Themes for August 23rd to September 21st
As we enter the 9th lunar cycle of 2006 and face the seasonal transition of Summer to Fall, our awareness is about to shift from our outer life to our inner life. If you've noticed, the days are a little shorter now and the overall vibe is just a tad slower, more sedated. On the social landscape, this cycle is frought with transition as the recent high school graduates head off to college, the work force or vocational school. Soon you'll see the periennal faces of new mothers watching their children begin their academic lives. It's a very intense time.
This is why we are drawn to focus on the 3rd somatic interface (individual to indvidual) during this lunar cycle. It brings us into contact with our coping mechanisms, our 'emotional body', and our capacity to TRUST the unknown. On a physiological level, we are more sensitive to changes in tactile and thermal patterns. This is when we see those late summer allergies that signals to us that our immune system needs support to deal with the transition. If we've been tending to our inner world over the Summer, this task is not overwhelming. If we didn't though, it can trigger the early physiological cues for SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which will begin to intensity once we enter the Fall proper at the end of September. PHYLO's and ECO's pay attention!
What I wanted to point to this month is the work of Jacob Moreno (1889-1974). His work was called sociometry and it was designed to promote greater degrees of mutuality amongst people and greater authenticity in relationships. Today, interpersonal research is the found mostly in the science of social networks. What Moreno uncovered was that despite our highly specialized social hiercharies, we all possess a capacity to relate at a deep level. What Moreno revealed is that our awareness of interconnectedness is a learned process. He developed tools that are still used now to help organizational groups, creative teams, and global networks optimize their resources and bring a more human to human (2nd interface) element to the world of work. What I wanted to share in this post is how some of Moreno's core concepts of sociometry relate to our (1st interface) soma to soma interactions...
Tele - the two-way flow of feeling from one person to another...Tele has qualities of attraction, drawing people closer together; rejection, i.e. not chosen or moving away from the other; or neutral, where there is no movement...Emanating from the limbic system, tele enables us to gain insight to, appreciation of and feelings for the makeup of the other person – tele creates interpersonal chemistry, hitting it off with another without ‘knowing’ them, personality clashes, or just negative vibes. Forming the emotional and psychological geography of a community, these networks greatly influence what occurs in families, and within and between groups, organisations and societies.
Social Atom - Each of us has two types of social atoms: the private and personal, and the work or vocational. Our original social atom usually comprises family members or carers. People grow and develop as a result of significant experiences and interactions with those around them. New behaviours are learned and formed with both new and repeated experiences, and with new members entering and leaving the individual’s social atom. The social atom of each person makes up the larger patterns of social networks in groups, organisations and societies. The mix of role relationships of central individuals and groups form the culture and behaviours within organisations. As individuals move to new organisations, membership of the social atom of those involved alters, however, research shows the role relationships are recreated and the behavioural patterns persist, particularly under stressful conditions. Each individual is born into a social network. At a time when Rutherford was defining the atom in chemical life, Jacob Moreno (1889 – 1974) was defining the social atom as the smallest unit of society each of us has. The social atom comprises the smallest number of emotionally significant people and their inter-relationships around an individual in order for him or her to be alive and learning.
Cultural Atom - Instrinsic to the social atom is the cultural atom which includes the people and the role relationships - the patterns of behaviours between each dyad.
Social Atom Repair - the process of change and development occurs through altering patterns of relating in the social atom. This creates change in the cultural atom. Examples of changes to the social atom includes expanding the number of people in the social atom, generating new experiences, building capacities to build relationships on a range of criteria (emotional expansiveness), learning new behaviours through training, practice and experimentation.
The material below was a clipped summary of broader defintions found on...
So how can we take this map and relate it to the 4 Domains? I'm often asked which domains works best with
say a PHYLO or how can an ECO deal with the relentless directness of the ONTO's in their lives. This misses the point of opening up your somatic awareness. While it's valid to understand the way the 4 Domains exchange and complement each other, it's more useful to become more adept at Moreno's concept of social atom repair. For example, you may be in asymmetrical relationship like a parent-child one and yet the child is an ONTO and you are a PHYLO. Now what? If you take an authoriative stance, what does that do to the 'tele' of the relationship? On the other hand, if you yield to the ONTO's assertiveness, the PHYLO is left to fret that their child is a) a brat or b) a bully. Again, not the best 'tele' there. What's needed there is to use this double-binded conflict to acquire signatures from the ECO and EXO domains. The parent can engage the child in a coherent way by altering their extrapersonal world (color of their room, music in the home, shifts in the cultural palette the child is fed, etc...) which is an ECO path. Conversely, they can rearrange the furniture in
the home, feature family pictures, or post a 'duty roster' for household chores and EXO the child to cohere...
The point is we can venture into any of the 4 Domains to get the resources we need to harmonize our relationships within our social and cultural atoms. It is through this process that lasting postive change is realized since we can go through transformational change until we've completed our translational ones in each domain. It's not only a good practice to operate outside our primary domain; it's imperitive if we want to evolve as a whole person (5th interface) that can embody both their history and their destiny in the here and now and remain self-aware of the needs of the other whole person that shares that moment with you...
Wishing You Much Good 'Tele' , MRF 08.27
Further Reading...
posted by Dr. Mark @ 3:27 AM
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