Intro Series VII: Autopoietic Healing and Harmonising (AHH) Systems
Cutting-edge contemporary embodied psychological approaches to healing seem to make use of self-organising healing and harmonising systems within human cognition.
This is the seventh post in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and I’m going over a sort of minimum viable number of pieces individually in order to be able to start to talk about the interlocking wholeness that starts to emerge from the interweaving of each piece… Here are the links to parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI in this series…
In the previous post in the series, I discussed the Systems View of Life, and intimated towards the importance of aligning ourselves and our bigger-than-self systems with such a way of being and organising. In this post I want to start to talk about some significant upsides to (enactively) aligning ourselves with this view, focused on the area of autopoietic healing and self-unfoldment.
I’ll discuss a proposed set of self-organising systems within the human organism that I see cutting-edge embodied psychological approaches tapping into to produce highly effective, efficient, and comprehensive psychological change in therapeutic contexts. I’ll focus on two particular examples: (1) memory re-processing in Eye-Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR; e.g., Shapiro, 2014) therapy; (2) parts work in Internal Family Systems (IFS; Schwartz, 2020) and Aletheia Coaching (March, 2021); and then discuss how these link with and can be interpreted through the lens of important advances in cognitive science, namely predictive processing (Clark, 2015), the Free Energy Principle (FEP; Friston, 2010), and the associated idea of cognitive priors (e.g., Carhart-Harris et al., 2019).
The basic idea that I want to demonstrate here through discussing these examples is that the human organism, and specifically the ways its embodied cognition is structured, has the capacity for processing information in what we might call super-optimal ways. And I’ll argue, with evidence, that these super-optimal ways of processing information not only feel better, but are (often radically) more effective than more normative, sub-optimal ways of processing information. These super-optimal ways of information processing could be referred to as specific kinds of flow states (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and seem linked with self-organising criticality as discussed in the previous post in this series.
This capacity for super-optimal processing is linked to the potential for a phase shift of the kind that I discussed in the previous post: from a machine-systems-mind way of relating to self, other, and bigger-than-self reality; to a living-systems-mind way of relating to the same. That is, our current normal way of operating, which is characterised by a separation of our “self” from our bodies, the environment, and bigger-than-self reality, and which is reinforced by our culture, is characterised by the machine metaphor: our body is something we inhabit and control from our heads, the environment is something we manipulate and control with our intelligence, science, and technology, and bigger-than-self reality is inert and made up of objects and things, rather than complex dynamic living processes.
The potential phase shift that embodying and enacting (rather than simply intellectually endorsing) the living systems view of life entails is accessed through transforming the self through these super-optimal processing facilities that the human organism seems to have baked into its structure as natural capacities. And not only that, but normalising this kind of super-optimal functioning within one’s embodied cognitive system such that this level of smoothness of flowing through one’s environment - without bypassing difficulties within one’s experience or in the environment - becomes more and more accessible and accessed through the moment-to-moment flow of one’s life.
If this sounds a little fanciful or abstract, I hope that the following examples will help ground the idea of such a phase shift being possible and what that might look like - and this phase shift in one’s normal way of being and relating is something I’ll be talking a lot more about in coming posts in this series and throughout this substack, as it’s a central idea in my thinking on more optimal ways of responding to bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis.
EMDR and the Adaptive Information Processing Model
EMDR is an evidence-based trauma treatment that focuses on re-processing of trauma-related memories, including both “big T” (Criterion A Events in DSM terms, such as car accidents, exposure to combat zones, and physical or sexual assaults) and “little t” traumas (such as bullying, neglect, relational abuse, and invalidating responses from attachment figures). EMDR makes use of bilateral stimulation in the form of eye movements, auditory and tactile stimulation, which all act to stimulate both sides of the brain and distract and tax working memory while distressing cognitive and affective content is being processed.
The evidence base for EMDR, particularly for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), is overwhelming: it works for a range of conditions, and is a gold-standard evidence-based treatment for PTSD. Shapiro (2014) outlines the evidence base for EMDR for PTSD, noting 24 out of 25 methodologically valid randomised controlled trials (RCTs) supporting its use in treatment of PTSD. 10 RCTs compared EMDR to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) directly, with 7 finding EMDR’s effects to be faster or otherwise superior, and 1 study finding superior effects for CBT on some measures. Importantly, the trauma-focused CBT protocols used in these studies, reflecting standard clinical practice, were more complicated and involved more work on behalf of both therapist and client, with approximately 50 hours of exposure-focused homework complimenting 8 sessions with the therapist. EMDR protocols for these studies included 8 sessions with no homework.
Comparison with pharmacological treatments for PTSD are also telling. One study (2007) examined the effects of 8 sessions of EMDR versus 8 weeks of fluoxetine treatment for adults who had PTSD related to events experienced in childhood. There were no significant differences between the treatment groups at the end of the 8-week period, but at 6-month follow-up 88% of the EMDR group no longer met criteria for PTSD and 57% were asymptomatic, while 73% of the fluoxetine group no longer met criteria and 0% were completely asymptomatic.
Comparisons between EMDR and both trauma-focused CBT and pharmacological treatments are significant to us because they represent a difference between one of these proposed super-optimal information processing functions that are associated with a more complex living systems orientation on the one hand; and with an old-paradigm computational approach to cognitive science where cognitions are elicited and challenged via cognitive restructuring or emotions are extinguished via behavioural (imaginal or in-vivo) exposure on the other hand. Shapiro noted “Like CBT with a trauma focus, EMDR therapy aims to reduce subjective distress and strengthen adaptive cognitions related to the traumatic event. Unlike CBT with a trauma focus, EMDR does not involve a) detailed descriptions of the event, b) direct challenging of beliefs, c) extended exposure, or d) homework.”
This example offers support for the proposal in this post that there exists such systems in the human organism that offer autopoietic healing and harmonising. Autopoietic systems are self-organising, self-authoring systems - here the term is being used to describe the system’s ability to adaptively reprocess trauma-related memories with minimal manual control of the process by the executive function of the self. This has a harmonising function, resolving and transforming inner conflicts - for example between wanting to live a full life and being hamstrung by anxiety and avoidance related to posttraumatic stress symptoms, or between having a value of ethical consumption and an addiction (e.g., to sugary processed foods) that has one behaving in contrast with that value.
The Autopoietic Healing and Harmonising (AHH) hypothesis is fully consistent with the model underpinning EMDR and which guides formulation of clients’ presenting issues by EMDR therapists, known as the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP; e.g., Hill, 2020) model. This model provides an explanation for how traumatic experiences are stored in the memory system of the brain, and how these differ from the adaptive processing that occurs for most memories for most people. For traumatic memories, the AIP model holds that the emotional content is stored in raw and fragmented ways, not integrated into a coherent narrative within one’s wider life story, and so leading to a sense of currently existing threat for the person that is triggered whenever a relevant part of that memory network is activated - which in individuals who meet criteria for PTSD is often almost all of the time.
The AIP model also provides theory about what happens in EMDR therapy procedures. It suggests that eye movements, auditory and tactile stimulations activate the whole brain system, facilitating the flow of information between regions of the brain that are holding the different fragments of the unprocessed traumatic memory or memories, including between the left and right hemispheres. As this communication flow is kick-started, the adaptive information processing system is able to re-process the memory just as it would any other memory, and so integrating it into a coherent narrative that fits within the individual’s broader story and no longer causes present-moment distress and sense of impending threat.
According to the AIP model, what the components of EMDR do is remove barriers to the brain’s normal healthy processing system. In EMDR, then, the therapist and client together let the client’s AIP system do the work that might in trauma-focused CBT be manually broken down into specific cognitions and behaviourally conditioned responses to be challenged and exposed to. This aspect of the AIP model fits with observations within EMDR, where a target memory is started with and after each set of bilateral stimulation the client is guided to “go with” the naturally emerging sensations, feelings, imagery, or cognitions that they are noticing in that moment. The AIP model also aligns with the understanding of self-organising systems present within the Systems View of Life.
IFS, Aletheia Coaching: From Parts Work to Unfolding into Nonduality
IFS (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020) and Aletheia Coaching (March, 2021) are both parts-based models for working with experience that come from the therapeutic and coaching worlds respectively. They can each be understood as models that, in their own ways (that differ from but are similar and complementary with that found in EMDR) can be understood as tapping into naturally occurring AHH systems within human cognition, and that are consistent with the systems approach within the Systems View of Life.
IFS is an evidence-based transdiagnostic model of psychological therapy. Its evidence base is not as extensive as that of EMDR, but that perhaps reflects the differing personalities of their founders: while Shapiro, the founder of EMDR therapy was extremely dedicated to research, Schwartz, the founder of IFS, seems to be more naturally oriented as a therapist and detailed observer of complex internal systemic phenomena than as a researcher: it is only in more recent years as the IFS therapist community has grown that more studies have begun to be carried out, led by other therapists that were trained by Schwartz rather than Schwartz himself.
Despite the relatively small number of studies that have been carried out, which is an important limitation, the studies that do exist show promise. A proof-of-concept study by Shaddick et al. (2013) found positive results in patients with rheumatoid arthritis in terms of their pain symptoms, physical functioning, depressive symptoms, self-compassion, and self-efficacy, although no significant difference in anxiety symptoms or sleep quality. These gains were all maintained at a one-year follow-up, except for self-efficacy and physical symptoms.
A pilot study of IFS therapy for the treatment of depression (Haddock et al., 2017) found that IFS therapy resulted in reduction of depression symptoms equivalent to that of CBT, even when carried out mostly by therapists inexperienced with the model relative to the experience of the therapists carrying out CBT. A pilot study of IFS for treatment of PTSD in adults with multiple childhood trauma experiences (Hodgdon et al., 2022) found that IFS resulted in highly significant reductions in PTSD and depressive symptoms, with 92% of participants no longer meeting criteria for PTSD at one-month follow-up.
IFS views the psyche as a system of parts, the interactions among which can lead to emotional suffering and which can be tapped to lead to psychological healing and internal harmonisation (Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020). In IFS therapy, presenting problems such as anxiety, relationship difficulties, etc, are interpreted as trailheads for exploration of the issue from a parts-based lens - to inquire into different parts of the individual’s embodied cognitive system that might be holding different relationships to the presenting issue.
Generally, the internal "family” system in IFS is viewed as being made up of protector parts, exiled parts, and an underlying “Self”. The Self, often referred to as “Self energy”, is a kind of underlying essence of the person or their awareness, recognisable by qualities known as the 8 “C”s: compassion, curiosity, calm, courage, confidence, creativity, clarity, and connectedness. However, especially when and where histories of adverse experiences are present, access to this Self energy is often obscured by protective parts.
These protective parts, split into managers (who are there more consistently, and take on roles to navigate challenging tasks in the environment) and firefighters (who tend to emerge suddenly in times of acute perceived distress), are aspects of the cognitive system that are seemingly set up to protect the system from potentially overwhelming pain or distress. They appear to form originally, for the most part, at times in childhood or adolescence where the person’s system was overwhelmed and not sufficiently supported, and adopt strategies for managing the (perceived) unmanageable. These strategies can include emotional shutting down or numbing, over-working, intellectualising, addictions, dissociation, judgment or self-criticism, aggression or intimidation, or a range of other maladaptive behavioural patterns.
Underneath the protective parts are what’s known in IFS as exiles: typically younger parts that hold unprocessed vulnerability, hurt, and pain that the person is carrying from the time of the first instance of such distress, often added to over the years with experiences that are sufficiently similar to trigger the stored pain. The process of IFS therapy involves Self energy (often initially of the therapist, but increasingly of the client as therapy progresses) being facilitated to come into dialogue with protective and exiled parts. Parts generally respond well to Self energy and, in the presence of skilful guidance by the therapist or the Self of an experienced client, are able to trust this, open up, and access healing, which allows them to release burdens.
When done skilfully, the process of parts work unfolds quite naturally, through a witnessing of the suffering and anxieties of the parts from Self energy. As the parts release burdens, they naturally over time desire to take on new roles: protector parts might now take on roles as cheerleaders, trusted advisors, or take over specific tasks that the person values or needs to do in their life, such as “hard worker”, “intellectually curious one”, “into cooking and eating healthily”. Exiles generally carry, underneath their burdens, tremendous amounts of vital energy, creativity, and enthusiasm, as the inner child-like parts of the system that were formerly largely unavailable to the system due to their burdens and protected status.
Aletheia Coaching (March, 2021) takes the unfolding process that emerges from parts work potentially further than standard IFS therapy, and makes use of a different model on which to base such psychological work1. Aletheia Coaching explains the mechanism of change being that of memory consolidation, drawing on the work of Pedreira et al. (2004). Their work, based on experimental research with animals, suggests that whenever memories are recalled, they go through a labile phase where they are vulnerable to re-consolidation into either a new state or falling back into the previous state (a process which sounds functionally equivalent to criticality as operating within memory systems).
When a significantly different and contradictory experience is introduced in this labile (critical) phase, memory reconsolidation takes place. March posits that parts work, and the presence of Self energy (“Presence” in Aletheia Coaching), provides just such a contrasting experience for the parts that are holding (big or little T/t) trauma-related memories, allowing for memory re-consolidation for the network of memories held by that “part”.
Further, March introduces a depth model to explain how the work proceeds in layers, of which parts are only the first layer. The second layer, Process, operates at the level of felt sense embodiment or imaginal felt images. The third layer, Presence, equivalent to Self in IFS, is associated with a sense of wholeness, integration, acceptance, and all the characteristics of the 8 Cs. The fourth and deepest layer, Nonduality, is associated with “non-separate and entirely unconditioned awareness… the depth of profound spiritual realisations of unity consciousness and the domain of the deepest unfoldment of human development”.
Each level of depth triggers subsequently deeper and more broadly-influencing experiential mismatches in the memory reconsolidation process between the previously stored cognitive, emotional, and somatic content associated with that memory and the level of depth that is being reprocessed. As March notes, this moving through layers of depth tends to happen naturally as a process of dynamic “unfolding” when working with parts in the ways outlined within the Aletheia Coaching process. This unfolding happens within sessions (e.g., from parts to process to presence) and over weeks and months in working with this methodology (e.g., in a tendency to have more contact with process, presence, and nonduality as more of the person’s system enters into the process - though March notes that the level of nonduality doesn’t tend to be reached by most individuals until after at least several months of dedicated work, while the other three levels are often present/accessible at least in some form from the beginning sessions).
Cognitive Priors, Predictive Processing, the Free Energy Principle, and Trans-Theoretical Processes of Change
What’s been discussed so far aligns well with recent theoretical and empirical advances in the cognitive science of Predictive Processing (e.g., Clark, 2015) and the related Free Energy Principle (FEP; e.g., Friston, 2010). In both of these accounts, the brain and 4E cognitive system operates in large part by creating predictive expectancies of what is happening in the environment (and within other parts of the internal cognitive system). These predictive expectancies, or cognitive priors, help make cognitive system more efficient as then it can focus most of its attentional resources on the differences between what’s expected and what is observed. As an analogy, if we get a stable pay cheque from our regular job every fortnight, but one fortnight it is significantly less than expected, this would stand out in our attention as it contradicts our cognitive prior or expectancy for what we were expecting to see in our bank account: this is similar to what is happening with in cognitive processes throughout the brain, from basic perception upwards.
The FEP complements the predictive processing account by positing that cognitive systems seek to minimise the amount of predictive error or surprise that they experience from moment to moment. This surprise is referred to as “free energy” and, being autopoietic systems, cognitive systems naturally want to minimise the amount of energy expended where possible so as to conserve their finite resources and use them most efficiently.
How I tend to see the “parts” of IFS, Aletheia Coaching, or similar, is as complex forms or sets of associated cognitive priors that have formed in response to needs arising as the organism moves through and interacts with its environment. The parts, or complex adaptive systems within the overall complex adaptive system of the cognitive agent as a whole, will learn complex behavioural repertoires for interacting with others, carrying out tasks, managing themselves and the emotional ups and downs of life.
Applied to therapeutic contexts, we can see how cognitive priors of human organisms would be likely highly sensitive to potentially (socially, physically, sexually, attachment-based) traumatic or threatening events. As Free-Energy minimising sub-agents of an autopoietic, social organism, these parts are going to be highly attuned to perceptions of physical and social threat, as the human biological evolutionary process selected for this over millions of years. Being rejected or outcast in the context of the environments where humanity has spent over 99% of our biological evolutionary history would have been akin to death in many circumstances, and so it makes sense that our cognitive systems would evolve to become very sensitive to such social threats - and conversely, to seek out and thrive on relationships involving secure intimacy and social trust and cohesion.
However, these sensitivities to threat can create self-deception within our cognitive systems such that they “optimise” for free energy minimisation in such a way as to be sub-optimal for social and veracity-oriented goals. That is, a part that has formed at a time of social threat (e.g., being bullied at school) might “optimise” its free energy by concluding things about the self such as “I’m bad/shameful”, “the world is unsafe to be me in”, “I need to act in certain ways or I won’t be accepted”. A part that formed to meet academic or work-based challenges might optimise for being a “good student” or “good worker” over learning or doing work that is more meaningful and life-enhancing for that person.
In the first case above, what might be sacrificed is a healthy sense of self-esteem, or the possibility of ease and belonging in the world (self-oriented self-deception); in the second, what might be sacrificed is a prioritising of what is more true or meaningful versus what is perceived to be desired by the environment (environment-oriented self-deception). In both cases, “optimising” for free energy minimisation can be seen as the source of the self-deception that reduces one’s optimal grip as a social agent sensemaking accurately and operating effectively in alignment with such truth-oriented sensemaking in the world.
AHH Processes and Enactive Wisdom Development
This post is heading towards its conclusion now, but before I get there, I want to link what’s been discussed here with things I’ve discussed so far in the Intro Series, and to arguments that I’ve yet to make. For example, I’ll discuss the relationship between AHH processes, self-deception, enactive wisdom development, and bigger-than-self distress in more detail in a future post but hopefully a preview of the direction of that argument is becoming clear already: that we can engage in and make use of the kinds of AHH processes discussed in this post to metabolise the sources of such self-deception within our own cognitive systems - and in so doing release the constraints operating on naturally unfolding self-organising systems of wisdom development.
The reason such AHH processes are so vitally necessary to engage with today’s world are, as I see it, at least twofold. Firstly, as Vervaeke emphasises repeatedly in his (2019) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series, the ways our cognitive systems are structured leaves them perennially vulnerable to self-deception. Our cognitive priors are going to naturally fall towards self-deception without mindful attention, and a major source of this self-deception is going to come from a perception of threat, whether physical or social, which our cognitive priors are evolutionarily biased towards giving a large precision weighting to. The intrapersonal/therapeutically-focused AHH systems reviewed in this post help one’s cognitive system to re-process current perceptions of threat that distort our perception and action repertoires within the world, and facilitate a naturally unfolding re-organisation process within the system in response to this reconsolidation of threat memory. While these AHH processes are natural, the self-organising nature of the FEP means that without engaging in processes like these, cognitive systems will tend to get stuck in threat-related self-deception, because we are perennially vulnerable to self-deception.
Second, and as I’ll elaborate on further in future posts, the nature of the built social environments and institutions that we operate in today is such that there are many cultural sources of threat that can engender such self-deception in our cognitive systems. While the threat of being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger is obviously drastically reduced in today’s world, we operate in systems where there is pervasive background threat, often unacknowledged: “if you don’t do well at school, you won’t be able to get a good job, and if you don’t get a good job, you won’t be able to afford to live comfortably”, “if you don’t conform to these social norms, you will likely be rejected by this group with social/political power”.
As I’ll argue in future posts, these forms of distributed social threat are endemic to many of the underlying structures and assumptions of our society. I’ll argue, too, that due to the effect of Shifting Baseline Syndrome, among other things, that we have to a large degree become desensitised to how threatening and unhealthy our globalised dominant civilisational culture is to live within, how antithetical to human wellbeing and wisdom it has become. Starting to see/re-perceive this civilisational misalignment with human and planetary wellbeing is a major source of bigger-than-self distress in itself.
One of the first ports of call, then, in beginning to work with bigger-than-self distress, are these AHH processes, which tap into naturally healing and harmonising properties within our embodied cognitive systems and can support the process of unravelling self-deception and moving towards an enactive wisdom aligned perspective that is a better fit for the times we live in.
AHH Processes and the Systems View of Life
What I’ve hoped to show in this post is that these AHH processes can align us - and the structure of our cognitive systems and their relationship with the environment - with a Systems View of Life aligned way of being. I’ve tried to demonstrate at least the beginning of an argument that transitioning to enacting more fully such a way of being can be both better for human and more-than-human wellbeing, truer and more meaningful, and more effective (for example, than overly-mechanistic, top-down models of cognitive or behavioural change that don’t take into account fully the self-organising nature and self-unfolding capabilities of cognitive systems).
What I’m trying to set up here, too, is the idea that AHH processes don’t just exist at the intra-personal, therapeutically-focused level of organisation. The reason I use the term “AHH processes” rather than, for example, “memory reconsolidation” as the primary label, is both to align the term with the larger Systems View of Life narrative (on account of AHH processes tapping into self-organising systems within human cognition) as well as to point to the the possibility of AHH processes occurring not just in intra-personal contexts but in interpersonal, organisational, and distributed cognitive systems and contexts as well.
These ideas also link back to what was discussed in the previous post in this series to the discussion of autopoiesis, self-organising criticality, and phase shifting of complex adaptive systems. The changes to memory and self-referential processing that occur within these therapeutically-oriented AHH processes can be seen as changing the structure of the autopoietic organism and its fittedness to the world via its agent-arena relationship. For example, underlying levels of depression or anxiety that a person’s embodied cognitive system is holding in response to childhood adverse experiences will tend to limit or otherwise distort that person’s perceived agency in the world: re-processing that will not only change them as a person but also potentially their set of affordances for acting in the world, and so effect their agent-arena relationship.
I mentioned earlier in this post that the memory reconsolidation processes likely active in EMDR, IFS, and Aletheia Coaching, as well as other related approaches not covered in the current post, bear a striking resemblance to the concept of self-organising criticality. That is, it seems as though working with the cognitive priors in these ways helps to cultivate an experience of criticality in the priors, where they are open to new information changing their structure. That is, they are open to a phase shift in the structure of the memory and the associated thoughts, images, affective states, and interoceptive sensations that go with that memory, which allows for phase shifts in the nature of the self as it pertains to that memory network.
It is useful to use this language of autopoiesis, self-organising criticality, and phase shifting, as it links us to more inter-scalar processes of change within self-organising systems more broadly, and to the Systems View of Life which is a major theme of the view I’m outlining within this Substack.
At the same time, the AHH processes reviewed here tie the Systems View of Life to human-scale phenomenological interfaces: we can interact with our cognitive priors through parts work; we can experience criticality as an openness to change and not-knowing that our parts go through as they let go of burdens and extreme roles and consider who or what they might want to be without that burden; we feel the autopoietic healing process take place as memories are re-processed and the distress associated with them transforms; we participate in the unfolding process of parts undergoing phase shifting in a self-organising manner as we work through the levels of depth inherent in the Aletheia Coaching process. This linking of phenomenological experience with cognitive science in closer, more mutually-informing ways is central to the vision of enactivism proposed by its founders in Varela, Thompson, and Roschs (1991), and one of its key intellectual forebears in Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1961).
In the next post, we will arrive at the Nondual Enactive Wisdom Development and Sensemaking (NEWDS) perspective that I alluded to in the Read this First post to this Substack. This approach will integrate everything discussed in the Intro Series so far and provide a platform on which to build for the second half of the series (I think we are near the halfway mark at this point).
The model underlying IFS is very practically focused and doesn’t include much of an emphasis on cognitive or information processing theories of what is happening during IFS therapy, but others have done good work reconciling IFS therapy with an information processing model of functioning, notably this explanation by Kaj Sotala of LessWrong.