User:TrevorGriffiths/Emotional Chaos Theory

Emotional Chaos Theory (EChT) is an explanatory basis for a lifelong learning approach to personal identity development (Emotional Logic) that enables maturity and stable order to grow in relationships by learning about emotions. It extends the New Science of Chaos Theory and non-linear 'Complex Adaptive Systems’ (CAS) into a new domain - the physical processing simultaneously of inter-personal relationship messaging and intra-personal self-organisation (the dynamic emotional physiology of the body-and-brain). Emotional Chaos Theory thus provides a uniquely physical conversational basis for the growth of social order by personal feedback learning and fulfilment in society, which process thus integrates mind and matter towards the same socialising outcome.

History

Emotional Logic was first developed in the 1990’s in a UK primary healthcare setting. Evaluation of outcomes using the Nottingham Health Profile showed that after learning the useful purposes of unpleasant emotions social functioning improved more rapidly than an individual’s sense of wellbeing. This observation became central to understanding the conversational context in which Emotional Chaos Theory explains the effectiveness of Emotional Logic as both [a] a therapeutic intervention, and [b] a health promotional and character development method for individuals to become resilient in their families and social groups.

In the early 2000’s methods were developed to train and assess ‘Emotional Logic Tutors’. A decision had been taken to promote Emotional Logic not as a therapy, but as a lifelong learning method accessible by anyone as a core, transferable, conversational life skill. As potential tutors began to engage with the subject matter, an increasing need was identified to develop theory that would help tutors to modify their teaching appropriately to meet individual learner's needs. The theory needed to account for the rapid ‘Butterfly Effect’ changes in people’s sense of identity that the tutors were seeing, and also for the ‘ripple effects’ of conversational skills and emotional understanding spreading through families and communities. Informal lifelong learning could effectively bring constructive change independently of the tutors once set in motion.

Emotional Chaos Theory began to emerge as a synthesis of (1) Systemic (Milan) approaches to Family Therapy (involving exploration of new conversational strategies), (2) Chaos Theory and non-linear Complex Adaptive Systems, and (3) Vygotsky’s lifelong learning model of personal development by providing individuals and groups with an accessible range of learning resources to explore. Tutor effectiveness does not depend on acquiring all this theoretical understanding, however. Understanding the theory is an optional capacity that may improve the flexibility and humanity with which a tutor can deliver the core teaching into diverse settings.

In the early 2010s tutors started applying Emotional Logic in a wide range of cultural settings (including Ndebele tribal culture in Zimbabwe, Russian, Chinese in expatriate communities in London, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East). Efforts were made to explore the effectiveness of the learning package by making translations from English of the core meanings and useful purposes of the seven significant emotional states, not merely making a word transliteration. Thus although the Western concept of 'depression' may not exist in Ndebele culture, for example, the core meaning of emptiness and powerlessness does. The method was found to promote personal stability, empowerment and social well-being despite widely diverse cultural traditions. The success of this proliferation affirmed that Emotional Logic brings understanding of a core feature of humanity in any social system. Emotional Chaos Theory was developed to account for this universality, describing how people are connecting at a level deeper than the psychiological aspects of their cultural habits. These physical organisation aspects of behaviour among shared humanity can be identified, taught, and assessed.

In the mid-2010s the educational potential for promoting good character and social resilience in diverse cultural settings became more apparent. Diversity in ways of living in a neighbourhood with improved compassion and understanding could be encouraged. Successful piloting in a UK secondary academy unit for children at risk of exclusion was given a 'highly approved' status by Ofsted, and this led to a whole school approach to emotional literacy being developed and made publicly available. Low cost, publicly accessible, self-help lifelong learning materials are available on-line to assist public health approaches to reduce anxiety and depression at all ages in the community. They have a far wider character education role to help people and families develop a core transferable skill to foster emotional resilience in response to setbacks, disappointments and hurts.

Concepts that apply Chaos Theory to emotional processing in human systems

1. Emotion is different to ‘feelings of emotion’. Emotions are physical states of the body physiology and cellular chemistry affecting whole body posture and movement, as preparation states in social settings for action or withdrawal. Feelings of emotion are information arriving in the brain's patterns of neural activity that a change of emotional preparation state is ongoing bodily.
2. An individual person’s emotional states of physical-chemical preparation are the fundamental elements of a richly communicating, non-linear, complex adaptive social system, more significant in their social effects than cognitively perceived words.
3. People develop habitual patterns of emotional and cognitive communication [attractor states], for which systemic family therapy provides new feedback learning that is sensitive to initial conditions to help people explore new ways to relate and adapt in changing circumstances.
4. Emotional states in wellbeing have a linear flow. However, at social interfaces the risk of loss can initiate grief emotions that induce emotional turbulence, and even physiological chaos at times of emotional overload.
5. General Chaos Theory explains how linear flow (for example in a column of smoke) breaks up into curling turbulence when certain boundary conditions prevail. Emotional Logic describes equivalent states of emotional turbulence called ‘whirlpools of emotion’, in which the body's physiology and brain's electro-chemistry organisation can become chaotic when certain inter-personal boundary conditions prevail. Whirlpools of emotion affect people’s patterns of behaviour, thinking and feeling, disturbing their sense of personal identity and presenting as attractor states that are diagnosable by doctors, psychologists, social workers and criminologists as common mental illnesses, or as socially disruptive behaviour.
6. Fractal scaling self-replicates intra-personal emotional turbulence as disturbances at several different inter-personal systemic levels simultaneously, seen in family dynamics, school disruptive behaviour, workplace confrontation, unlawfulness, and so on.
7. Feedback learning that such a thing as a ‘whirlpool of emotions’ can be set in motion enables a person to choose not to grieve in that habitual pattern when encountering a situation in which there is risk of loss, but to explore instead new ways to relate and adapt during times of change. This enhanced capacity for personally-relevant choice can result in rapid Butterfly Effect changes of personal identity and normalising self-esteem, with ripple effect changes in social systems.

Controversies

• Emotional Chaos Theory challenges the prevailing wisdom that common mental illness arises from an individual’s cognitive ‘habits of thinking’. Emotional Chaos Theory proposes by contrast that learned unhelpful habits of emotional processing generate a traumatised sense of personal identity. Beliefs about self and the world emerge cognitively from this damaged subjective sense of identity, and these secondarily create habits of negative thinking and behaviour.
• At the philosophical level, complex adaptive systems theory can provide a solution to the body-mind problem. Similar patterns of self-organisation can be identified (a) in the social chemistry of a body-in-relationship-with-others, and (b) in the brain’s pattern-recognising capacity to organise sensory and memory inputs into a bundled sense of orientation of person in 'space-time-presence’ of a social reality. Emotional Chaos Theory thus provides a basis also for a new model of consciousness. The social-body-brain’s physiology is self-integrating. The brain’s information patterning is self-integrating also. These self-integrating processes are parallel systemic processes, which may exchange information with each other, but may occasionally diverge, for example when day-dreaming. Each system self-organises according to the same ‘triune principles’ that integrate form, change and relatedness information about life. They are thus ‘triune systems in parallel exchange’ – the TSIPEX model of conscious orientation in social systems.
• By integrating ‘relatedness’ into conscious, parallel sets of systemic processes, Emotional Chaos Theory has the potential to re-integrate the spiritual, psychological and material aspects of personal life. The sense of ‘belonging’, which is central to spirituality in all its forms, induces an integrating, laminar flow effect on emotions and physiology. This can indeed be manipulated in religious and political sub-systems of humanity by those who distort the values of ultimate relatedness, burdening others with human power structures instead to control them. However, improved emotional literacy can enable and strengthen people to resist psychological manipulation, and to explore the potential for diversity with peaceful reconciliation at the boundaries where unity is sustained.
  

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