In fact, it’s not far fetched to say the concept of mental health is an unfortunate reduction itself. The study and research of our mental life has been disconnected from the body and social relationships since it’s inception. We have left the body and the socio-cultural aspects of many of our problems separated. This disconnection has been encouraged by a less informed focus on forceful solutions like psychopharmacological drugs and a neglect of mental health altogether at the other end. Despite the trend towards taking things apart and out of context so they can be more easily manipulated, there is one priceless and free principle of life that continues to win out. Connection begets connection.
The complex structure and function of our body lies in the fact that it gives rise to a self-system capable of forming complex relationships with other bodies. All together we have the potential to form a very physical system capable of facilitating the generation of informed solutions to life’s problems. This is we what I call intersubjective collaboration. When out of our experience of disconnection we connect and communicate about how life is going with someone who is paying attention, solutions arise from places out of our control. The information exchange within our body and between our body and someone else’s generates what I call biopsychosocial connectivity. That is, a connection between our brain, self-system, and other people. The Life Enhancing Information Processing (LEIP) is a perspective on psychotherapy informed by how all life forms depend on the collaborative exchange of information to live. It has lead me to focus on facilitating intersubjective collaboration in my psychotherapy and consulting practice as an alternative to taking myself and clients out of their historical and environmental context and trying to merely manipulate their brain, self, or our relationship in isolation of each other.
Trees and plants, plants and insects, animals and animals and every other combination of life form gives us fascinating everyday examples of life making its way in the context of their relationship to their environment and historical context. We have shared many structures and functions with other organisms throughout evolutionary time. The LEIP perspective has inspired the Biopsychosocial Adaptive Information Processing Model (BPS-AIP), a model of psychotherapy that draws on what we know about the human version of connection. You can read about this theoretical model in two scientific papers published by Springer Publishing in the Journal of EMDR Practice and Research (Cotraccia, 2012, 2022). A key problem in living many of us who present for psychotherapy face is that we are surviving in more or less disconnected social environments. Disconnection begets disconnection. Cultural resources that we pass down from generation to generation don’t always promote social connection. Even in the mental health field we adhere to theories, methods, and funding for research that yields financial gain for the few and promote disconnection in the research lab, training institute, graduate program, and therapist’s office.
This blog series is dedicated to exploring the relationship between our biopsychosocial health and the information processing resources we are endowed with. This time around, I will give examples how sensing, feeling, and moving is at the core of what we share with all life forms. I will also highlight how attention in all it’s varieties, is a central resource that any psychotherapist and client will want to appreciate. I’ll use examples from many areas of science and now and again specifically feature applications of the LEIP perspective and BPS-AIP to my practice of Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. Now and again I will also highlight the ways I believe socio-cultural phenomenon support and thwart biopsychosocial connectivity and how some of the factors involved may not be recognizable from the perspective of standard theories and practices in the mental health field. I hope you enjoy the posts and that we can connect along the way!
