C07 General Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

Mental illness occurs only in the mind so changing one’s thinking leads to mental wellbeing.

OR

Mental and physical wellbeing results from a mix of internal and external wellness factors.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy recognizes how the quality of your wellbeing depends equally on internal and external factors. This challenges conventional thinking in your favor. Wellness remains elusive when failing to complement its internal contributors with its external contributors.

Conventional thinking around wellness, at least in a Western cultural context, tends to bend toward internal psychological and biological determinants. Much of psychotherapy assumes if you change enough of your thinking and behaviors you will attain wellness. Much disappointment soon follows.

Only recently has the practice of psychiatry and related fields begun to acknowledge external socioenvironmental contributors to wellbeing. A biopsychosocial model emerged in the late 20th century, but the old model persists. If you seek out healing, expect the internally reductionist paradigm to persist.

After all, it can be easier to get a struggling individual to adjust to a sick system than to cure an immensely large sick system. When the impersonal healer objectifies the body of those hurt by society, they don’t have to face the possibility that they’re contributing to the ongoing damage.

If all of your anxiety about losing your job springs from unfair yet legally protected actions from your boss, psychotherapy may not be the answer. Perhaps the psychotherapist can help the client nail the source of their anxiety to a situation beyond their personal control. But then what?

Need-response

Need-response picks up there. As a new professional practice, it starts with the foundational premise that wellness is psychosocial. Anankelogy recognizes how your wellbeing gets shaped equally by internal bio-psychological factors and socioenvironmental factors.

Instead of trying to integrate a new biopsychosocial model or vulnerability-stress model, need-response begins with a holistic premise of wellness. Instead of assuming society functions well with its current alienating norms (privileging avoidant adversarialism), need-response works to reconnect us with each other to optimize our personal and collective wellbeing.

Need-response’s holistic approach goes further and includes a spiritual dimension. Anankelogy recognizes that recurring spiritual practices dependably correlates with resolution of needs. For example, the more you vulnerably trust Creator G-d when acknowledging being too powerless to face a crisis on your own, you “inexplicably” can find ways to rise above the problem and find a meaningful solution.

Social sciences recognize moderate correlations between two variables as significant because of the complexities involved. Anankelogy dares to apply this to the objective fact of each unchosen need.

Reactive Problem

The less we appreciate wellness as equally internal and external, the more we can get pulled into what anankelogy recognizes as psychosocial imbalance.You either address your sensitive self-needs at the expense of your affected social needs, or you address your sensitive social needs at the expense of your affected self-needs.

For example, exaggerating your self-needfor privacy to the point of neglecting your social need for intimacy. Or becoming overdependent on others to satisfy your social need for supports that you underserve your self-needfor self-initiative. Your body then warns you with emotional pain that something here is not quite right.

We often react to this emotional pain with “psychosocial vacillation” of swinging between the extremes of “reductionist individualism” and “exaggerated collectivism”. We attach ourselves ideologically to generalizations trusted to ease this emotional tension. We take a political side to cope with our troubled psychosocial orientation.

Full wellness remains disturbingly elusive the more we cling to civic legalism for relief. That’s when we prioritize obedience to laws or to social norms over serving the needs for which laws and norms exist. Wellness actually declines the more avoid its psychosocial foundation.

Where do you go for professional help to address a load of anxiety overwhelming your life from some situation? Seeking psychotherapy can be fruitlessly stigmatizing if implicitly expecting to adjust only your internal factors. Seeking legal or political help can become counterproductive if only offering some pain relief after adjusting some external factors.

Responsive Solution

Need-response was created to equally address the internal biopsychological factors and externa socioenvironmental factors impacting your wellbeing. No other professional service exists that recognizes wellness as psychosocial from the start.

Only need-response sets you up to resolve your affected self-needs and social needs equally. Only need-response provides for psychosocial balancing your self-needs and social needs. Only need-response seeks to fully resolve each other’s affected self-needs and social needs.

Responsivism begins at the individual level. But when held back by impenetrable social pressures, such responsive services can segue into a robust wellness campaign. The service client learns how to speak truth to power (STTP) in ways those powerful are incentivized to listen to those impacted (LTTI). Everyone’s wellness requires psychosocial balance.

For example, many among the wrongly convicted innocent cannot be adequately served by either psychotherapy or legal resources. Psychotherapy may help them get through the consequences of an unresponsive judicial system, but the external contributors must be addressed.

The legal system of the adversarial judicial process has yet to faithfully identify and address each viable case of wrongly convicted innocence. Innocence projects cannot serve each viable case of compelling innocence. If the available facts of the case do not present a path to reverse the wrongful conviction, even if they can see grounds for innocence, such innocence litigators typically will not serve the innocent claimant. This includes a population estimated in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands. But our current legal system lets them all rot.

Responsivismtakes a different approach. Instead of the court’s binary options (i.e., pass-fail, guilt-innocence, defendant-complainant), “responsive innocence” automatically scores the viability of an innocence claim.

It invites the claimant to compare the details of their case to known exonerations. The more the claimant can cite factors producing other wrongful convictions (e.g., misidentification, official misconduct, tunnel vision, debunked forensic science, coerced confession), the higher the innocence viability score.

This unique approach goes even further. It upends this impersonal and adversarial legal framework to serve the needs for which laws exist. The falsely accused claimant identifies what they see as the affected needs of the accuser or accusers. Then they can raise their own impacted needs. They respond to the needs of all involved, including the prosecutor and law enforcement authorities. The self-needsand social needs of all get addressed, toward better wellness for all.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• I’m in therapy now with an MSW and she does address the social dimensions of my problem.

• Sounds like psychosocial imbalance may have a lot to do with political extremism.

• Where does the spiritual dimension fit into this psychosocial balance approach?

• Correlations spotted in spiritually related results seem highly disputable.

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.