Developmental Engagement Field Theory (DEFT): A practical application of Integrally Informed psychotherapy
Abstract
Psychotherapy has benefited from AQAL’s contribution of a developmental perspective expanded through quadrants, states, and types. We grow on different lines through progressive worldviews which shift and morph according to our and others’ states of consciousness and types of people. Our experience can be lived, monitored, and affected variously from four quadrants and eight zones (Wilber 2000).
There is considerable phenomenological and empirical research indicating that much—if not all—development is mediated through engagement with subtle energy fields, which we influence to varying degrees depending on maturation, intention, and attention (Radin 2006, McTaggart 2007). This paper offers an integrally informed developmental engagement field theory (DEFT) with practical suggestions about applying it to living, parenting, and psychotherapy.
How do we practically apply AQAL to psychotherapy?
Trying to keep too much consciously in mind during a session creates the risk of distracting away from the subtle intersubjective contexts that are the fluid medium of psychotherapy. Therapists, like Olympic athletes, operate largely from implicit learning embedded in circuits anchored in the right hemisphere (Schore 2003). In sessions, therapists experience left quadrant reactions, feelings, images, and urges arising from their personal being, their mission to help, their attunement to clients, and their training and experience. They alchemically cocreate healing work with clients, often by accessing extensive implicit knowledge with simple interior directives from their logical, linguistic, literal left hemispheres to their intuitive, emotionally paradigmatic, somatically organized right hemispheres.
Thirty-five-year-old anxious Evan*i comes into his eleventh session and announces, “I’m having panic attacks all the time.”
I feel a surge of alarm at this revelation and an urgent, codependent countertransference desire to rescue him from his pain. I tell myself, “Breathe. Relax. Explore what’s happening. He’s uncovering emotions and memories he learned to bury as an avoidant infant; overwhelming stuff.”*ii “Breathe,” “Relax,” and “Explore what’s happening,” cue implicit knowledge associated with psychotherapeutic and yogic systems, and I become curious about his panic attacks. “Let’s explore these states. I can tell they’re scary and painful, but they’re probably also guides.”
Later in the session Evan says, “I don’t know if you understand me or can help me.”
I feel a defensive impulse to illustrate my understanding and usefulness to him and recognize it by the defensive flavor of self-righteous protest. “Be interested in his experience. His caregivers and lovers have never been able to sustain attunement. These cues direct my attention and orient me to think developmentally. “What am I not getting, Evan? Maybe you can help me understand and we can figure out a way to create movement.”
Such interior cues and directions guide therapists’ intention/attention/energetic attunement to support intersubjective fields involving rich combinations of approaches such as active listening, interpersonal neurobiology, and spiritual orientations within overarching integrally informed frameworks.
Other examples are, “Go with the flow,” “Relax into the session,” “Think developmentally, “Attune to yourself,” “Attune to your client,” or imagining channels of light connecting your and clients’ chakras. These practices can evoke elaborate healing systems, but non-consciously the way a basketball player accesses layers of learning about stance, strategy, shot selection, focus, and teamwork with interior admonitions like, “Assert your will, or “Let the game come to you.”
This paper offers a comprehensive developmental engagement field theory beginning with morphegenic fields, extending through development, psychopathology and psychotherapy, and progressing to unity with pure spirit. Each theoretical formulation includes key organizing concepts that can be accessed interiorly with a few words or images, thus paving the way for first learning Developmental Engagement Field Theory (absorbing the frameworks, insights, and techniques into linear/logical left, and non-linear/associational/reflexive right hemisphere circuits), and then comfortably leaning into them and evoking them in sessions.
Why Developmental Engagement Field Theory (DEFT)?
It’s becoming increasingly clear that we are connected in multiple intersubjective matrixes, all of which have mutually influencing energetic components. Given string theory, it’s hard to imagine any object as other than nothingness vibrating in multiple dimensions creating progressive interlocking fields (and what mystery motivates these vibrations to arise out of absolute nothingness?). Certainly field theories are central to many modern conceptions of psyche/soul/unity/psychotherapy (Almass 2004, Bion 1970), and significant historical approaches of Western philosophers such as Plautinus (1991) and Augustine (Louth 1983), and Eastern traditions such as Saravati’s applications of the Pantanjali Sutras to Raja yoga (Sarasvati 1987). Wilber’s discussions of “energy bodies” permeating and informing states of consciousness (Wilber 2007), Rupert Sheldrakes ideas of morphegenic fields guiding development (Sheldrake 2005), and Alan Schore’s formulations of subtle maternal attunement influencing babies’ neural anatomy and physiology (Schore 2005) can be considered—at least in part—field theories of development. In general, the distinctions between energetic and non-energetic field connections are progressively blurring as our instrumentation for measuring subtle energies advances (McTaggart 2007).
Social engagement
Humans are social animals whose development is dominated by interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships from before conception through life (Witt 2008). Development progresses through physical/energetic engagement, morphegenetically with the human race—perhaps with extended family (Hellinger 2005), biologically with self and mother, psychosocially with self, caregivers, and increasing numbers of others throughout life, culturally through social networks and identifications, and nonlocally/transtemporally through self-awareness of past/present/future and quantum effects. These engagements tetra-emerge guided by interpersonal and intrapersonal intersubjective fields.
The idea of ontological development enacted through engagement with multiple intersubjective fields informing and being influenced by growth and experience is central to Developmental Engagement Field Theory.
Development needs attunement.
Love affairs emerge from sexual polarity, complementary wounds and dreams, physical access, and drives to relate and create meaning. Some love affairs lead to pregnancies, initiating a new generation. Attunement permeates everything. Healthy attunement to self and others involves extending awareness—with acceptance—of what we and others are sensing, feeling, thinking, wanting, and judging. Unhealthy attunement involves perceived threat evoking enactment of defensive states/patterns encoded through reflexive instincts to protect self from shame, fear, and other painful and/or unacceptable experiences. Expanding capacities for healthy attunement to self and others mark progress on a variety of developmental lines including the moral line, the values line, the psychosocial line, and the self-line (Witt 2007). Self-awareness and the powers of intention and attention considerably influence these processes (Siegel 2007).
Attunement is such a central aspect of development that I originally entitled this paper Developmental Attunement Field Theory. I changed it because engagement captures the omnipresence of active, interconnected relational systems, and my twenty-three-year-old son Ethan assured me that DAFT is a ridiculous acronym, sure to violate left quadrant validity standards.
The activity of attunement—attending with acceptance to what we and others are sensing, feeling, thinking, judging, and wanting—can be encapsulated in a word such as “attunement,” an image such as two sets of intersubjective fields dancing elegantly with each other, or a sound as in interior or interpersonal harmony. These are the kinds of simple cues that can evoke the more complicated processes of interoception and empathy embedded in accepting awareness of self and others. Feeling an absence of attunement through subjective discomfort or objective misalignment, a clinician can evoke it through such mechanisms.
A few of my favorite attunement cues are looking into my client’s left eye (to better connect with their non-verbal, somatically based, emotionally driven, autobiographical right hemisphere, Siegel 1999), breathing in rhythm with my client’s breath, and relaxing into a subjective sense of shared harmony of purpose in supporting his or her health and development.
The birth language of infants and mothers.
Infants are born communicating through sound, touch, movement, gesture, and gaze (Trevarthan 1979, Tronick 1989, Lyons-Ruth 2005). James Grotstein in a lecture given in 2005 —referencing famous infant researcher/pediatrician Barry Brazelton—suggested that the advent of slow motion photography turned infants from the idiots of primary narcissism to the PhD’s of intersubjectivity by revealing the incredible dance of expression, sound, touch, and gaze between mothers and infants (Grotstein 2005). Certainly researchers such as Edward Tronick (2006), Karlin Lyons-Ruth (2005), Peter Fonagy (Bateman and Fonagy 2003), and others have chronicled the rich birth languages shared by infants and caregivers through early development. Barry Brazelton has reported six different forms of infant crying relaying a wealth of information that mothers understand by six weeks (2005). Alan Schore has established that mothers’ right hemispheres literally guide the growth of infants’ right hemispheres during early development, and that similar brain areas light up harmoniously in mothers and infants in crescendos and decrescendos of neural activity during periods of mutual gaze. 70% of women and 70% of fathers hold infants on the left, presumably to enhance right hemisphere to right hemisphere communication, which is not just parents communicating with and influencing infants, but infants communicating with and influencing parents (Schore 2006).
Secure attachment is optimal.
Infants who receive the attention, space, and protection they need tend to become securely attached to caregivers. They’re favored to have a stable sense of self, confidence of a fair and loving caregiver consistently available, and a relatively unobstructed developmental path. There is no question that secure attachment is superior to insecure attachment in all relationships (Siegel 1999, Schore 2003, Bateman and Fonagy 2004, Sroufe 1996). Securely attached infants develop more resilient and robust nervous systems, less psychopathology, better social adjustment, more likelihood of having secure interpersonal relationships and—eventually when they mature and create families—are more likely to have secure attachment with their own children (Schore 2003).
Present, congruent, and marked.
In the absence of trauma, caregivers who are present, congruent, and marked tend to create secure attachment relationships with infants (Bateman and Fonagy 2004).
“Present” means a primary or secondary caregiver (secondary caregivers are those that infants feel comfortable and familiar with) is experienced as consistently there. This is no small thing. In one study, fathers in England spent an average of 7.5 minutes a week individually with their children (NICHD 1996).
“Congruent” involves caregivers’ non-verbal—or energetic—messages feeling consistent with verbal/behavioral messages.
“Marked” means that when a caregiver mirrors back a child’s experience—a necessary developmental activity—they inflect—usually exaggerate—expressions so baby knows Mother is referring to baby and not experiencing the emotion herself (Bateman and Fonagy 2004). An example would be a mother holding a crying infant, looking at the child’s face with an exaggerated sad face of her own, and saying with a slightly dramatic sad tone, “You’re unhappy right now, aren’t you?” The child gets that Mother is talking about the child’s inner experience and, in the intersubjective embrace of her attunement, feels empathized with and coregulates toward emotional harmony.
The child’s upper left quadrant experience here is most likely that of feeling known, accepted, and protected. Even though neural areas central to language and explicit memory barely come on line at eighteen months to support rapid language acquisition and explicit memory, children whose mothers routinely use feeling language through infancy tend to develop more self-awareness of emotional states and enhanced capacities for mentalization, the crucial ability to be aware in the present moment that states of mind influence thoughts and behaviors (Miller et al 2002). Such research suggests progressive, include and transcend, interweaving processes of neural development, social learning, and self-awareness.
The importance of, “Present, congruent, and marked,” extends through development. A teacher reading Hamlet to her class is marking her words, tones, expressions, and gestures so the class knows she isn’t going crazy and raving at them, but instead is empathizing with their absorption in the drama and actually is an agent that protects them from being poisoned or impaled. A therapist saying, “That is so sad,” as a man talks about his daughter’s death is marking his expressions so the man knows the therapist feels authentic sorrow at his loss, but also satisfaction and approval at the man’s trust and willingness to allow his grief in the session. Such experiences involve present, congruent, and marked attunements where individuals feel known, accepted, and protected.
Known, accepted, and protected.
I suggest that the experience of feeling known, accepted, and protected, both intrapersonally and interpersonally, is universally beneficial at every stage of development, and is present in most successful interpersonal relationships to some extent, especially those like parent, teacher, therapist, good friend, and lover where there are special responsibilities inherent in the role.
Known, accepted and protected—like present, congruent, and marked—can be used both as senses to cultivate (as in learning to monitor whether I and/or another am feeling known/accepted/protected), and as cues to access deep levels of implicit knowledge about knowing, accepting, and protecting relevant on every line from magenta to clear light. Therapists can evoke these qualities—and much of their theoretical/practical underpinnings—by simple directions such as, “Help her feel known,” “I feel angry, I don’t feel accepted or protected by this person,” or, “I’m ashamed, I’m not accepting myself right now for some reason.”
The experience of feeling known, accepted, and protected can vary wildly through development. A toddler left alone is likely to feel panic and outrage. A teen left alone might feel attuned to by caring parents who sense his need for autonomy. A fifteen-year-old girl sensing erotic interest from her step-father might feel frightened and disgusted, while believing her boyfriend doesn’t desire her might evoke abandonment depression. Known, accepted, and protected can be sensed by all through elaborate left quadrant processes, but will vary situationally, and often require intersubjective adjustment to be fully comfortable interpersonally, and intrasubjective adjustment to be fully comfortable interiorly. Capacities for such adjustments form core skill sets in living, parenting, relating, and psychotherapy.
Known, accepted, and protected is as relevant intrapersonally as it is interpersonally.
It is an axiom of development that we tend to parent ourselves the way we were parented, and treat ourselves the way we treat others. If your parents were compassionate, fair, and firm with you through your development, you are likely to be compassionate, fair, and firm with yourself intrapersonally, and with others interpersonally. If your parents neglected, or abused you under stress, you are more likely to neglect or abuse yourself and others under stress, and so on (Witt 2008).
Infants are externally regulated by parental attunement, but this is often harder than it sounds. Seventy percent of babies are easy, hard, or shy (Ambert 1997). All children are born with varying degrees of novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, persistence, self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence (Cloniger 2004), among other temperamental traits (Ambert 1997). There are better and worse fits of children’s and parents’ temperaments. Lack of goodness of fit can make attunement more difficult (Ibid), and the pressure is on such parents to grow in attuning to their difficult-fit children. Parents with secure, autonomous attachment styles adjust better and quicker to such demands (Bateman and Fonagy 2004).
Neglected or abused infants respond in predictable hierarchical fashion (Porges 2006, Shore 2006). First response is usually protest, sympathetic nervous system charged outrage at being neglected or injured. Parental attunement can quickly regulate mild distress back to happy sympathetic arousal where babies—especially toddlers in the early practicing period—spend a lot of time. Lack of attunement and more persistent abuse or neglect often result in younger infants dissociating into parasympathetic collapse, the physiological substrate of shame emotions that will appear later around in response to caregivers’ disapproval. At around one, babies learn to walk, realize more consciously the need for mother to help regulate painful emotions, and can parasympathetically collapse into shame in response to nonverbal cues of disapproval (Schore 2003).
Dissociation is a primary substrate of defensive states and patterns.
Neuroscientist/psychoanalyst Allan Schore believes that most defenses involve dissociation to some extent (Schore 2006). I agree. Development, both healthy and unhealthy, always builds on previous capacities. Greater capacities for dissociation predispose infants to block discomforts like shame, guilt, fear, anger, and disapproval with reflexive dissociative processes like suppression, depression, projection, denial, projective identification, scapegoating, and other defenses. Capacities for dissociation predispose individuals to post traumatic stress disorder, dissociative identity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, personality disorders, and other psychopathologies (Schore 2005). Further, unsafe parents can evoke social circuits in developing infants’ nervous system for determining whether a beloved intimate caregiver is currently safe or a monster. These circuits persist into adulthood and are believed by some to be the implicit sources of toxic states of consciousness characteristic of borderline, narcissistic, and other personality disorders (Fonagy 2008).
In early development, parents protect infants and toddlers from their own destructive impulses. “Stop, don’t go into the street!” “Don’t eat that! It’s yucky.” “You hit Timmy when he took your ball. You need to apologize.” These are examples of parents protecting children from destructive impulses with judicious disapproval. If such training happens in relationships where parents are present, congruent, and marked, children more easily internalize values to progressively refine and apply to self and others.
The social learning mechanism of caregiver disapproval inducing instantaneous shifts from happy sympathetic arousal to the parasympathetic immobilization and collapse of shame emotions is central to healthy development. All mammals have this capacity, which empowers mothers to control toddlers at a distance and encode preconceptual social learning (Witt 2007).
Starting at around eighteen months when the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex come more fully on line, children start to develop language involving symbols, concepts, and I/you/we in the past/present/future. This capacity is relatively recent evolutionarily, perhaps only fully potentiating two hundred thousand years ago with crucial mutations on two of 715 sites of the FOXP2 gene (Enard 2004). Some believe this mutation was the birth of modern human self-awareness (Witt 2007).
Conscious self-awareness in the past/present/future allows children to observe and approve or disapprove of themselves, thus interiorly evoking shame emotions that must be defended against. Since children start being able to hide emotional states from adults by around 16 months (Shore 2003), they often self-regulate such experiences and—depending upon their relative experience of feeling known, accepted, and protected by caregivers—such self-regulation builds on past capacities for dissociation to deepen and elaborate defensive states and patterns involving suppression, repression, and the panoply of defenses chronicled by the psychoanalytic research of the last century.
On the other hand, interior disapproval can also motivate children to follow rules, ask parents for understanding, guidance, and absolution, and strengthen crucial lower left quadrant value systems.
Protected from myself.
Secure attachment and attuned caregivers can protect infants and toddlers from harm physically and psychologically. A shamed infant looking into the eyes of an approving caregiver can be regulated back to happy sympathetic arousal in ten seconds (Schore 2003). This interactive, external affect-regulation certainly helps children encode neural circuitry for later self-regulation, but parents embody formal operational cognitive abilities that aren’t available to children until after their second major neural pruning around ten to twelve when they become more stably formal operational.
Formal operational cognition includes the capacity to hold competing concepts in our minds simultaneously, and relate to people—including us—as embodying good and bad, beautiful and ugly, or truthful and false. Holding competing concepts simultaneously with compassion optimizes emotional transformation from pain such as fear/shame/anger/regret/guilt/hatred to authentic growth, thus accelerating development.
Another uniquely human attribute that can accelerate growth is a “theory of development,” which includes conscious awareness that we are always developing and can affect direction of growth, rate of change, and relative happiness using attention, intention, and manifestation.
“Theory of development” is like “Theory of mind.”
A “theory of mind” means a child is aware of self as thinking being. I propose that children, adolescents, and adults develop a “theory of development” when they become aware of themselves as constantly developing human beings in multiple dimensions. Attachment research shows us that a less healthy theory of development regards self as passive victim of the caprices of life, and that a more healthy theory of development involves an agentive self guiding growth on a number of developmental lines. When therapists simply have a developmental orientation, and valid criteria for discerning more/less healthy theories of development, they naturally transmit healthy theories of development to their clients.
Inability to self-regulate shame emotions as original sin.
Unfortunately, the neural maturity of preoperational and concrete operational children is not adequate for optimal self-regulation of shame emotions. Optimal self-regulation of shame requires simultaneously holding the concepts of self as agentive agent able to make amends, follow rules, or refine rules, and self as rule-breaker, a formal operational capacity that stabilizes after the second major neural-pruning at around eleven. Children don’t have the neural capacity to have a theory of development that involves effectively self-regulating all shame emotions. They do have strategies that can reduce or eliminate shame in different situations such as following rules, or seeking support, absolution, and approval from caregivers, but nervous systems programmed to reflexively avoid shame will also—largely nonconsciously—employ and elaborate defenses such as projection, denial, scapegoating, rationalization, and projective identification.
Normal human development produces constellations of defenses: brilliant but flawed best efforts of emergent nervous systems at self-regulating shame emotions and other threatening material.
Given that modern human self-awareness probably only fully arose two hundred thousand years ago, we have had relatively little evolutionary space to be biologically prepared for the avalanche of interior relationships, perspectives, and judgments that show up with consciousness. Social development has addressed this issue, with progression through successive MEMEs producing new healing systems along with new psychosocial pathologies (Kegan 1982).
Developmental research has helped determine optimal attunement attitudes and techniques, but the gift of self-aware consciousness seems to necessarily involve even well attuned parents raising children with neurotic defenses and characterological defensive capacities that are neurologically well established by adolescence (Witt 2007).
What are defenses?
What are defenses? How can we discern them in ourselves and others? Defenses are altered states, based in implicit neural circuitry reflexively constellated in response to perceived threat. They involve amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives, destructive impulses, and reduced capacities for self-reflection and empathy. One of these characteristics usually indicates present to some extent (Witt 2008). If I have the impulse to run from you, arguably a destructive impulse if you aren’t actually threatening my physical or psychological integrity, I’m probably experiencing amplified fear, distorted perspectives of your dangerousness, and reduced abilities to attune empathetically with you (which would soothe my fear) or be aware self-reflectively that I’m in a defensive state.
If my client is excoriating her husband in a conjoint session—arguably indulging a destructive impulse—she probably additionally has amplified anger, a distorted perspective of his vileness and the advisability of trashing him, lack of empathy for his—and my—suffering, and no self-awareness of her toxic attitudes or behaviors. Additionally, she probably is harmonizing with his defensive states that are offensive and provocative. One of the ultimate goals of therapy and development is for people to be responsible for everything they experience and do (Masterson 1981). The therapist’s complicated task in such situations is to encourage each partner to embrace a healthy theory of development toward deeper consciousness and greater compassion that includes progressive awareness of defensive states and abilities to self-regulate them to states of healthy response to the present moment.
Every experienced therapist knows the feeling of defensive states arising into empathic resonance, driven by mirror neuron circuits, which recapitulate other’s states of consciousness including intentionality (Siegel 2006). As we feel these defenses constellate, we attune to our clients, tolerate the pain of their wounds, and reach to know, accept, and protect them with presence, congruence, and markedness. Therapists can thus function as active/interactive mirrors—mediums through which clients simultaneously self-discover and self-transform (Grotstein 2004).
The Delphic injunction to, “Know thyself” is a central feature of healing transformation. As we know, accept, and protect ourselves from harming or being harmed, we support developmental processes that lead toward sweeter harmony and deeper consciousness on a road that is tetra-enacted in the present moment, rooted in ontological development, stretching from infrared through clear light and beyond.
Complexity theory is so cool: link differentiated parts of an open system and they naturally self-organize toward greater complexity.
Swimme and Berry suggest in their elegantly written, The Universe Story (1992) that the “cosmogenic principle” of evolution is a tendency toward greater complexity and deeper consciousness on every level of development. Chaos theory tells us that complex systems are open to receive energy/input from the outside, link differentiated parts, and are not lost in chaos or rigidity. Complex systems naturally integrate toward greater complexity, which feels like greater simplicity and harmony. Human brains/minds/bodies and relationships are complex systems of linked differentiated parts, yearning toward harmony.
Differentiated parts of our consciousness, preconscious, unconscious, and non-conscious can be linked intrapsychically by being known, accepted, and protected by us. What blocks such linkages are simple ignorance, developmental arrest, dissociation, defenses, and chaos characteristic of interior turmoil. Defenses can involve addiction, mania/hypomania, depression, violence, and conflicted relationships, and can arise from subjective deprivation in what Maslow called, “deficiency needs:” needs for food, water, shelter, security, basic affiliation, etc. (Maslow 1962). Here we see the neurological substrate of why social work and psychotherapy are effective. Social work strives to answer deficiency needs to give development a chance, while therapy challenges the individual to grow toward divine love, sacred work, and unity with pure spirit through knowing, accepting, and protecting an inner community of selves and aspects.
The good news of complexity theory is that as we know, accept, and protect ourselves, our brain/mind/body/social systems naturally integrate toward greater harmony and deeper consciousness, all the way to unity with everything. This is one explanation for the relative unanimity of what contemplatives describe variously as universal love, Big Mind, pure emptiness, and pure fullness (Almaas 2004, Wilber 2007). Sunyata by any other name is still pure emptiness. Unity with God by any other name is still unity with God.
In psychotherapy, cultivating a sense of whether our client is knowing, accepting, and protecting myriad aspects provides us with new perceptual healing capacities. “I can’t stand how jealous I get.” “I just lose my ability to say ‘no’ to my five year old.” “Why do I keep choosing the same type of woman, again and again?” As we know, accept, and protect our clients in sessions, we explicitly, implicitly, and energetically support them doing the same, thus resolving obstacles to integration.
Therapists rarely need to directly dispute distorted defensive perspectives in clients. We can instead help them utilize formal operational capacities to hold distorted perspectives simultaneously with compassionate ones. Evolutionarily driven tendencies to integrate toward greater compassion and depth of consciousness (complexity and harmony) will naturally promote health and growth.
Where are the energetic fields?
There have been numerous studies validating simultaneous energetic connections between bonded couples—and even casual acquaintances—as measured by EEG and other physiological indicators. One partner “sends” positive intent of some sort at random, computer-generated intervals and the other receives (Radin 2006). Similarly, focused experimenter intention has had significant impacts on plants, algae, and other living organisms at a distance, and long distance healing has had effects on immune function and other health related indicators. Bioluminescence of all living things naturally becomes synchronous when in physical proximity through air or water (McTaggart 2007). It is not a great leap to assume that such connectedness extends to mothers and infants, parents and children. We can measure the effects of such energetic field connections, but the fields themselves are often too subtle to be observed with modern instrumentation.
A unified field theory assumes that no object or force exists separate from the whole it is embedded in. There is some question of the relative effects of intention on such fields, but it seems apparent that there are effects of intention (Ibid).
Conceptualizing development as occuring within a multitude of intersubjective fields of subtle energies has been enthusiastically embraced by many in the pre and perinatal community (McCarty 2004). It’s hard to imagine more powerful intentions than those generated by parents at every level of development. Similarly, as we grow we expand our own intentions in multiple directions. From a Spiral Dynamics perspective, there are waves of intention that arise through each MEME, characteristic of the values of that MEME channeled through the individual and social goals of each person, tribe, and nation. Developmentally, every MEME includes positive intent of parents toward biological children, and often all children.
DEFT in practice.
Now, let’s examine Developmental Engagement Field Theory practically through the development of one human being named Sarah.
Sarah’s parents, Alex and Carlin, were drawn to each other influenced by proximity, family morphegenic fields, and attunement with dreams and wounds. They met, were erotically magnetized, established romantic infatuation, became engaged, and got married just as their romantic infatuation was transforming into less erotically urgent intimate bonding. Alex is an extroverted, masculine, enneatype three, the Achiever (Riso 1999), while Carlin is a more introverted, feminine enneatype six, the Loyalist (Ibid). Both are college educated and work at a state university, Alex as a professor, and Carlin as an administrative assistant. Both extended families—back through several generations—value education, success, and conformity.
Sarah is conceived and immediately influenced by genetic programming, morphegenic fields, Alex and Carlin’s intention and attention, and Carlin’s biochemistry. Through pregnancy, as Carlin’s endocrine system and nervous system deal with stress and recovery, Sarah’s nervous system is subtly entrained. In the second trimester, Sarah’s nervous system begins encoding implicit memories of blissful union with the womb, possible substrates for later transcendental experiences when she becomes an avid meditator her thirty’s.
Sarah is born in a warm dark room, and Carlin’s first look into her eyes is one of gratitude and adoration, soothing Sarah’s nervous system into feeling pleasantly known, accepted, and protected.
Carlin and baby Sarah frequently attune with gaze, touch, gesture, sound, and expression. This process is largely driven by Sarah’s needs for contingent contact and space. The two naturally constellate a non-verbal, emotional language that will continue to expand—eventually being included and transcended into symbolic, conceptual communication—while always being the subjective foundation of relating (Trevarthan 1979, Lyons Ruth 2005). Alex participates—and is a primary attachment figure—but is more peripheral since he decided to keep working while Carlin stays home with the baby.
Energetically we can assume Carlin’s chakra centers, intention and attention, and the hopes, prayers, and thoughts of interested relatives and friends all subtly influence Sarah’s development as her emerging personality subtly influences them. Sarah is temperamentally feminine, introverted, shy, high in novelty seeking, dependence, cooperativeness, and persistence, and low in self-directedness, harm avoidance, and reward dependence. She leans toward enneatype two, the Helper (Riso and Hudson 1999).
Carlin is a dedicated mother who’d stays consistently present, congruent, and marked through Sarah’s infancy. Like many college-educated mothers, she speaks often to Sarah and mirrors her emotional states nonverbally and verbally, which will enhance Sarah’s later capacities for self-awareness and mentalization (Miller 2002). Sarah enjoys secure attachment with both parents and develops relatively low capacities for dissociation. As she discovers her physical body and the emerging world, she feels known, accepted, and protected by all.
At one, Sarah is put in the college preschool for fifteen hours a week while Carlin returns part time to work. The culture of the preschool is child-enrichment centered, and Sarah is immersed in loads of sensory/cognitive/social input, most of which is pleasant. She is disapproved of for wandering out into the garden by herself, and playing with her genitals during activities. Her nervous system processes these disapprovals with parasympathetically driven shame emotions. The behaviors quickly extinguish, and Sarah continues to seek approval from groups (and avoid disapproval) and avoid public displays of sexuality through subsequent developmental stages.
At around eighteen to twenty months, Sarah’s brain—especially her hippocampus and middle frontal cortex—matures into enhanced capacities for explicit memory (memories that feel like memories when evoked) and language. Relatively quickly, she is deluged by “I,” “you,” and “us” in the past/present/future, a literal infinity of perspectives, unique to humans, probably evolutionarily recent (dating from the FOXP2 mutation) and overwhelming. These perspectives involve countless interior selves—happy, sad, angry, alone, together, yesterday, tomorrow—interrelating. Out of these multiple relationships emerges a coherent identity—“I”—that will remain subjectively the same throughout her life. Simultaneously there are every shifting/changing/morphing perspectives that will alter her worldviews continuously through life. Cumulatively, the unchanging “I” and ever shifting “I” constitute her self.
As Carlin and Sarah play during the eight to eighteen-month-old practicing period and the subsequent rapprochement period, they explore the psychic equivalence mode of Sarah thinking everything is consistent with her interior states, and the pretend mode where play has no connection to outer reality (Bateman and Fonagy 2004).
Present, congruent, and marked Carlin plays patiently and happily with Sarah, helping her integrate psychic equivalence and pretend modes so she gradually absorbs that everything is related to, but not equal to, her emotions, thoughts, and states, and that pretend does have connections to reality. This enhances her reflective function and interpersonal interpretive function, both of which are crucial to mentalization, the ability to have ongoing awareness of how her own and others’ states influence reality. Mentalization is central to ongoing secure attachment and emergent capacities for emotional self-awareness, self-regulation, and eventually a mature theory of development (Ibid).
The failure of integrating psychic equivalence and pretend modes into deepening mentalization abilities, usually a function of insecure attachment and poor attunement, creates the neural substrates for splitting, projective identification, and faulty affect regulations that are the hallmarks and burdens of borderline and other personality disorders.
At around three-years-old Sarah can engage in co-corrective play (Ibid), an activity that in hunter/gatherer or horticultural societies would mean she could now contribute to the tribe’s work. In child-centered America, it means she can order her parents and other adults around which leads to both empowerment and narcissistic entitlement resulting in temper tantrums at four and five when Sarah can’t get her way.
Carlin and Alex protect her and themselves from her rages by first constraining her when her high levels of emotional arousal leave her largely out of control of thinking, feeling, and action, and then—when her emotional arousal is soothed down enough to sustain social engagement—explore and explain her experience to her in language comprehensible to her worldview and consistent with the rules of their family. The tantrums fade as Sarah grows from preoperational magic perspectives to concrete operational mythic perspectives where sacred rules dominate the universe, and she can access them with the help of her family and other cultures she’s embedded in (Wilber 2000). In Sunday school she imagines God as a huge superbeing who can work miracles, and she believes Santa Claus physically exists.
It is relaxing and reassuring for five to eleven-year-old Sarah to join into the family, school, and church activities. The physical, emotional, and energetic currents are powerful and absorbing, and she discovers she’s a good student and a gifted ballet dancer.
To Alex’s surprise, Sarah, even though she loves to practice dance, dislikes performing. Extraverted, thrill seeking, achievement-oriented Alex can’t understand why introverted, low reward dependent Sarah doesn’t bask in the adulation of applauding crowds.
This conflict culminates in bitter arguments when Sarah—twelve, formal operational, and demanding reasons for rules and commands—drops of ballet, even though she is the best student in the school. She has discovered that she prefers rock climbing and spends her free time at the college climbing gym. The cooperative, low drama culture of the rock climbing community attracts her psychologically and energetically, and she loves solving “problems” with the help of her friends on the climbing routes.
Alex hates this and Carlin feels helpless when her beloved husband and daughter fight and argue. At her insistence they schedule a family therapy session with Dr. Ken Wiseman, an integrally informed psychologist in his late thirties who is happily married with two children of his own.
As the family walks into the session, Dr. Wiseman senses everybody’s energetic shifts. He knows his presence alters Alex and Carlin’s relationship, likely evoking more mature attitudes and reflexive hiding of defensive impulses. This will also probably happen with Sarah, but he’s aware that—as the session progresses and she feels safer—her twelve-year-old formal operational consciousness will triangulate with him toward whichever parent (perhaps both) who is most threatening. He is also aware that everyone in the room is currently ebbing and flowing on various developmental lines, and that both fear of change and desire for growth tend to be amplified in therapy.
The family quickly progresses through history and polite conversation and moves into the conflicts between Alex and Sarah:
Alex: Pleading with Sarah to return to ballet: “I don’t want you to waste your gift. You are the best dancer in the school. We’ve had inquiries from the Boston School of Ballet.”
Sarah: She’s been raised to be honest, and feels safe in the intersubjective fields of the therapy session. “I don’t like how the girls snipe at each other. I hate performing. I like going to the climbing gym with my friends. You just want me to be to be a star for you.”
Alex: “Damn it, Sarah…”
Carlin: Embarrassed at Alex’s outburst: “Come on, Alex. You get so worked up. It’s her life.”
Dr. Wiseman: He’s aware of Alex’s family achievement orientation and can feel Carlin being torn between her husband and daughter. He imagines them all being influenced by morphegenic fields, cultural pressures, and the fluid dynamics of their family system. His intention is to support harmony and health everywhere. He tells himself, “Reach for the highest good.” And has an image of them blind to their defensive states and the types of people they are. “Alex and Sarah, I think you are different types of people. Alex, if you had a gift like Sarah’s, what would you do?”
Alex: This captures his imagination. “I’d push it all the way to the New York Ballet Company. I’d be unstoppable.”
Dr. Wiseman: “How about you, Carlin?’
Carlin: “It depends what I wanted. If I loved ballet, I’d probably pursue it. I’d hate to disappoint my parents.”
Dr. Wiseman: He notices that everyone is now interested in the conversation and the harmonies of the session have shifted from defensive states to states of healthy response to the present moment. “They are more open to be instructed and inspired right now.” “We are born with various temperaments and develop different personality types. Alex, you are a more extraverted, competitive, masculine, achievement oriented person. Sarah, you like people you’re familiar with and the quality of your experience is more important to you than the recognition or rewards you get.” Both nod. This feels self-evident to them, though there is material here that neither has heard before. This is frequently the case in self-discovery, the sense of remembering something you have always known. “So Alex, do you want Sarah to develop into being more like you, or into being a more mature version of herself?”
Alex: The family sits in stunned silence. Put this way, it is against each’s lower left quadrant standards for Alex to coerce Sarah to be more like him and less authentically herself. “Well, when you put it that way, I don’t know why I get so worked up.” He looks down. “I’m sorry you guys.”
Dr. Wiseman: He feels Alex’s shame at having been egocentric and coercive. “Good time to introduce defensive states.” Look you guys, when we feel threatened, our nervous systems often enter defensive states where we have amplified or numbed emotions, distorted perspectives, destructive impulses, and diminished capacities for empathy and self-reflection.” They all nod, interested. “If we notice this and calm the emotion, cultivate compassionate understanding of distorted perspectives, refuse to act on destructive impulses, and reach for empathy and self-awareness, we can behave like Alex just did. We can disidentify with the defensive state and create more compassion and depth of consciousness, which always supports love.”
Carlin: “I don’t know what to do when they get upset.”
Dr. Wiseman: “That’s one of your defensive states. You get shut down, pessimistic, powerless, and disengage from the family. I think you should always interrupt and tell them to lighten up when they go after each other.” The family laughs at the pleasurable image of compliant, non-assertive Carlin interrupting. Dr. Wiseman knows that Carlin doing this will enhance everybody’s development. “You can all help each other with this. This is how healthy families mature, by supporting the development of each member.”
Dr. Wiseman is thinking and speaking developmentally, presupposing in his references a theory of development that is unique to each family member. He sets his conscious intent to access and harmonize the subtle fields that cascade through the moment, and the family gradually falls into the rhythm of thinking and speaking developmentally.
Sarah as an adult in therapy.
Let’s fast forward now through Sarah’s adolescence, college, and eventual employment as a learning specialist working with teens with learning disabilities at a local high school and living with Tom, a yoga instructor who meditates with her daily. Sarah still has difficulty with conflict, assertion, and motivation. She tends to drift, and her meditation practice is actually making her less comfortable with her current life. She feels a hunger for something, but is unsure what.
At this point she enters therapy with Dr. Wiseman, now in his late fifties, and much more experienced and knowledgeable about adult development than he was at thirty-seven. He has personally experienced most of Erik Erickson’s dialectical psychosocial developmental stages (Erikson 1998), and in the last ten years has been especially impressed by Riso and Hudson’s formulations of adults progressing through nine stratums of progressive development beginning with habitual self image and progressing through behavior, underlying affects and motivations, rage/shame/fear/libidinal energies, grief/remorse, emptiness/the void, and unity with universal being (Riso and Hudson 1999). He’s done contemplative practice for decades and likes A. H. Almaas’ conception of an Inner Journey home to unity (Almass 2004). He also has traveled family life stages with his wife and two children and is aware of the rich and complex personal/social forces and drives of interlocking developmental fields, and an ambient sense of how these fields constantly influence individuals, families, and cultures. Dr. Wiseman has absorbed the include and transcend nature of development and his work has delivered enormous experience with the complicated drives/defensives/forces that both accelerate and inhibit progress.
They greet each other fondly and—after getting oriented on what’s occurred since their last session years ago—get to why Sarah scheduled the appointment. Her current distress centers around conflicts with her lover Tom, who wants to start a family and can’t understand Sarah’s reluctance. Programmed by a secure attachment history and a robust self-reflective capacity, Sarah chose in Tom a mature, self-reflective man. He is dedicated to growth, expanding erotic polarity with Sarah, and is fully resolved to keep claiming her as his feminine partner through life:
Sarah: “Tom wants children, but it seems like so much work. I don’t know if I can do it.”
Dr. Wiseman: “Of course you can, and of course Tom wants a family with you! You guys would be great parents! Come on, Ken. This is your frustrated grandfather talking. What’s happening for Sarah right now? Attune to her. Explore this worldview.” How do you mean you don’t know if you can do it?” As Sarah elaborates her fears of being consumed by motherhood, Dr. Wiseman remembers his own discussions with his wife about children, and knows this is a developmental milestone. “Don’t project you choices on her. Listen for her developmental voices.” “You rarely have this level of conflict with Tom.”
Sarah: “I have trouble saying ‘no’ to my students. I don’t want to be one of those child dominated mothers.”
Dr. Wiseman: “She has a point. She’s easily directed. A demanding, novelty seeking, persistent child would tend to dominate her.” He has an image of a garden. “What is your vision of your life blossoming like a garden in spring?”
Sarah: Tears come to her eyes and a deep sadness and yearning rise from her heart—which Dr. Wiseman instantly resonates with and feels in his body. She has a vision of herself, Tom, several children, and extended family members playing happily on a lawn surrounded by flowers. “I want so much for Tom and me to have a loving, happy family, but I’m afraid I’ll either be eaten up by it or won’t be able to make it work.”
Dr. Wiseman: “I think both your yearning and fears are relevant. You probably need to keep growing in your capacities to care for yourself, keep you and Tom passionately connected, and structure others’ lives by setting inclusive and exclusive boundaries (Witt 2007) to make your vision come true. You do have the capacity to do all that.” He is reminded of her as a twelve-year-old. “Remember how you stood up to your father about his ballet dreams for you.”
Sarah: She laughs. “Yeah. A kid couldn’t be any harder to deal with than he was.”
Dr. Wiseman: He has a memory of telling his own nineteen-year-old son last year that he’d cut off his college money if he bought a Harley. “ Speaking as a satisfied—but experienced—parent, you never know.” He smiles warmly at her. “But I do believe life is better lived manifesting dreams than avoiding fears.”
Sarah at fifty-five after the last child goes away to college.
Here is Sarah at fifty-five and Dr. Wiseman at eighty, in a session she scheduled because of vague distress and yearning. She and Tom are in love and doing well—couples tend to be happier when the last child leaves the house, but her attunement to her self keeps pushing her to reach for something new. She has dismissed this as, “Empty nest syndrome,” for several months, but the feeling keeps growing and she’s had disturbing dreams of death and unsolved problems. Sarah has learned to trust such feelings and inner messages:
Sarah: “I know I need to do something.”
Dr. Wiseman: “ At eighty, he’s a man in full, having lived his life according to his principles, conducted tens of thousands therapy sessions, and learned to trust his healing channels: “She’s deepening into turquoise.” He feels some celebratory joy. “Describe, ‘Something.’”
Sarah: “Maybe it’s my painting. I get so lost in the sunsets and sunrises over the ocean. I disappear into the work and seem to wake up later.”
Dr. Wiseman: “ Sounds like a spiritual practice to me. Csikszentmihalyi (1990). says flow is self-sustaining, but I think there are deeper waters here.”
Sarah: “I like the feeling of disappearing into the work and feeling connected to everything.”
Dr. Wiseman: Remembering his meditation that morning, feeling unity with the emergent universe, with every particle, wave, and mythic form as expressions of God, and with absolute nothingness. “I believe such experiences unite us with each other and everything.”
Sarah: “it seems so selfish. To just do what I most enjoy.”
Dr. Wiseman: “How do others receive your work?”
Sarah: She blushes, embarrassed at public recognition, “Several galleries keep calling for more canvasses.”
Dr. Wiseman: Laughs. “Still uncomfortable with applause?”
Sarah: Remembers turning away from a standing ovation at twelve, and then has a surprisingly deeper memory of the joy she felt practicing the routine endlessly. “I loved ballet.”
Dr. Wiseman: “Where are you?”
Sarah: Fully open, her vision shifts to a sunlit studio filled with canvases and color, with Tom coming home and enjoying a new painting of Cathedral Peak, her favorite mountain in the back country behind her house. She describes the series of images and finishes with, “I think I’m beginning to understand the flow of my new life. The children are launched. I’m called to be an artist.”
Development Engagement Field Theory
Dr. Wiseman is regularly aware of the fields he influences and is influenced by. He directs attention, intension, and action to support health and development everywhere.
His intention and attention are organized by knowledge of his current states of consciousness and the intersubjective fields that permeate everything. He attunes to himself and others and leans toward healing cocreation, guiding himself with key phrases, images, concepts, and principles to do what feels helpful during sessions.
Positive developmental intent can be constant through all life cycles, each characterized by interpenetrating, intersubjective developmental fields, all tetra-emerging, being enacted on developmental lines and levels, and heavily influenced by states of consciousness and types of individuals.
This is the promise of DEFT, to help therapists cultivate deeper harmony with developmental forces, and relaxed, focused awareness, while using simple interior directives to evoke and transmit unique healing styles to remediate symptoms, enhance health, and support development.
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