Self-Regulation: The Ways of Nature

I started my professional life by studying chemistry and then biochemistry, and worked as a postdoctoral research biochemist for a number of years before I realized that I was in the wrong profession, and then retrained at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy. This was a big change at the time, and it is only recently that I have found biological sciences and psychotherapy appearing to move closer to each other. So I want to try to write something about how I think my knowledge of biology has influenced the way I work as a psychotherapist. This is a question that returns to me regularly. I have been teaching a training module called ‘Holistic Anatomy and Physiology’ for body psychotherapists for many years, and I like to try to give my students some reasons why they should be studying this subject. I do not find it easy to give such reasons. I have written elsewhere about what I think biology does not contribute to psychotherapy (Stauffer, 2008, 2009 [in press]). But that does not mean that biology cannot influence psychotherapeutic work, and I want to try to communicate a little of how I believe it shapes what I do.

I think the strongest influence comes from a sense, acquired in many years of biological study, of how ‘nature does things’. By this I mean an image of how molecular and cellular processes might be happening, the sorts of processes that underlie all of our physiological functioning in all our organs (including the brain).1 If I were to put this into more colloquial language, I would use words such as having a sense of the rhythm, and of the patterns, and of the flow in living organisms.

One of the first things I learned in biochemistry was that the chemical processes that go on in living organisms are nothing like the chemical reactions that take place in test tubes. In a test tube, you can have a process that happens in a straightforward fashion, changing substance A into substance B, so that