Patterns of Recognition
Looking at life, be it therapy or the natural flow of one’s own existence, we may begin noticing patterns. Patterns are an intricate part of life; they contain symbolic meaning, especially as one is able to decode the pattern and its nature of associations and meaning. As a process of decoding, then, it represents a fragment of reality, perhaps the most primitive and therefore the most foundational, that reflects back to you the nature of life, to yourself, and to others. Patterns hold meaning because they reflect order, an order that can have a healthy hierarchy, such as the order of meaning from a thought, to an idea, to a structure, to a specific structure, to further order within a wider meaning-making structure. So, for example, we may have the thought “chair,” which then represents an idea. This idea is meant to signify a type of object with four legs and a base to sit on. We may think of a stool or a chair with a back; it may have three legs or four, but optimal for whatever occasion the chair is ordered will reflect the structure for its intended purpose of ordering. That said, this process is hierarchical in structure, top to bottom. The top orders that which is below. The chair fragments into small structures of order, such as a leg. A leg by itself is but a stick, but four legs structured beneath a base may be considered a chair. Thus, it is this type of order that contains patterns, patterns that help us to make sense of what it is that we are seeing. Thus, we symbolize the object, say of a chair, to have meaning as the object that we sit on to have a meal. So, we find that objects that are ordered contain meaning as symbols to life.
The reason that I write this is because this is a healthy and helpful model of understanding the outer world in relationship to our actions and emotions. A chair has meaning because it is an ordered object that reflects communal experiences from which we express our emotions. This pattern now links a coherent narrative of object to emotions and emotions to object. Thus, as a mental health paradigm, we operate within a narrative that is a conversation from the outer world to the inner world and its opposite. Recognizing patterns is fundamental to life; we form meaning from these patterns. We can trace a sensation to an emotion to a memory to an action—a pattern. Or an object to a thought to an idea, to an ordered object, back into feelings and life. Thus, the meaning-making of our experiences is ordered from within and in healthy dialogue with that which is without.
The purpose of mental health is, as I reflect it to be so, the representation of life in accordance with reality. We reflect greater mental health and emotional capacity as we dedicate ourselves to reality, even if reality asks of us change that is difficult. It is this process of change that orders us within a healing paradigm and begins to create higher orders of meaning and health. It is this process of dialoguing objective reality with inner reality that builds a conversation of mental health, both in our bodily world of sensation and the outer world of matter and ideas. To heal is to recognize that the subjective and objective are to cohere, and to cohere is to represent a conversation from within, with curiosity and openness to that which is without. This narrative forms a union of relationship to well-being.
It is my contention, then, that mental health, emotional stability, and nervous system regulation are not single-track functions of dialogues merely from within, but that we must continuously test our narratives within against that which is without. Honoring both is the only path forward to clarity of vision and coherence of being, where both the inner and outer synchronize to find harmony and balance in the dance that is called life.
