Get it together: Flexibility, Integrity, Resilience, and Psychotherapy

• Speaker: David Pincus, Psychology, Chapman University
• Abstract: Linear models, reductionism, and disciplinary boundaries pull things apart into smaller and smaller pieces until independent and simple cause-effect relationships can be discerned. This myopic focus can be interesting when a particularly rare and useful linear cause-effect process is discovered. However, when over-applied, scientific oversimplification results in stagnation. This brief workshop will examine the problem of linear, reductionistic oversimplification in the context of human resilience and psychotherapy, two areas that are core to understanding psychology, but that have been surprisingly stagnant in both science and practice. Applying self-organization as a theoretical framework removes a range of unnecessary conceptual, empirical, and practical barriers that contribute to this lack of progress. For example, networks, topologies, bivariate, and univariate dynamics may each be understood to be different models to be applied within a unified theoretical framework. Resilience may be understood to be a single process involving several dynamics: robustness, bouncing back, growth, and grit. Similarly, the various 'theories' of psychotherapy may be seen as a single process applied to past, present, and future mind-sets, across four broad experiential channels: emotion, cognition, interpersonal and behavioral dynamics. At a higher level, flexibility and integrity may be seen as complementary processes that are foundational to any useful theory of resilience or psychotherapy, rather than as opposite or independent processes. Finally, understanding psychotherapy may be understood to be inseparable from understanding resilience because psychotherapy is fundamentally a resilience-building therapy, not a treatment aimed at some sort of cure.