A post inspired by:

 

Jim van Os, the breakdown of false order, and the therapeutic recovery of inner direction

 

A wonderful push by psychiatrist Jim van Os

and a conversation between Jovanna and Ariel

 

Sometimes chaos is not evidence that something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it is evidence that an old order can no longer contain what is trying to emerge.

In a recent interview, the Dutch psychiatrist Jim van Os said:

“My wish is to go towards the chaos.”

At first, this may sound as though he prefers disorder over stability. But Van Os is not romanticising collapse, psychosis or suffering. He is referring to the transitional space that appears when an established system begins to break down and a new form has not yet fully emerged.

In transition theory, this can be represented by an X-curve.

One movement is declining: the old structure is losing its viability.

Another is rising: new forms, relationships and possibilities are beginning to appear.

 

Where these movements cross, there is uncertainty.

There is no longer sufficient faith in the old, while the new cannot yet be clearly seen.

That is the chaos.

And that may be precisely where transformation becomes possible.

 

The false safety of the label

 

Jim van Os has long questioned a psychiatric system that attempts to make psychological suffering manageable by dividing it into diagnostic categories.

Depression.

Borderline personality disorder.

Psychosis.

ADHD.

Anxiety disorder.

These classifications may sometimes be practically useful. But they can also create the illusion that naming an experience means understanding it.

A diagnosis describes a pattern from the outside.

It does not necessarily tell us what happened to this particular person, what their symptoms are expressing, what relationships shaped them, what they have had to suppress in order to survive, or what their life is asking of them now.

The system produces order through questionnaires, classifications, protocols and treatment pathways.

 

But that order may have very little relationship to the inner reality of the person sitting in the room.

 

What is orderly to the institution may therefore feel meaningless to the human being.

 

And what appears chaotic to the institution

may contain a hidden coherence that has not yet been heard.

 

 

Two forms of chaos

 

Therapeutically, it may be helpful to distinguish between two different experiences of chaos.

The first is the chaos of repetition.

A person has gradually lost contact with intuition, trust, embodied knowledge and inner direction. Old conclusions formed during painful or overwhelming experiences have begun to organise perception.

I am not safe.

I am not good enough.

I will be abandoned.

I must remain in control.

My feelings are dangerous.

I have to take care of everyone else.

I cannot trust what I know.

These conclusions may once have helped the person survive.

But when they continue operating unconsciously,

they become self-confirming patterns.

 

Present situations are interpreted through the emotional logic of the past. Thoughts trigger fear, fear narrows perception, and narrowed perception seems to prove the original thought.

The person becomes trapped inside an apparently chaotic mental world that is,

paradoxically,

being produced by a very rigid underlying organisation.

 

The surface is chaotic.

The pattern underneath is repetitive.

The second form is the chaos of transformation.

This begins when the old pattern is interrupted.

 

The familiar explanation no longer feels convincing. The habitual defence stops working. The identity that once held everything together begins to loosen.

For a while, the person may not know what to think, whom to trust or who they are becoming.

This can be frightening.

But it can also be the first moment in which something genuinely new becomes possible.

The task of therapy is not always to eliminate this uncertainty as quickly as possible.

Sometimes the task is to help a person remain present within it long enough

for a deeper form of order to emerge.

 

Therapy does not impose the destination

Good therapy does not drag somebody from chaos into the therapist’s preferred version of normality.

 

It helps reveal the difference between a living inner movement and the automatic repetition of an old wound.

 

Several therapeutic approaches can enter through different doors.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can soften the dominance of habitual conscious thinking and create access to images, memories, bodily responses and inner knowledge that have remained outside ordinary awareness.

Rather than forcing an intellectual explanation, it allows the deeper mind to communicate in its own language.

A symptom may then appear not as an enemy, but as an old protector whose task has never been reconsidered.

 

Integrative psychotherapy

Integrative psychotherapy does not assume that one method can contain an entire human being.

It draws from different psychological traditions and adjusts to the person, the moment and the underlying process.

Thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, relationships, personal history, imagination and meaning are not treated as separate compartments.

They are movements within one living system.

 

 

EMDR

 

When an overwhelming event has not been fully processed, part of the nervous system may continue responding as though the event is still happening.

EMDR can help the brain and body resume a process that became frozen.

The memory is not erased.

Its emotional charge and its position within the person’s inner world can change.

What once dominated the present becomes recognisably part of the past.

 

 

Rational emotive therapy

 

Rational emotive therapy helps expose the beliefs that continually recreate distress.

Not simply:

What happened?

But also:

What did I conclude from what happened?

What am I still demanding of myself, other people or life?

Is this belief true?

Is it helpful?

What becomes possible when I no longer obey it automatically?

This is not a rejection of emotion.

It is a way of discovering how rigid interpretations can imprison emotional life.

Revealing the underlying pattern

Beneath symptoms that appear unrelated, we often find a repeating organisation.

The person may repeatedly abandon herself to prevent somebody else from leaving.

She may confuse vigilance with intuition.

She may experience guilt whenever she chooses her own wellbeing.

She may seek safety through control and then discover that control has made life increasingly unsafe.

Once the underlying pattern becomes visible, the chaos begins to speak.

Its separate fragments reveal their relationship.

What appeared to be a collection of defects becomes an intelligible adaptation.

And what was learned can begin to be revised.

Recovering the connection

 

The purpose is not to return someone to an earlier, supposedly undamaged self.

 

Transformation is not a restoration project.

It is a renewed connection with the living intelligence that remained present underneath adaptation, fear and social conditioning.

 

Some call this intuition.

Some call it the observing self.

Others speak of soul, inner wisdom, the higher self or the self-healing capacity of the organism.

 

The language may differ, but the movement is recognisable.

A person begins to sense again:

This is what I feel.

This is what I know.

This belongs to the past.

This is not my responsibility.

This relationship diminishes me.

This possibility gives me life.

The therapist does not manufacture that knowledge.

The therapist helps create the conditions in which it can become audible again.

 

The self-healing capacity is relational

Self-healing does not mean that a person should heal alone.

The word self can mislead us here.

Human beings regulate, recognise and transform themselves through relationship. A sufficiently safe encounter can make it possible to feel what was once too dangerous to feel, remember what had to be excluded, and question conclusions that once seemed absolute.

Healing therefore arises neither exclusively from the therapist nor exclusively from the client.

 

It arises in the living space between them.

 

The therapist contributes knowledge, attention, methods, experience and the capacity to remain present.

The client brings her history, nervous system, imagination, resistance, intelligence and emerging direction.

Neither can know the complete outcome in advance.

Therapy is not the execution of a blueprint.

 

It is a disciplined encounter with emergence.

 

 

Going towards chaos

 

To go towards chaos is not to glorify suffering.

It is to stop pretending that premature order is the same as healing.

It means entering the place where the old explanation has failed without immediately covering the opening with another fixed explanation.

It means listening before classifying.

Feeling before correcting.

Becoming curious about the symptom before attempting to silence it.

Looking for the intelligence within an adaptation, even when that adaptation has become painful or destructive

Sometimes chaos tells us that a life has lost its organising centre.

 

Sometimes it tells us that the old centre is dissolving

because a more truthful one is preparing to emerge.

 

Therapy helps us discover which movement is taking place.

And often both are occurring simultaneously.

The accumulated chaos of old patterns becomes the material through which a new inner order can form.

Not an order imposed from above.

Not the order of the protocol.

Not the order required to make somebody easier to classify.

 

But an order arising from renewed contact with the whole person.

 

The therapeutic paradox

People often enter therapy because they want the chaos to stop.

Understandably so.

They want relief from anxiety, obsessive thinking, traumatic memories, relational conflict, exhaustion or despair.

Yet lasting relief may require something subtler than the immediate suppression of discomfort.

We may have to enter the apparent disorder carefully enough

   to discover

        what it contains.

 

 

The symptom may be carrying a history.

The fear may be protecting a boundary.

The confusion may mark the collision between an inherited identity and an emerging self.

The collapse may be announcing that a way of living has reached its end.

Once these movements can be experienced, understood and integrated, chaos changes character.

It is no longer merely something happening to us.

It becomes a threshold through which we can participate consciously.

 

The therapist does not command the chaos.

The therapist accompanies the person closely enough for its concealed direction to become visible.

And then, sometimes almost imperceptibly, the fragments begin to constellate.

A new pattern appears.

The person does not return to who she was.

She becomes more intimately

      who she is.

 

 

 

How this reflection began

Jovanna:

What do they mean when they say Jim van Os prefers chaos? Does he simply mean the creative moment in which things are unfolding?

Ariel:

Your interpretation comes close, but for Jim van Os, “going towards chaos” also has a concrete meaning from transition theory.

An entrenched system can change only when the old structure begins to break down while the new has not yet been fully formed. Between those movements lies an uncertain transitional phase: chaos.

Van Os is not saying, “Let everything collapse into disorder.”

He is saying:

I want to enter the uncomfortable territory in which the old certainties no longer work, because that is where something genuinely new can arise.

And that is where his thought meets your own.

Chaos becomes the fertile, not-yet-determined space of becoming. Van Os approaches it institutionally and therapeutically: tolerating that we do not yet know what form will emerge, listening to what is actually presenting itself, and allowing the solution to develop together with the person rather than placing a pre-existing category over her experience.

The chaos is not necessarily the problem.

The problem may be a system that closes it prematurely, before it has been allowed to reveal its meaning.

Jovanna:

And because Positive Impulse and Positive Illness are, at their heart, a therapeutic practice—even when our inquiry takes many delightful side roads into uncharted territory—we could connect this directly with hypnotherapy, integrative psychotherapy, EMDR and rational emotive therapy.

We can show how people sometimes enter the chaos of their own thought-world because they have lost their connection with intuition, trust and the higher self.

And how therapy can uncover the underlying patterns.

Ariel:

Yes.

Then the crucial distinction becomes visible.

There is a chaos created by old patterns that have taken over the person’s inner world.

And there is a fertile chaos in which those patterns loosen and a new order can emerge.

Therapy does not simply remove chaos.

It helps transform unconscious repetition into conscious emergence.

Jovanna:

Then let us go there.

Into the chaos.

Not to become lost in it—

but to hear what is trying to be born.

 

 

 

Genezing is het herstellen van verbinding