Emotion, True Self, True Other, Core State: Toward a Clinical Theory of Affective Change Process

Abstract

Aiming toward developing a change-based metatherapeutics, i.e., a metapsychology of how and why what is therapeutic about therapy operates, this paper follows an arc where a psychoeveolutionary perspective at one end and aesthetics, spirituality, and the quest for personal truth at the other are shown to be seamlessly linked through the bodily rooted experience of emotion processed to completion. This arc is created by exploring how affective experiences associated with the operation of biologically-based wired-in emotional and relational processes naturally culminate in deeply therapeutic experiences of aliveness, hope, faith, clarity, agency, simplicity, compassion, truth, self, and beauty I might add. Accessing processes mediated low down in our mammalian brain, we become able to soar to the greatest heights and plumb the greatest depths. \nThis paper's version of "the whole structural interconnection of the thing", "up and down, both ways" (see Feynman quote above), results from a focus on both the process and the experience of healing transformation, and the phenomena encountered when moment-to-moment we track and process to completion the individual's experience of intense emotional experiences, only to then keep on going on to moment-to-moment track and process the experience of transformation itself. Through the experiential processing of the affective experiences associated with attachment and emotion, processes shaped by aeons of evolution through survival-honed adaptation, there unfolds a series of cascading transformations, where the focus on the experience of transformation of the self at the end of one affective wave becomes a transformational experience in its own right, triggering the onset of yet another wave of emotional experience, and so on, until we arrive at the affective phenomena that underlie some of our highest strivings: aesthetics, the search for the fundamental laws, spirituality, along with the quest for the authentic self and its truth. Only to begin again, faced with some new environmental challenge.\nIn the Prologue, we see how the focus on the phenomena and mechanisms of change leads us to the centrality of affective change processes, bodily rooted emotional experiences dyadically regulated within an affirming relationship. Introducing the notion of a state transformation, the invariant features (3 states and 2 state transformations) of affective change processes are described, as are the positive affects that are the somatic markers of such transformational processes. The next three parts discuss in greater detail some aspects of the affective change process. Part I explores two affective change processes, the experience and expression of categorical emotion, and the dyadic regulation of affective states, and looks at how their paradigmatic affective experiences function to produce therapeutic change. Part II is devoted to a third affective change process, the affirmation of the self, including its transformation, where the experiential focus is on the experience of transformation itself. Two key constructs are introduced in this section: the True Other, the relational counterpart of the True Self, and the healing affects, a phenomenologically distinct set of affects which are the somatic markers of the self's experience of transformational processes at work. Part III focuses on core state, the experiential culmination of all affective change processes, and its affective marker, the truth sense. The paper ends with a section called Out There Musings. There, I offer some riffs on what affective change fundamentally seeks to facilitate in us through bringing to the individual's experiential fore experiences flagged by the truth sense, the felt belief in the fundamental truthfulness of experience.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 57 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.