On a daily basis I am given the opportunity to meet with people who are undergoing processes of change and transformation. Whether this be with Individuals, Couple's, Families or groups; the salience and fundamental essentiality of the interceonneted web that we as humans exist within is highlighted in each interaction.

While the dominate psychological and medical paradigms identify and treat pathology as something that exists within the person, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that people are not fundamentally seperate from their environment in any way shape or form and an attempt to understand and facilitate change within an 'individual' without a contextual and systemic understanding of the web of connections that surounds and interpenetrates their experience could be understood to be only of the first order; i.e. the ordering of parts of the system may change as a result, but the system itself stays the same, it maintains homeostasis...

i.e. 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'.

Now reductionist and individualist thinking can be helpful to allow us to sharpen our focus, and make conceptualisation and intervention in a system more specific, however this still only leads to well functioning members of an existing system, and what if the system itself is fractured, and biult upon princibles that are at odds to fundamentals of health, growth, transformation and psychological and spiritual intergration.

As a therapist what I am looking to facilitate is change that is of the second order, i.e. change of the system itself, not just its parts. In Family therapy this means working not only with an indiviudual who presents with, for example depressive experiences, but working with the relational context of that experience i.e. who are the people that influence and are influenced by this individuals experience, what function does this symptom serve, and what are the patterns that sourround it. This is the approach taken due to the argument that, when you get down to it, our depest wounds and also our most profound healings are about relationships; relationships with our parents, partners, friends, society, ourselves and most fundamentally our sense of seperation or connection to the numinous other.

This idea that we as humans are fundamentally relational creatures, that we create identities,

meanings and hence experience from our interelationships highlights to me the incongruence between this fundamental aspect of our being and the individualistic consumer capitalist culture of many western countries. This is a culture that reinforces and perpetuates the false ego, a sense of fundamental isolation and a pathological individuality, rather than supporting the expression of an individuals unique identity within a web of interconnections that are understood as fundamental to their humaness.

To develop as the unique beings we are, we need to look now more than ever to our relationships with the other, and understand how fundamental these relationships are to not only our own healing but also I believe to the next step forward in our evolution and survival as a species. To do this we can start with our closest human relationships, and as we progress expand out to the interconnected web of all life which is so fundamental to our existence, recognising that essentially when others hurt, so do we, because:

'Man is not and can never be an island'.

So in what ways do these ideas relate to spirituality, evolution and fundamental social change? This is the topic of my next post......