4.2.6 Implications Of Chaos Theory For Healing

I mentioned in an earlier part of the website that during what is now called the Age of Enlightenment, science and mathematics became more and more important to humanity. This was certainly true in Europe, which is the part of the world that is familiar to me, but advances were happening in parallel in other places – and, in science, mathematics and philosophy, some parts of Asia were ahead of Europe. (For example, algebra, knowledge of which was essential for all the mathematical discoveries in Europe in later centuries, originated in the Arab world).

The result of the rise in status and importance of science and mathematics was that, one by one, old beliefs were challenged by new scientific discoveries that were proven by mathematics.

Whatever about the Earth being curved instead of flat (which was quite plausible and had been suggested for many centuries), the subjective experience of every human is to observe a moving Sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening over a stationary Earth [1], whether or not it was flat or curved. The ground-work that led to the Age of Enlightenment was laid down by scientists like Copernicus, Galileo (and other mathematicians) who, in the 1500’s and early 1600’s, proved that the Earth went around the Sun; and it was not the other way around.

It is difficult to appreciate now how unbelievable this was to people who lived in those times.

The reason I say unbelievable is that if no-one told us we’d never guess! What I mean is, as I sit here typing this, looking out the window, I have no physical or mental sense that I am on a rock weighing several septillion tonnes moving at over 100,000 km/hr through empty space.

Unlike many natural phenomena that I experience, I’d never figure this out for myself, an expert had to tell me.

The fact that things that everyone thought were true actually weren’t true, (and that something that was thought to be fixed was actually moving), filtered, over many decades and centuries, into the consciousness of ordinary people.  The new thinking began to have an effect on people’s beliefs, norms and eventually culture.

With increasing levels of education, access to books, newspapers and journals, and faster communication, the belief that science and technology could assist humans in exercising control over far more parts of their lives than in previous centuries became firmly established.

Superstition was replaced by fact.  The guesswork of alchemy was replaced by chemistry that published results of objective experiments bolstered by chemical equations.  The vagueness of astrology was replaced by the certain (always objective) mathematically sound, science of astronomy.

The principal relevance of all the above to this blog was that during an era in relatively recent history (about 400 hundred years over a span of 10,000 years – i.e. a mere 4% of our known history – and that’s only our known history – we began to believe that the chaos that is part of every human’s experience, (and over the centuries caused humanity so much trouble, e.g. plagues, droughts, deadly diseases, crop failures, famines, etc.) could now be eliminated from our lives if we so wished and replaced by certainty.

(As I will explore further in the Chapter on Anthropology, reducing the amount of uncertainty was always important to us, it began with farming and living in houses – but the pace with which it advanced in the past 400 years surpassed anything prior to that).

As mentioned already, elimination of uncertainty and chaos was absolutely necessary in engineering, (e.g. in constructing buildings and machines – its most obvious applications), but it also gained traction in other spheres e.g. farming, time, healing, travel, education etc.

I have mentioned its influence in respect of healing a number of times already and I will deal with it in more detail in the next post.

[1]. I find it interesting to parallel this belief which apparently lasted for thousands of years with our psychological world from birth to death.  We are, after all, the centre of our own universe, in that we experience every aspect of, and object in our environment from our own subjective perspective.  I recommend anyone who might wish to explore this further to study phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that is very interesting and is not as complicated as the word is hard to pronounce!

In the last post I discussed how reductionism became established as the principal method of figuring out problems. Such was the success of reductionism in solving mechanical/technical problems it gradually began to include social problems (e.g. education, medicine etc.) as well.

Minimising the level of chaos, or uncertainty, out of healing promised (and over the centuries, delivered) huge improvements in the quality of healing offered by the medical profession.

Rather than being a mixture of guesswork, ancient lore, intuition and superstition, the exact reason why a person was unwell could be determined, (diagnosis) and the exact treatment that would make that person better again could be determined scientifically.

With parallel developments in pharmaceuticals initiated by advances in the knowledge of chemistry, exact doses of chemicals could be given (prescriptions) to alter the chemistry of the body so that healing could be virtually guaranteed. 

Anaesthetics (more chemicals) could be given so that a patient would feel no pain as a surgeon removed damaged parts of the body to provide relief, like a mechanic would remove a damaged part of an engine.

So it is no surprise that over the centuries the body came to be viewed as a machine of sorts, which could be fixed just like an engine could be fixed.

This, of course, also involved handing over most of the responsibility for the healing process to an expert person (a doctor or surgeon – or a dentist) who knew exactly what to do. (I gave an example of this from my own life in a previous post).

(Just as an aside, I am not an expert on the study of the origins of words but I find it fascinating that the word that describes the person who has handed over power to heal to, and is waiting for a cure from, an expert, knowledgeable other is the word patient which is also the adjective that describes a person who can wait for a long time for something or someone without getting annoyed).

Cures for the condition that became known in the last three hundred years as mental illness, however, eluded the fast developing medical profession which was making such huge leaps in curing physical illness.  The results that were achieved by dispensing chemical medication to those who were diagnosed as mentally ill were very patchy, and brought little long term relief, though it was tried in many different guises continuously over that time and still is.

Naturally enough the mechanical model of healing (in particular the handing over of responsibility for one’s healing) continued to be very influential in efforts that were developed more recently to alleviate mental illness, including – to some extent – theories proposed by Freud in the early years of the 20th century (and many other practitioners over the decades following) to the present day.

And it is accepted by clinicians that, unlike physical ailments, relief from emotional distress/mental illness will not be long-term.  Indeed, as I mentioned already, mental illness might go on forever.

The elimination of uncertainty and chaos became just as important in psychiatry and psychology, (the sciences that focused on healing mental illness) as it was in physical healing.

This is not surprising, nor am I being over-critical of it here!

One can achieve very little in a chaotic environment, and anyway humans tend towards order and structure.  And viewed from the perspective of the person in distress, continual chaos and crisis mean that there is always a good reason to hand over responsibility for healing to an external expert.

Generally, if I have a crisis going on I don’t have to take responsibility for not being responsible – and handing over the problem to someone else relieves me of that.

Some practitioners in the mid to late 20^th Century challenged the paradigm of healing that I described in the previous post and while they might not have directly stated that the accommodation of chaos was necessary to effect healing in some environments, this belief was implicit in their work [1] and many of their publications.

Indeed, the essence of Person Centred Therapy is to invite the client to bring much of their world into the therapy room, whether one to one or group, (i.e. the healing environment).  It is inevitable that doing so risks accommodating a considerable amount of discomfort, surprise, uncertainty, and even chaos.

The unorthodoxy of Carl Rogers’ work, described in the Chapter on Modalities, was much criticised in many circles, as it did not seem to be ordered into a beginning, middle and successful conclusion.

The acceptance by the practitioner that a journey to wellness would involve the person who was looking for help working through something that might present as chaos, that is, making sense of his/her own erratic behaviour, and/or finding meaning in irrational reactions to events, etc. with the practitioner as a facilitator, and not an expert analyst who handed out a solution, was a fairly radical departure from the norms of helping in those times.

Indeed, such was the belief that our healing was best left to an external expert who would fix us, (whether it was a person of religion, medicine, or our betters – remember the esteem that people had in royalty and the nobility in general) was so entrenched that Rogers’ claims were akin to Copernicus’ claims about the Earth going around the Sun a few centuries earlier.

This is because person centred therapy introduced the notion that accommodation of, and in particular finding meaning in chaos may be helpful to growth.

I propose that to achieve a particular goal of healing (or growth) when supporting families in the Focus Group the accommodation of chaos is not only desirable but necessary and its presence should not only be tolerated but welcomed as it has an educational role for both practitioner and family member(s). 

After all, in a healthy family a certain amount of chaos is accommodated and is evident in many aspects [2] of the family’s life.  However the balance between order and chaos leans towards order so that a healthy growth pattern prevails over time.

Good design not only accommodates and tolerates the chaos, unpredictability, and uncertainty that constitutes the reality that we encounter day by day, but takes cognisance of its existence and welcomes it, using it in a proactive manner as a tool for the growth (that is full of uncertainty anyway) that needs to occur and that is the principal aim of the work.

Allied to this is the reality of the feedback loop described in the Sub-Chapter on fractals, used to bring about change.

The result of all this is that movement towards constructive patterns of behaviour (which of course is the desirable outcome) is encouraged by self-similar, constantly repeated patterns of behaviour over time.

These self-similar patterns are not, of course, exactly the same (in which case they would be boring and unattractive) but are experienced in different situations and environments at different times.  Indeed their power results from a mixture of their diversity and regularity, and their self-organising tendency, just as it would in a healthy, well-functioning family.

Much of this is achieved by modelling and mirroring, resulting in a steady move towards patterns of responsibility.  (I have not only frequently observed this in others but experienced it at first hand in my own journey).

Furthermore, I propose that the reason why this steady move happens is that responsibility is an existential given in our lives, and people gravitate towards experiences that are nurturing, significant, and dependable.  (I expand these arguments further in the Chapter on Energy below).

[1]. Carl Rogers, (who developed Person Centred Therapy), and Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy) immediately come to mind as practitioners who challenged the order and structure healing paradigms of many of their peers.  There are many others – they are the ones that are more prominent.

[2]. This chaos could manifest in temper tantrums by children, unreasonable behaviour by teenagers, arguments between spouses/partners/siblings that take on a life of their own, various characteristics and idiosyncrasies that each member has, unspoken emotional issues, accidents, unexpected redundancy, different reactions to similar events, changes and growth over time, etc. etc.

This post concerns the effects of chaos on our lives and in particular in healing emotional distress.

A chaotic event almost always induces an emotional reaction. This is probably the reason why – while making great strides in the area of physical healing – the medical model, which is wedded to reductionist thinking, has always struggled in the healing of trauma and the distress and deep hurt that goes with it.

It generally fails to acknowledge emotionality, and the non-linear, constantly varying, and complex nature of human distress, where the output might be largely disproportionate to the input.

(I described this already when I mentioned the butterfly effect, or the catastrophe of the First World War, or, closer to home, how, on the street at night, a young man might react in a violent manner to a relatively insignificant provocation like a mistimed joke or a look that is deemed to be insulting. Of course, this happens in families too as the Atlantic Ocean of emotions overwhelms rationality and reason).

I have given an example of a positive tipping point in respect of the person who is recovering from addiction, and in society I have given examples of how love and compassion in families have a positive impact on the world in general.

I have had a number of tipping points in my own life.  Each one might not have been as dramatic as the butterfly effect but it still posited a point of no return – where hope was gradually supplanted by confidence, and there was no going back.

And in reaching a tipping point there is always some chaos, uncertainty, struggle and even pain along the way – but there is also an underlying pattern that imposes itself on the process which informs our behaviour. 

Finally, it is interesting that when I came to be aware of fractal geometry and began considering its application in understanding the unpredictability of human behaviour I was struck by the fact that the history of a family is often called a family tree, the life form that is often chosen to demonstrate fractal geometry in the natural world!