How can you help people make positive changes in their lives?
If you’re starting from the position that people are getting things wrong—maladjusted, dysfunctional, misinformed, etc.—then it’s pretty straightforward: teach them the ‘right’ way to do things. But if your starting point is that people are already doing their best—for instance, that they have an ‘actualising’ tendency, as the humanistic and person-centred therapies hold—then it gets more complicated. Because how do you help someone who is already actualising to actualise more?
One way of tackling this might be to say that, ‘Ok, the person does have a potential to actualise, but the problem is that the environment they’re in gets in their way.’ So it’s not that the person isn’t capable of actualising, it’s that their world isn’t letting them. Problem is, that then makes the person little more than a pawn to their world. Are we really so powerless? And, if so, what does that say about the human being’s natural capacity to actualise?
For people who believe in an innate human ability to ‘grow’ and act in prosocial ways, there’s a similar paradox at the socio-political level. It’s easy enough to explain social ills if we start from the premise that people can be intrinsically selfish and competitive; but if people are inherently prosocial, how do you explain gun crime, or homophobia, or Nazism? How can something so bad come out of something so potentially good?
This is where the concept of ‘synergies’—and its opposite, dysergies—comes in. Synergies are win–win relationships: where two things go together to make something more than either alone. Let’s take a really simple example. Narek wants to be in a relationship and so does Paul. Narek and Paul get into a relationship together. Now they’ve both got more together than either had alone. So we can say here that there’s a synergetic relationship between Narek’s desire for a partner and Paul’s desire for a partner: because the more that one of these things happens the more the other thing does too.
Synergies have been described by Peter Corning as ‘nature’s magic’ and, in a way, they are magical, because they make something out of nothing. They’re where 1 + 1 = 3. Here’s Narek, and here’s Paul, and without either bringing in more than what they’ve had, they’ve managed to create something more than what they were. That’s amazing, isn’t it—something out of nothing?
Synergies don’t just operate between people, they operate within people as well. Say Narek, like most of us, wants to feel good about himself, and he also wants to have a relationship with another man. So if he can feel good about himself as a gay man, he’s got a win–win relationship on the inside too.
Contrast that with a dysergetic internal relationship, where Narek doesn’t feel good about being gay. Now his choice is to either (a) express his gay side and feel bad about himself, or (b) try and feel good about himself by suppressing his gay side. But either way he loses out: 1 + 1 = 1.
What this example should also begin to show is how the concept of synergies and dysergies can answer the opening question in our blog. Because it’s totally fair enough that Narek wants to feel good about himself, and it’s totally fair enough that he wants to express his gay side. Both of those are parts of his actualising being. But because they are pulling against each other, he ends up getting less out of life than he could otherwise. He’s an actualising being that’s not actualising to his full potential. And it’s not because he’s maladjusted, dysfunctional, or misinformed; it’s because the things he’s trying to do, with the best will in the world, are dysergetically-related rather than synergetically-related.
Ok, so here’s where I want to make a really bold claim. I think that nearly everything we do in therapy, whatever orientation, and whether we consciously call it as such or not, is about helping clients reconfigure their ways of doing things so that they are more synergetic. What we do is we help them think about their lives and how they’re acting, reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, and then think about ‘better’ ways of moving forward (better, of course, for the client, not for us). So that might mean, for instance, reflecting on ‘defensive’ strategies that have emerged in their childhood, and thinking about whether they want to continue with that; or looking at black-and-white patterns of thinking and seeing if it’s better to see shades of grey. And it may also be about helping clients to process things at more embodied levels: for instance, to really feel their anger and hurt towards their parents, and to recognise that those feelings are really legitimate. But, in all of this work, what we don’t do is to pathologise their ‘unhelpful’ ways of doing things. We don’t intimate to clients, for instance, that their defense mechanisms are really dumb, or that black-and-white ways of thinking are just pointless. And the reason we don’t is because we can see the intelligibility of these ways of doing things: of course, it makes absolute sense that we want to protect ourselves, or that we want to see the world in more simple ways. It’s just that those ways of doing things act against us in other ways and are ultimately unproductive. So the question is not about right or wrong, but about how we can get all our needs met in ways that support each other: i.e., how we can be more synergetic.
So I’m suggesting that positive change at the individual level works through the development of synergies; and I think positive change at the social and political level can be conceptualised in a similar way too. Two communities talk across their differences and start to value each other, nations move from the ultimate dysergetic state—war—to peaceful co-existence, people learn to live in synergetic harmony with their environment. Groups, striving to do their best, strive to do their best in ways that other groups can also do their best.
This is a humanistic perspective: not a radically socialist or a radically libertarian one. It’s a politics of understanding rather than a politics of blame. It’s saying that people, even when they act in oppressive or highly damaging ways, aren’t generally setting out to do so. Rather, even the most oppressive people are essentially like us: trying to get their needs met. Only they’re doing it in ways that are incredibly dysergetic to the rest of us, and not always willing to recognise that they’re doing so.
What does any of this mean in terms of what we can do—at the personal or socio-political level—if we want to try and make things better? In my just published book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change (Sage, 2019), I try and outline some of the principles by which synergies can be developed, whatever the level. There’s establishing trust, and communicating more clearly, being assertive, and embracing creativity and difference and diversity.
I guess my hope is that, by seeing positive change in this light, we can begin to try and understand the common principles that make things synergetic or not. As things stand, the development of synergies is always implicit: an underlying process that we try and make happen, without much conscious thought. Perhaps we can move to a place where we more consciously think, ‘How can we create synergies here?’ And we can also look at the limits and challenges of synergetic processes (for instance, over-compromise), and perhaps develop even deeper and more integrative principles of positive change.
Perhaps, most importantly, what the concept of synergies does is allow us to understand people, and societies, as doing best but could also do better. It means that we can engage with people in deeply respectful ways, while also holding on to the potential for improvement and change. That’s something that, albeit implicitly, is right at the heart of our therapeutic work. And if we can also put that ethos at the heart of social and political change activities, I really believe it maximises our abilities to bring good things about.