Contextualization Within Our Primal Origins as a Therapeutic Tool

This week in my Psychopathology class we have been studying anxiety. Following is a post I wrote addressing the construct known as Anxiety Disorder:


"The PDM (2006) says that Generalized Anxiety Disorder would be better categorized as a “personality disorder in which anxiety is the psychological organizing experience” (pps. 56-57). This makes sense to me as a way to organize the characteristics that can show up in a variety of ways that signal anxiety. From the readings it seems that what we define as Anxiety Disorder can actually be seen as a symptom of a larger issue, and shows up as a symptom of many disorders. As I understand it, anxiety is a really broad term with a lot of different ways of showing up. As are many disorders, anxiety can often be co-morbid and show up in conjunction with many other symptoms. Does this point to it as a more general symptom of other defined disorders rather than a disorder on its own.

Maddux and Winstead (2013) address many ways that Anxiety Disorders distort psychological reality, including creating false dichotomies between what is seen and normal and what is pathological in a client (p.166). There is also the distortion of a strict set of ways that it can be defined and identified including exclusion of co-morbid factors, and specific thresholds and criteria.


One of the things that this week’s reading made me think about was the greater environmental factors in mental health, disorders and diagnosis and where the dichotomy between normal and pathological lies in a socio-cultural context. The PDM (2006) defines anxiety as “fear in the absence of obvious danger” (pp. 96). It also goes on to name the shared traits of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychic Trauma, and Anxiety as including feeling “overwhelmed, the sense of having suffered a catastrophe, loss of a sense of security, and fears of injury and death” (pps. 100-101). Being in both the courses Human Growth and Lifespan Development, and Treatment Applications in Ecopsychology it is hard not to bring these lenses into the way I am examining this topic.


I wonder at what point a symptom or set of symptoms is pervasive enough that the cause or context for it can be seen as part of a larger pathology of civilization? When the developmental needs for security and full maturity of humans is actually counter to expectations and values of civilization, can the creation of individual pathology can be traced to what might be called a cultural epidemic of disconnection that creates individual pathology?


If we are using the definitions of anxiety as referenced above then it would seem that civilization as a whole is not only suffering from these symptoms, but is perhaps chasing its own tail by also continuing to be the very cause of the symptoms themselves? Through a human development lens, a securely attached human has a greater chance of processing fear or insecurity, and has less potential of experiencing prolonged trauma. From a somatic understanding of trauma, domesticated animals experience trauma, but wild animals living in a their natural context have an ability to process through intense events that does not leave a traumatic imprint. From an ecopsychological understanding, living outside of relationships with the rest of the living world of which we are intrinsically a part creates the psychic ability which makes it possible for us to see nature as “other” and thus try to shape and control it. In this context, our disconnection makes it possible for us to destroy the very habitat which feeds us, which must create a feeling of being “overwhelmed, the sense of having suffered a catastrophe, loss of a sense of security, and fears of injury and death” (PDM Task Force, 2006, pps. 100-101). Living immersed in the culture that is perpetuating the trauma would create a difficulty in seeing the possibly global and underlying causes of the symptoms, which could cause what felt like “fear in the absence of obvious danger” (pp. 96).


I looking at these ideas not to discount the necessity of addressing individual symptoms and how these affect the lives of our clients, but in the quest for a greater understanding of the larger context of mental health and wellness. I am curious how a new generation of therapists can begin to look at the root causes of symptoms and perhaps be part of re-contextualizing ideas around mental health that erase the dichotomies between normal and pathological and address the global nature of the issues at hand."


I often wonder if the health, environmental, and social factors of the culture in which we live make it possible to exist free of anxiety? As therapists how can we address these factors while still existing in this context? What do treatment applications look like while addressing things through a larger lens?


One of my favorite books is by the ecologist and anthropologist Paul Shepard. In Coming Home to the Pleistocene (Shepard, 2004) he lists some 70 themes of cultural recovery that he calls "Aspects of a Pleistocene Paradigm" (pps. 171-172). I like to think about how we could culturally repair all the ways that we have disconnected from our whole and healthy way of being in the world. I love the idea of creating lists like this to use in a therapeutic context. To look at the roots of certain symptoms and address them in a more holistic way. As a therapeutic tool, I wonder what looking to our primal roots can do for our mental health and wellbeing. This idea of making a list of the small steps we can take towards our reintegration into the web of relationships with the earth and our place as animals in it might offer us a tangible path.

Below is Shepard's (2004) list as an example of themes found in land-based, in-tact cultures that we might utilize in order to reform our connection with our whole, sane selves developing into full maturity.


"Themes of Cultural Recovery

Ontogenic
(The process of biological growth and development)

1. Formal recognition of stages in the whole life cycle

2. The progressive dynamics of bonding and separation

3. Earth-crawling freedom by 18 months

4. Richly textures play space

5. No reading prior to "symbolic" age (about 12 years)

6. All-age access to butchering scenes

7. All-age access to birth, copulation, death scenes

8. Few toys

9. Early access via speech to rich species taxonomy

10. Formal celebration of life-stage passages such as initiation

11. Rich animal-mimic play and other introjective processes

12. Non-peer-group play

13. Parturition and neonate "soft" environment

14. Access to named places in connection with mythology

15. Extended family or dense social structure

16. Extended lactation

17. Play as the internal prediction of the living world

18. Little storage, accumulation, or provision

19. Diversity of "work"

20. Handmade tools and other objects

21. No monoculture

22. Independent family subsistence plus customary sharing

23. Ecotypic economy - keyed to place

24. No landownership in the sense of "fee simple"

25. Little absolute territoriality

26. No fossil fuel use

27. Minimal housekeeping

28. No domestic plants or animals



Social

29. Prestige based on demonstrated integrity

30. Little or no heritable rank

31. Size of genetic/marriage/linguistic group or tribe: 500-3000

32. Clan and other membership giving progressive identity with age

33. Limited exposure to strangers

34. Hospitality to outsiders ,

35. Functional roles of aunts and uncles

36. Postreproductive advisory functions such grandparental roles

37. Size of fire-circle group: 10 adults (council of the whole)

38. Occasional larger congregations

39. Emphasis on mneumonics with its generational repository

40. Participant politics vs. representational or authoritarian

41. Vernacular gender and age functions

42. Totemic analogical thought of eco-predicated logos

43. Dynamic, emergent, and dispersed leadership

44. Decentralized power

45. Intertribal tension-reduction rites (song duels, peacepipe)

46. Cosmologically rather than sociohierarchically focused ritual



Other

47. Periodic mobility, no sedentism

48. Conceptual notion of spirit in all life, numinous otherness

49. Centrality of narrative, routine recall and story

50. Dietary omnivory

51. Rare-species demography

52. Subordination of art to cosmology

53. Participatory rather than audience-focused music

54. Sensual science ("science of the concrete") vs. intangible science

55. Celebration of social and cosmological function of meat eating

56. Religious regulation of the special effects of plant substances

57. Extensive foot travel

58. Only organic medicine

59. Regular dialogue on dream experience

6o. The "game" approach -- to love, not hate, the opponent

61. Attention to listening, to the sound environment as voice

62. Running

63. Attention to kinship and the "presence" of ancestors

64. Attunement to the daily cycle and seasonality

65. No radical intervention on fetal genetic malformations

66. Immediate access to the wild, wilderness, solitude

67. Nonlinear time and space-no history, progress, or destiny

68. Sacramental (not sacrificial) trophism

69. Formal recognition of a gifted subsistence

70. Participation in hunting and gathering

71. Freedom -- to come and go, to choose skills, to marry or not, etc. (pps. 171-172)"






                                                                   References

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM, 5th ed.). (2013). Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association.

Maddux, J. E., & Winstead, B. A. (2012). Psychopathology: Foundations for a contemporary understanding (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

PDM Task Force. (2006). Psychodynamic diagnostic manual. Silver Springs, MD: Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations

Shepard, P. (2004). In Shepard F. R. (Ed.), Coming home to the pleistocene. Washington, DC: Island Press.