A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Introduction

5 : What has gone wrong?

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

It may perhaps be necessary to begin where we are standing and not some abstract idealised place. So I have also taken a little time to frame the goal – at least partially - in more culturally familiar terms – i.e. " What has gone wrong (so we might address it)?"

You don’t actually need to read this part!

Our 21st Century Western techno-industrial society has ended up with many belief systems about how the body-mind works that are incorrect; and has created a physical and social environment vastly different from the one our nervous system evolved in. Its almost as if you buy a new washing machine and the supplied instructions for use lead to a way of operating it that brings about its untimely and unnecessary self-destruction. But with a washing machine it would be more obvious – "This machine works best when standing in six inches of dirty water. Add two large bricks and a handful of screws, nuts and bolts to every load of laundry. If it stops working then hit it with the biggest hammer you can find and stab the control board with a screwdriver".

The net effect is that – relative to our hunter-gatherer ancestors - it is far easier to become both physiologically and psychologically (mentally-emotionally) overwhelmed. And then, starting from that state of overwhelm, far less easy to reset the nervous system back to safety. Although the tendency is to think of trauma with a capital "T" (a major violent incident), trauma as overwhelm occurs all the time when the total instantaneous demands on all of the physical / homeostatic / mental / emotional / immunological (etc.) resources of the body-mind crosses a certain threshold - and momentarily exceeds the person’s available reserves or resilience. It is true that can be caused by one big event. But it happens far more often with an accumulation or combination of relatively small everyday stressors that reduce the spare adaptive resource to critically low levels.

Similarly, dissociation may have a clinical (psychiatric) definition, but it is also a far wider phenomenon that is extensively endemic in Western culture at both clinically recognisable and subclinical (i.e. less visible) levels. We say there is a "problem with embodiment" – meaning that dissociation and disembodiment are rife. Trauma and dissociation both have similar causes, arise in largely overlapping circumstances, and are both usually residual overwhelm adaptations that have not re-normalised to the reality of the present moment. The result is that – for most people walking round in Western society - some parts of the organism of a single human being are adapting to "now", whist others are adapting to "then" (or many "then"s). This fragmented state results in a loss in biological efficiency, a reduction in physical-mental-emotional resilience, and a degradation of sensory capacity along with a subtle but pervasive reduction in quality of relationality and empathy.

Many of these stressors are cultural and specific to our Western techno-industrial society at this particular time in history - such that we live in a far more demanding environment than our stone-age ancestors, and have far fewer personal resources and adaptive choices available to deal with them. Probably the beginning of everything was that after a few hundred thousand years walking we reached the edge of the world, and from then on it started to get smaller, more cramped. Faced (from no less than 25,000 years ago) with too many people and insufficient space to hunt and gather in the most fertile parts of the known world, static agriculture started to look like a good thing, which then accumulated its own particular problems.

The stressors faced by many people in the modern developed world that were not present 100,000 years ago include :

• Relatively sedentary lifestyles [1] - our bodies are not fully used[2].
• Massive reduction in food diversity – both in terms of range of species (Bronze Age remains indicate foraging included well over 200 plant species[3]) and genetic diversity. The modern diet in particular includes refined foods and poor quality fats. All of which lead to a substantial reduction in gut microbiome health [4].
• Environmental pollution from heavy metals, radionuclides, man-made organic chemicals and sensory pollution (light, noise[6]). Airborne micro-particulate pollution [7] particularly challenges the immune system because it absorbs so easily through lung endothelium.
• Manipulation of information. Our nervous system evolved to deal with what is immediately in front of us in our immediate environment [8] and there were different and simpler requirements for exercising trust vs caution.
• Modern techno-industrial culture encourages a problem-solving left-brain mindset, (categorising, separating, everything is already known) focussing on thinking about what is wrong[9], including a medicalised way of thinking of the body. A problem-solving view of the body sees it as a set of illnesses waiting to happen and a liability. The English language is particularly fond of of nouns (things we already know and have classified) compared to verbs (processes, relationships).
• We no longer live in a natural ecosystem but have created a parallel human "meta-"ecosystem - visible in most Hollywood films, books, popular media, in which humans are all that exist.
• Our sensory nervous system has evolved to interact with a living landscape, and we evolved sleeping on the Earth, under the stars. The separation of human and other ecosystems has also removed an unfathomable layer of relationality from our daily lives.
• Human societal structure has shifted, and much of the support it gave from birth onwards is no longer present – e.g. the separation of home and work, adults and children.
• Generational trauma and overwhelm have accumulated from pretty well the whole of human post-hunter-gatherer history, but mainly from the industrial wars of the past 120 years
• Poverty is now endemic in almost all countries. This is a major survival stress that also directly affects the ability to respond intelligently[13].
• Operations, anaesthetics and morphine/cannabinoid/cocaine-derived painkillers may be life-saving medical interventions. However, anaesthetics and painkillers sometimes induce chronic overwhelm-like states.
• "Problems" faced by hunter-gatherer communities would on the whole be human-level, be faced by the entire community, and the response would involve physical action. This is the environment within which our nervous system evolved.
• There is a cultural tendency to treat the human body and every other living thing in a "colonial" way – if something is not working as we would wish, we just manipulate it or chop it or change it until it’s "better", assuming that what we think is better must inevitably be better.
• … and many other factors besides

All of these factors (more stress mentally, emotionally, immunologically, biochemically etc; less support from extended family and society and societies, more baseline inherited stress adaptations and memories; etc.) - mean that overwhelm is a common state.

Once overwhelm occurs, our societal mindsets and lack of understanding of the body (because we have ideas about the body more than relying on positive lived experiences of it) tend to disrupt the evolved pathway that resets us from danger to safety.

Trauma-overwhelm is therefore a societal norm, and therefore largely invisible because it is everywhere, only becoming visible when its degree exceeds our threshold of recognition. Even as far back as the 1950’s Krishnamurti felt the need to say something like :

Heaven knows how much more that is the case today.

Systemic overwhelm that has not reset (by returning to a sense of being safe-enough and in-control-enough) has been recognised and described as "Trauma" since roughly the 1980’s.

The effect of overwhelm leading to chronic trauma tends to be – for modern humans - cumulative not just in one lifetime, but across generations, and is endemic. The consequent fractured, fragmented state is far less efficient in the task of self-regulation, which in turn causes:

• the sensory system to be both hyperaroused in some areas and numbed in others.
• a de-coupling of subtle but important layers of communication in the body, resulting in many mental and physical illnesses (as documented e.g. by Robert Scaer[15])
• a reduction in quality of relationality – between the mind and body, socially, and with the living environment

In contrast to these Western cultural distortions, the herbalist David Woodgate relates the following conversation :

These effects have increasingly tended to reinforce themselves through normative societal patterns, behaviours, expectations and institutions.

As a society, if not empathically numb then we particularly tend to focus on what is "wrong" so that we can fix it – a pathology-oriented, survival-driven way of seeing. And if you can appreciate the irony, in describing the "problem" (so we can "fix it") - this is exactly what I have done in the above few pages[16].