An old and persistent part of me resists simple explanations. I learned early that human suffering does not submit to tidy formulas. In my work I have grown accustomed to the surprises, the unpredictability, the quantum mechanics of healing. No equation solves it. And yet we strive, and grow, and seek understanding.

This is why I work within the Ecological Dynamics framework. Not because it simplifies complexity but because it honors it.

Beyond Broken Mechanisms: The Limits of Reductionism

For decades, the dominant paradigm in mental health has operated from a simple premise: psychiatric disorders are discrete illnesses caused by broken brain mechanisms. In this view, depression represents a serotonin deficiency, anxiety reflects overactive amygdala firing, and addiction stems from hijacked reward circuitry. These explanations feel reassuringly scientific. They locate problems in brain chemistry or genetics—something invisible and complex that requires expert intervention. They allow people to remain passive recipients of treatment rather than active participants in reorganization.

But here is what this medical model fundamentally misunderstands: what looks like disordered behavior is often adaptive. A person responds to unmanageable stress by developing behaviors that help manage the stress over time, even if these behaviors sometimes increase the stress over time due to a mismatch between the body’s own evolutionary survival strategies and the particular circumstances of the modern world (Durisko et al., 2015; Hollon et al., 2021).

Consider depression. The DSM defines Major Depressive Disorder as a discrete illness characterized by a checklist of symptoms: depressed mood, loss of interest, sleep disturbance, fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, difficulty concentrating. But from an evolutionary and developmental perspective, these symptoms may represent functioning adaptations operating exactly as designed by natural selection—not brain malfunction (Durisko et al., 2015). When an infant’s needs go chronically unmet—through parental depression, substance use, absence, or chaos—the developing system cannot flee or fight. It can only freeze: shut down, stop asking, wait passively. This freeze response, initially adaptive in an impossible situation, becomes the foundation for all later patterns. The infant learns, at a somatic and pre-verbal level, that needs are futile, that reaching out does not work, that satisfaction is impossible or unreliable.

The symptoms we call depression are not random malfunctions. They are the nervous system’s elegant solution to an impossible developmental dilemma. The system learned that freezing was safety, that shutting down preserved the organism when no other options existed. When stress arises later in life, particularly stress that activates feelings of profound unmet need, this early learning reasserts itself. The person becomes depressed—not because their brain chemistry is broken, but because their system does exactly what it learned to do to survive.

The same pattern holds for anxiety, trauma responses, and addiction. These are not disorders in any simple sense. They are the system self-organizing around solutions that worked, at least initially, to preserve the organism.

A Framework for Complexity

Ecological Dynamics provides an alternative to reductive thinking. This multi-disciplinary framework integrates Ecological Psychology, Dynamical Systems Theory, and Complexity Science to understand how human beings—as complex adaptive systems—organize themselves across time (Chow et al., 2023). Rather than viewing mental health challenges as discrete disorders requiring repair, Ecological Dynamics recognizes them as patterns that emerge from the continuous interaction among developmental history, current environment, relational contexts, physiological states, and meaning-making processes.

Recent developments in psychiatry are beginning to recognize what ecological psychologists and systems theorists have long understood: human beings are complex adaptive systems, not mechanisms with discrete disorders. Psychiatric disorders may come and go with symptoms changing over a lifetime, suggesting the need for a paradigm shift in diagnosis and treatment (Scheffer et al., 2024a).

Dynamical systems theory—used widely to explain tipping points, cycles, and chaos in complex systems ranging from climate to ecosystems—offers a radically different way of understanding mental health challenges. In the dynamical systems view, the healthy state has a basin of attraction representing its resilience, while what we call “disorders” are alternative attractors in which the system can become trapped (Scheffer et al., 2024a).

Rather than an immutable trait, resilience in this approach is a dynamical property—not something you have or do not have, but an emergent characteristic of how the entire system responds to perturbation. This explains why the same person can move in and out of mental health challenges across their lifespan, why recovery is possible but not linear, and why individual responses to treatment are so variable. We are not fixing broken mechanisms; we are working with systems that can reorganize along multiple possible trajectories.

The Scientific Foundation: Attractor States and System Organization

In dynamical systems terms, persistent patterns—whether we label them depression, anxiety, or addiction—are what we call attractor states. The psychological system has organized itself around a particular configuration, and multiple constraints—internal and environmental—guide the person back to this state repeatedly. The trauma created initial conditions that favored this response. The person’s neurobiology, developmental history, current circumstances, and learned patterns all combine to create a stable configuration that resists change not because the person lacks willpower or insight, but because the entire system is organized to maintain it.

This is what dynamical systems theory helps us see: multiple elements of the system—developmental vulnerability, trauma response, mental health adaptation, substance use, current environment, relational patterns—all constrain and reinforce each other in ways that create stable configurations. The person is not choosing to maintain the pattern; the entire system is organized to do so.

Consider the pathway I have observed across years of clinical work—from early developmental disruption through trauma response to mental health adaptation to addictive behaviors. When an infant experiences the world as fundamentally unsafe—through parental violence, neglect, unpredictability—the nervous system learns that escape is safety. This flight response, when repeatedly activated, becomes internalized as dissociation. The person develops the capacity to “leave” their immediate experience—to separate consciousness from the body, to observe from a distance, to split awareness from overwhelming sensation or emotion. Dissociation is initially adaptive; it allows survival in conditions that would otherwise be psychologically devastating.

Over time, substances and behaviors that facilitate departure become compelling. But here is the crucial insight: the addiction is not merely caused by trauma or even simply a symptom of it. The addiction participates in maintaining the entire system in a state of perpetual flight. It is a feedback loop, a self-reinforcing pattern that becomes increasingly stable over time. The addiction facilitates the continuance of the trauma response itself.

Constraints and Affordances: The Ecological Perspective

Ecological Dynamics draws heavily on James Gibson’s concept of affordances—the possibilities for action that environments offer to organisms. A chair affords sitting for a human but not for an ant. A substance affords escape for someone whose nervous system organized around flight, but may afford different possibilities for someone with a different developmental history.

Understanding mental health challenges ecologically means recognizing that behavior emerges from the interaction of constraints and affordances. Constraints are factors that limit or channel behavior: developmental history, current neurobiology, environmental circumstances, relational patterns, cultural context. Affordances are opportunities the environment offers: the relief a substance provides, the sense of control movement affords, the temporary respite from overwhelm that dissociation allows.

The person sitting before us, struggling with compulsive substance use or unable to log off from virtual worlds or perpetually planning their next geographic escape, is not weak or undisciplined. They carry a developmental vulnerability that formed during critical windows of nervous system organization—a vulnerability that made perfect sense given their early circumstances. They use the only tools they have found to manage what has always felt unmanageable.

From an ecological dynamics perspective, we cannot separate the person from their environment. The meaningful unit of analysis is the person-environment system. When someone presents with opioid addiction, we are not simply observing a disorder within an individual. We are witnessing a stable configuration of the entire system: early experiences with need fulfillment (probably), learned patterns of freeze response, current relational context, substance availability, economic circumstances, cultural meanings around suffering and relief, the affordances the substance provides for someone whose system learned that needs are futile.

Nonlinear Dynamics and the Mystery of Change

One of the most profound implications of dynamical systems thinking concerns the nature of change itself. In linear systems, causes produce proportional effects: apply twice the force, get twice the result. But complex adaptive systems behave nonlinearly. Small interventions can sometimes produce large effects; large interventions can sometimes produce no effect at all. The timing matters enormously. The same intervention may work at one moment but not at another, for reasons that remain largely opaque.

Recent work has demonstrated the universality of generic dynamical indicators of resilience that are now employed globally to monitor the risks of collapse of complex systems, such as tropical rainforests and tipping elements of the climate system (Scheffer et al., 2024a). The same tools may help monitor and manage resilience in mental health. Emerging results suggest that time series of mood and behavior may be used to monitor the resilience of patients using the same generic dynamical indicators that are employed to assess stability in complex systems (Scheffer et al., 2024b).

Moreover, experiences in ecological restoration confirm the theoretical prediction that under some conditions, short interventions may invoke long-term success when they flip the system into an alternative basin of attraction (Scheffer et al., 2024a). This explains something we see clinically but cannot explain within the medical model: why some people recover through treatment programs while others recover without them, why some need constraints and structure while others need freedom and exploration, why some require hitting “rock bottom” while others change before significant consequences.

The system can reorganize from multiple starting points through multiple pathways. What matters is not the specific intervention but whether the entire configuration of person-environment interactions reaches a critical transition point where reorganization becomes possible. All the constraints and affordances align, perhaps only briefly, in a configuration that permits reorganization. The person does not develop willpower in that moment. The entire system simply reaches a critical point where continuing the pattern becomes less stable than changing it.

I think about a man I worked with years ago, someone whose daily hallucinogen use had become as automatic as breathing. One afternoon, he sat on his couch, mid-journey, and happened to notice the date displayed on his television’s financial ticker. He realized that three months had passed since he last knew what day it was. At that moment, when he reached behind the veil of the substance and saw his life disappearing like the wake behind a boat, he stopped using.

Sometimes people simply turn a corner, and there is no way to predict or facilitate this. It is something we talk about at the clinics: the mystery of it, of how suddenly a shift happens inside, as though a part of the self awakens after a long and inconvenient sleep. As though the wanderer finally returns home. Recovery strategies do not seem to play much of a role in this process, nor do emotional pressures and the exigencies of daily life. Nothing works but readiness, and readiness is like the sunshine that melts the wax for kneading: it comes, or it does not.

Ecological dynamics offers a framework for understanding this mystery through the concept of degeneracy—the idea that in complex systems, multiple different configurations can lead to the same outcome, and multiple different pathways can lead to system reorganization. There is no single route to recovery because human beings are degenerate systems: enormously flexible, capable of self-organization along many different trajectories. (The word degeneracy is perhaps imperfect in this context, but there we are.)

Fractals and Self-Similarity: Patterns Across Scales

One of the most compelling aspects of Ecological Dynamics is its recognition of fractal properties in complex systems. A fractal is a pattern that repeats at different scales—the branching of a tree mirrors the branching of its branches, which mirrors the branching of its twigs. Human development exhibits similar self-similarity (like the birdhouses in the image at the top of this page). The patterns that organize during critical early periods do not remain isolated to those periods; they propagate across scales of time and context.

The infant who learns that reaching out brings no response develops not simply a single isolated belief, but a fractal pattern that repeats across contexts: in intimate relationships where vulnerability feels dangerous, in work situations where asking for help seems futile, in therapeutic relationships where revealing need activates the same ancient learning. The pattern that organized at one month of age—when neurons were forming their most basic connections about what happens when you need something—echoes across fifty years of life.

This fractal quality helps explain both the persistence of patterns and the possibility of change. Because the pattern repeats across scales, working at any scale can potentially affect the entire system. A small shift in one context—learning through repeated experience that reaching out can bring response—can gradually propagate through the system, altering patterns at other scales. The therapeutic relationship becomes a fractal seed of new possibility.

But this also means we must hold our interventions lightly. We cannot know which intervention, at which scale, at which moment, will catalyze reorganization. The same fractal property that allows for change also ensures that the process remains fundamentally unpredictable.

The Neurobiology of System Organization

Ecological Dynamics does not reject neuroscience; it contextualizes it. Early experiences literally shape the developing brain—not through choice or willpower but through the fundamental plasticity of the nervous system during critical windows of development.

During the first years of life, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis—the body’s stress response system—is being calibrated. If a child experiences chronic stress without adequate co-regulation from caregivers, the HPA axis develops a hair-trigger sensitivity. The system becomes primed to interpret the world as threatening, to respond to stress with heightened reactivity (Lupien et al., 2009).

Infants do not regulate their own emotions. They depend entirely on caregivers to help them move from distress to calm. Through thousands of repetitions of the cycle (distress → caregiver response → soothing → return to calm), the infant’s nervous system learns how to regulate. When this co-regulation is inconsistent or unavailable, the capacity for self-regulation does not develop properly (Schore, 2001).

The patterns of relationship with primary caregivers become encoded in neural pathways that serve as templates for all future relationships. Secure attachment creates neural patterns of: reaching out → getting response → feeling safe. Insecure attachment creates patterns of: reaching out → inconsistent response → cannot rely on others; or reaching out → no response → must manage alone (Siegel, 2012).

The brain’s reward circuitry—the same circuitry hijacked by addictive substances—develops in the context of early relationships. When emotional needs are met consistently, the reward system learns: connection feels good, needs can be satisfied, the world offers reliable pleasure. When needs go unmet, the reward system becomes dysregulated, primed to seek intense, immediate rewards that substances can provide (Volkow et al., 2016).

None of this is about choice. It is about neurobiology. But—and this is crucial—it is neurobiology understood ecologically, developmentally, systemically. The brain does not organize in isolation. It organizes in relationship to environmental conditions, caregiving patterns, relational experiences. The same research that shows how early adversity shapes neural vulnerability also shows something hopeful: the brain remains plastic across the lifespan (Kolb & Gibb, 2011). The patterns formed in childhood can be modified through new experiences, through therapy, through recovery, through relationships that provide what was missing early on.

Why This Framework Matters for Clinical Practice

Understanding mental health challenges through an Ecological Dynamics lens transforms how we approach treatment. If we are working with categorical disorders caused by brain dysfunction, our job is to fix the broken mechanism—typically through medication that corrects neurotransmitter imbalances or cognitive techniques that correct faulty thinking patterns.

But if we are working with complex adaptive systems that have organized themselves around survival strategies that once made sense, our job is completely different. We are not fixing anything. We are participating in a process of system reorganization—creating conditions where new patterns can emerge, where the person can discover through experience that old survival strategies are no longer necessary.

This perspective has profound implications for how we work. We cannot manufacture readiness, but we can influence the constraints and affordances that shape the possibility space. We can remove obstacles to change, provide scaffolding for new patterns, and create conditions where reorganization becomes more likely. But we must hold our interventions lightly, recognizing that change happens through processes far more complex than our theories can capture.

What would clinical practice look like if we truly embraced Ecological Dynamics thinking? We would:

Attend to the entire system, not simply the individual. We would recognize that mental health challenges emerge from the interaction of developmental history, current environment, relational patterns, physiological states, and meaning-making processes. We would work at multiple scales simultaneously—individual, relational, environmental, cultural.

View symptoms as adaptations, not pathologies. We would ask not “What is wrong with this person?” but “What has this person’s system learned to do to survive?” We would recognize that the same pattern that once protected the person may now imprison them, and that healing requires honoring the adaptive function while creating conditions for new learning.

Expect non-linearity and emergence. We would stop looking for simple cause-and-effect relationships and linear treatment protocols. We would recognize that small interventions can sometimes produce large effects (and vice versa), that timing matters enormously, and that recovery involves emergent reorganization that cannot be fully predicted or controlled.

Embrace uncertainty and complexity. We would hold our theories lightly, recognize the limits of our knowledge, and remain humble in the face of human complexity. We would resist the temptation to reduce suffering to mechanisms that can be simply fixed. We would accept that sometimes we participate in healing without understanding exactly how or why.

Honor degeneracy—the principle that multiple different pathways can lead to the same outcome. We would stop arguing about which treatment is “best” and recognize that different people need different things at different times. We would personalize our approach based on the unique configuration of each person’s system rather than applying standardized protocols.

The Promise and Humility of Ecological Dynamics

I want to be clear: Ecological Dynamics does not make our work easier. If anything, it makes it harder. It demands that we tolerate uncertainty, that we resist the seductive simplicity of mechanistic explanations, that we remain humble about what we can and cannot know.

To believe that approaches focused on brain structure, neurology, genetics, and biochemistry can, on their own, vanquish the varieties of human suffering—their breadth, depth, and turbulent wake across all human societies—is to believe that an oar can tame the sea. People heal in a variety of surprising and encouraging ways: connection with communities and cultural traditions, physical activity and immersion in nature, music, craft, and art. These practices work because one kind of complexity slowly replaces another. There is no shortcut to this path. Healing is always a hard-won and human journey.

As we move forward in understanding mental health, we must be willing to abandon the comfortable illusion of categorical disorders and embrace the more challenging but ultimately more truthful view of human beings as complex adaptive systems. This does not make our work easier—if anything, it makes it harder. But it makes it truer, more humane, and ultimately more helpful.

The future of mental health work lies not in ever more refined diagnostic categories or ever more targeted pharmaceuticals, but in understanding the dynamic, ecological, developmental processes that give rise to suffering and in creating conditions where new patterns can emerge. This is the promise of Ecological Dynamics—not to reduce complexity but to embrace it, not to fix disorders but to facilitate reorganization, not to eliminate suffering but to participate humbly in the mystery of healing.

When I work with someone struggling with addiction, I bring all of this understanding. I attend to developmental history, not to assign blame but to understand what the system learned when it was most vulnerable. I assess current constraints and affordances, looking for leverage points where small changes might propagate through the system. I remain alert to signs of readiness—those mysterious moments when the entire configuration suddenly becomes unstable enough that reorganization becomes possible. And I hold space for uncertainty, knowing that the person before me carries mysteries that no theory can fully capture, possibilities that no assessment can predict.

This is why I use Ecological Dynamics. Not because it provides easy answers—it does not. But because it helps me participate more skillfully, more humbly, more truthfully in the profound complexity of human healing.

Sources

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