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 Click to download Chaos, Complexity, Self Organization and Us
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This young branch of science is
so important for us because it focuses on the science of how living systems
change.
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A therapeutic community, like
any living organism, is a nonlinear system. A nonlinear system means you
cannot quantify outcome based on additive equations.
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As a result, cause and effect
are not necessarily functionally related. In linear systems, output is
proportional to input.
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In nonlinear systems this is
not the case – a little bit of input can produce an enormous change in output
– or not.
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In linear systems change can be
predicted by what has happened in the past.
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In nonlinear systems, change is
discontinuous, with sudden unpredictable jumps, more like the change in a
horse’s gait from walking, to trotting to galloping – sudden transitions
resulting from dramatic reorganization (McClure,
1998).
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At the same time, it is clear
that complex systems are at least partially determined by “sensitive
dependence on initial conditions” or in our case, “childhood”.
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This nonlinear idea is extremely
inconvenient for researchers who depend on changing one variable at a time,
measuring it, and discovering causality.
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Up to a point, this methodology
can be helpful, and lead to significant advances. But when we need to look at
actual situations that occur in messy and complicated real life situations,
rather than in highly controlled laboratory settings, we run into trouble.
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All kinds of unpredictable
things happen when you get joint interactions between systems as when a
patient makes a more significant contact with a ward clerk than with their
psychiatrist, or when a television show triggers the release of long buried
memories.
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These things that happen,
although unpredictable, are quite frequently, not chaotic at all, but well
organized. This has been a fundamental dilemma in researching the therapeutic
milieu – how do you know what works and what doesn’t work when so much is
going on all the time?
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When a complex, nonlinear system
becomes stressed or “perturbed”, the system becomes unstable.
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The further the system gets from
equilibrium the more unstable it becomes.
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Human beings, and human
organizations experience such a phenomenon as anxiety, fear, and stress.
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As the stress increases, a human
being at first compensates and attempts to reestablish equilibrium. These
kinds of changes are called “first-order” changes – linear, gradual,
segmental, predictable, moderate and incremental.
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But if these adjustments fail to
work and the system does not restabilize, the continued perturbation will
propel movement toward a “bifurcation” – a decision point, a critical choice,
Robert Frost’s “two paths” diverging in a wood.
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There may be many possible
options at each fork in the road and the consequence is that the future
becomes unpredictable, although not random.
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Like entering the vortex of a
tornado, the system experiences this movement as chaotic and, in human terms,
terrifying while inside the cone, but from outside, we can see that the vortex
does have form and boundaries.
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Hence chaos is not really chaos,
exactly.
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In fact, the possibilities of
movement within the vortex will be constrained by previous decisions that have
led to this turning point, and by other aspects of both internal and external
reality, but within the field of choice within the cone, anything can happen.
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As one psychologist has said,
“history circumscribes the choices” with which systems are presented (McClure,
1998), p. 20.
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If turbulence continues, at a
certain point, the bifurcation occurs, one fork is chosen, and that fork leads
to “second order change” which is described as turbulent, chaotic, nonlinear,
sudden, dramatic, transformative, and unpredictable (McClure,
1998).
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A new self-organization is the
result of the transit through this chaotic, turbulent process, one that may
lead to increased complexity or to regression/disintegration: to life or to
death. The change of a caterpillar into a butterfly is an example of
second-order, transformative change.
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We know intimately about the
power of applying stress to a system, while watching that system – individual,
family or group – attempt to restabilize itself using tried and true methods,
or defenses, only to become overwhelmed and enter a period of chaos out of
which may or may not come positive change and growth.
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There has long been a tension in
the mental health field generally, and the psychiatric field in particular,
between those who favor doing whatever it takes to stabilize a patient –
drugs, restraint, punishment – and those who see strategic and creative
possibilities within the chaos.
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Many psychotherapists would
agree that the proper role for therapy is to be a safe container for the chaos
of the patient’s experience, validating the importance of letting change
occur, despite the disruptions that may attend the process, alternating
between provoking enough anxiety to propel the person, family, or group into
the vortex of change while soothing anxiety that is threatening to overwhelm
the system, forcing it into regressive solutions.
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I believe a therapeutic milieu
that is truly working is one in which there is enough turbulence to edge
people toward change, toward that critical turning point, while providing a
safe enough container so that the choices are somewhat constrained, deterring
a deterioration into chaos.
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In a therapeutic milieu we
promote that turbulence through the work of psychotherapy, through group
process, through the everyday friction of social interaction, and through
planned interventions.
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We contain the turbulence by
having a clear value system and coherent practice, based on democratic
principles that we all agree to share as a way of life.
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One psychologist in this new
field has stated that general systems theory focuses on stability while chaos
theory explores how systems change
(McClure, 1998).
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Others propose that chaos and
complexity are the basis for a postmodern self.
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In contrast to the modern man
who could objectively discover the machine-like workings of the universe, a
self-contained individual able to uncover the one Truth, the post-modern self
is an open system, dependent on context, always in a state of becoming,
actively integrating new information and exchanging that information with a
changing environment (Masterpasqua & Perna, 1997).
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This for me, is a near-perfect
description of an active, engaged therapeutic milieu, the open system that
Maxwell Jones referred to so often.
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The science of complexity can also help us to understand
and promote the special nature and quality of psychotherapeutic interventions
that occur within a collective group experience.
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The biomathematician Evelyn Fox Keller has been quoted as
remarking that “It amazes me how difficult it is for people to think in
terms of collective phenomenon”
(Johnson, 2001) p. 12.
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All living systems appear to share the same
self-organizing features – they solve problems by drawing on masses of
relatively ‘stupid’ elements, rather than having a single, very intelligent
boss.
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They function in a fashion that is bottom-up rather than
top-down.
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This movement from low-level rules to higher-level forms
of functioning is what has been called emergence and is present in
systems as divergent as ant colonies, human brains, urban neighborhoods,
theatrical productions, and computer software programs.
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When a therapeutic community is working effectively,
solutions to individual and group problems emerge out of the process of linked
individual interactions and is the reason why democratic processes are so
essential to the functioning of a therapeutic community.
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It is only within the “soup” of democracy that the
processes of emergence and self-organization at higher levels of intelligence,
can occur.
Bloom, S. L. Chaos, Complexity, Self-Organization and Us.
Email From America. Psychotherapy Review 2(8), August, 2000.
Goldstein, J. (1994) The Unshackled Organization. Portland, OR:
Productivity Press.
Johnson, S. (2001) Emergence: The Connected Lives
of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. New York: Scribner.
Masterpasqua, F. & Perna, P. A. (eds) (1997) The
Psychological Meaning of Chaos : Translating Theory Into Practice.
Washington, D.C.:: American Psychological Association.
McClure, B. A. (1998)
Putting a New Spin on Groups: The Science of Chaos. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates
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Mental Models |
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Sanctuary Model of Organizational Change |
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Components of the Sanctuary Model |
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Social Legacy of Trauma |
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Trauma Theory |
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Seven
Commitments of Sanctuary |
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