clinical practice

CHAPTER EIGHT — The Law of Self-Repair: Awareness and the Whole Human Being

This post belongs to a wider body of work that is being released in stages. It can be read on its own, or as part of the whole. The Prologue offers a natural point of entry for sequential reading.

“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.” — Albert Einstein

This is not metaphor. It is a working description of a closed system.

E = mc² holds because energy and matter are not rivals but expressions of one reality maintained through relationship. What makes the system viable is not either side of the equation, but what sits between them.

The equals sign.

Remove the equals sign and the system does not become freer; it becomes unstable. Energy overwhelms form, or form constrains energy until failure occurs. The problem is never energy itself or matter itself. The problem is the loss of regulation.

Human consciousness has suffered an equivalent structural failure.

For centuries, identity has been weighted almost entirely toward cognition, narrative, and effort. Conscience was reduced to belief, instruction, or compliance rather than recognised as a functional regulator within a living system. Thought became identity. The mind was treated as the whole.

The Twelve Step template corrects this error with unusual precision.

Step Three establishes the lower line of the equals sign: the embodied human being returning their will and life as they are — conditioned, conflicted, unfinished. This is not resignation; it is structural truthfulness.

Step Seven establishes the upper line: conscious alignment with the One beyond the personal system — not as belief, but as contact. Willingness replaces strain. Alignment replaces control.

Between these two lines, a third function becomes possible.

This is where Step Five must be understood accurately.

Step Five is not moral confession. It is the delivery of conscience. It is the moment awareness becomes accountable within relationship, rather than circulating privately inside the mind. Until this delivery occurs, conscience remains present only in potential — sensed but not governing.

Step Five places the central point between the lines.

This point is not judgement, diagnosis, or ideology. It is individuated conscience: the capacity to recognise alignment and misalignment in real time, from within the person, rather than imposed from outside. Clinically, this is the restoration of internal regulation through truthful disclosure.

This is the gain control. This is the regulatory function. This is the equals sign restored.

When conscience is absent, energy overwhelms form (compulsion, repetition, escalation), or form suppresses energy (numbing, rigidity, collapse). When conscience is present, the same forces move through the system without damage and generate coherence.

This chapter concerns that restoration — not the elimination of desire, but the regulation of power; not the dominance of mind, but its return to function; not separation from the body, but reintegration of mind, psyche, and organism into a single working system.

The modern world — including many professional healthcare workers — conflates emotions and feelings into one list. Yet they are not the same.

Feelings are the continuous pressure system of the psyche — ascending, descending, or neutral i.e. transcending — the inner equivalent of blood pressure.

Emotions are the barometric responses to those pressures — expressive weather systems, passing storms, momentary turbulence.

Feeling-pressure is the inner meteorology. Emotion is the barometer registering its movement.

Until conscience is delivered, these inner systems remain difficult to trust. Right and wrong are felt only dimly, borrowed from outside, or imposed as rules rather than recognised as alignment. The organism feels pressure, but does not yet know with itself what that pressure means.

All experience enters through the five physical senses and was designed to be received by the mind, which is the stomach of the psyche. The mind is not a throne, not a control centre, not the essence of being. It is the digestive organ of inner life, receiving raw impressions as the body receives food — softening, mixing, breaking down, and integrating what comes in.

In the same way, conscience is not an abstract moral faculty. It emerges when digestion is restored — when experience has been received, broken down, and integrated rather than bypassed or acted out. Conscience cannot be installed. It must be born.

This digestion is continually heated and stirred by three biological instincts:

  • Sex instinct — toward union, creativity, pleasure
  • Social instinct — toward belonging, role, recognition
  • Security instinct — toward safety, control, continuity

These instinctual tones behave like thermal currents, shaping the texture of our inner weather.

But when the mind is lifted out of its digestive role and mistaken for the self — when it becomes a noun instead of the verb it was always meant to be — a catastrophic split begins. The mind becomes a box, a container in which a person attempts to live, separate from the organism that bears them.

Addiction arises as the organism’s desperate attempt to blow the box apart — to force a reunion between mind and psyche, and between psyche and the animal body. It is not merely escape; it is a violent attempt at reintegration.

In this sense, addiction is not the opposite of conscience but its precursor under pressure. The executive function — the capacity to bind, repeat, and devote — is alive and vital, yet ungoverned by an individuated knowing-with-self. Until conscience arrives, that binding power attaches to substitutes. The energy is not wrong. The marriage has not yet occurred.

When this split deepens, awareness detaches into a pod-like mind, floating above the living organism on a trickle charge of sensation and story. Detached awareness no longer inhabits the animal body, and so the person treats their own body in ways they would never treat a dog — with overwork, intoxication, deprivation, sedation, punishment, and neglect — not from cruelty, but from disconnection.

This disconnection is precisely what older spiritual language described as a second birth — not a conversion of opinion, but the delivery of conscience itself: the moment awareness becomes answerable and knowing becomes personal rather than theoretical.

At the heart of recovery is this revelation: the mind was never meant to be a noun. Its primary meaning is a verb: to mind — to care for, to attend to, to shepherd. This is the original function of mind in the architecture of Humankind.

In the Twelve Step Programme, this restoration occurs through a precise delivery apparatus. Steps Three, Seven, and Eleven restore contact — re-pairing the circuit so that consciousness is no longer running on a trickle charge. But contact alone is not sufficient. What follows is birth.

These insights do not arise from abstraction. They come from years of client work with cases that seemed impossibly complex — until the distinction between the two bodies became visible: the outer biological body and the inner ontological body of the psyche.

With up to forty thousand neurons in the heart, it is almost as if, in the end, the heart itself blows up the box of the mind. Where the noun-mind tries to contain experience, the heart forces reunion — bringing head and heart back together through a paradoxical collusion inside the sacred disease of stuck and broken addiction.

Steps One, Five, and Ten are not confessions in the moral sense. They are ad-missions — movements toward truth — the labour through which conscience is delivered into the present. The first birth brings a human into life; the second birth brings a human into responsibility.

For many, it is precisely addiction that exposes the failure of the mental box and compels the whole organism to seek unity again. And when this collapse meets the template of the Twelve Step Programme — a body of principles proven by lived evidence rather than theory — delusion is slowly dismantled.

In that process, healthy illusion is restored: the recognition that life is a play of energy experiencing itself through form. Not denial, not fantasy, but the rightful imaginative field in which a human being can live without fragmentation.

When conscience is born, illusion no longer deceives. It plays. Parable resumes its rightful function — carrying meaning across levels without freezing the soul’s development. Weaponised story arrests this second birth and leaves the person stalled between innocence and wisdom. Living story completes it.

The heart returns the mind to its verb-nature. The organism reclaims its person. And what was divided becomes whole enough to begin again.

Only now can consciousness carry its own preciousness through experience without fragmenting. Only now can the executive function bind the person to what serves life rather than substitutes for it. This is not virtue. It is alignment restored.

When clients see this clearly — the psychic stomach, the instinctual heats, the pressure system of feeling, the barometric nature of emotion, the pod-mind’s detachment — relief is palpable. Shame dissolves. Confusion lifts. A person sees themselves from the inside.

And then comes the great turning:

Both the outer body and the inner psyche heal by the same law.
When the wound is brought into awareness, the system moves toward self-repair.

Awareness is medicine because conscience is now present to receive it. Unity is the outcome because right and wrong have returned to relationship. The human being — mind, psyche, and animal body — begins its slow return from Mankind’s fragmentation to Humankind’s wholeness.

This is the return of Eden — not innocence regained, but innocence completed by wisdom. The One sees Itself through a unique, unrepeatable person, and love appears as recognition across difference.

Anne Wilson Schaef named the Addictive System as a cultural field rather than an individual pathology. This observation is included here not as critique, but as a clinical orientation point.

What this reveals is not a technique of self-repair, but a relationship. Awareness does not restore coherence by force or control; it responds. When the whole human being is allowed to register experience without distortion, something larger than the individual appears to be met. Repair occurs as if the organism is answering a call already present — an order that precedes thought, belief, and method. Whatever name is given to this order, it cannot be reduced to psychology alone, yet psychology becomes intelligible in its light.

Affect, the Broken Word: Why Therapeutic Change Remains Elusive

A position paper from the DRT / HIAI collaboration, pointing toward The Holy Con.

Abstract

Contemporary psychology and counselling frequently rely on the concept of affect as a broad, interchangeable container for feeling, emotion, mood, temperament, and disposition. This paper argues that such usage obscures rather than clarifies human experience and contributes to the difficulty of achieving durable therapeutic change. Drawing on Diction Resolution Therapy (DRT), the paper proposes that the problem is not merely conceptual but linguistic and architectural: affect has been severed from its etymological family (-fect), resulting in a theory of inner life that cannot adequately account for governance, causation, transformation, or resolution. Reuniting affect with the wider -fect family — including prefect and perfect — restores a missing dimension of meaning and reopens the question of human perfectibility: the lawful transition from Mankind into Humankind.

1. The Problem with “Affect” as an Umbrella Term

In contemporary psychology, affect is often treated as a neutral umbrella term encompassing emotion, feeling, mood, affective state, disposition, and affectivity. As common definitions illustrate, these terms are frequently used interchangeably, with differences acknowledged but rarely operationalised in clinical practice.

This linguistic flattening produces several unintended consequences:

  • Feelings and emotions are treated as interchangeable phenomena
  • Enduring moods and momentary states are collapsed into the same category
  • Temperament is confused with situational response
  • Inner pressure and outer expression are blurred

The result is a therapeutic language that describes what is happening but struggles to explain how change happens.

Clients may feel understood, validated, and even regulated, yet still report that something essential remains untouched. Insight increases; coping improves; but transformation proves elusive.

2. The Missing Architecture: What DRT Observes

Diction Resolution Therapy begins from a different observation: feelings and emotions are not interchangeable, and neither is “affect” a sufficient container for them.

DRT distinguishes between:

  • Feelings as inner pressure states (ascending, descending, or neutral)
  • Emotions as barometric responses to events
  • Mood as a residual atmospheric condition
  • Temperament as a biological and developmental inheritance

When these are collapsed into “affect,” something vital disappears: the sense that something is acting upon something else, and that this action belongs within a governed inner order.

This disappearance is not accidental. It arises from affect being severed from its linguistic family — a family that carries not just experience, but agency, governance, and purpose.

3. The -FECT Family: Governance, Action, and Restoration

The Latin root facere (“to make, to do”) gives rise to a powerful and ordered family of words:

  • Prefect — the one placed in charge; the governing principle
  • Perfect — that which has been fully carried through to its proper end
  • Infect — something introduced that alters from within
  • Affect — to act upon; to influence
  • Effect — the result of that action
  • Defect — a failure of formation or governance
  • Refect / Refectory — restoration through nourishment
  • Confect / Confection — something made together

Within this family, affect is not a passive state. It is a moment in a sequence. Something is governed (prefect), acted upon (affect), produces consequences (effect), may collapse (defect), and can be restored (refect) — all within the horizon of perfectibility.

Modern affect theory isolates affect from this sequence and turns it into a descriptive fog — experience without governance, sensation without direction, feeling without an end.

DRT suggests that this linguistic amputation mirrors the therapeutic impasse: when we cannot name what governs the inner life, we cannot support its lawful restoration.

4. Why Change Becomes So Difficult

When affect is treated as a free-floating inner state:

  • Therapy focuses on regulation rather than re-ordering
  • Clients learn to manage experience rather than restore governance
  • Insight replaces transformation
  • Symptom relief substitutes for inner alignment

By contrast, when affect is reunited with the -fect family, a different therapeutic logic becomes available:

  • What has been infected into this person’s inner life?
  • What is currently affecting them?
  • What effects follow from this?
  • Where has governance (prefect) been displaced?
  • What defects in meaning or structure result?
  • What would genuine refection require?

Here, change is no longer heroic effort. It is the restoration of order.

5. Perfectibility: From Mankind to Humankind

The word perfect does not mean flawless. It means fully carried through.

DRT understands the human being not as broken beyond repair, but as perfectible — capable of lawful re-ordination when the right governance is restored.

This is the deeper movement from Mankind (the governed-by substitutes human) into Humankind (the human governed by Being).

Reuniting affect with its family restores the possibility of this movement — not as moral improvement, but as structural completion.

6. Toward The Holy Con

This paper points toward the larger argument developed in The Holy Con: that much of modern suffering — clinical, personal, and civilisational — arises from misnamed, mis-placed, and mis-governed inner realities.

Language is not secondary to healing. It is the architecture through which healing becomes possible.

To restore affect to its family is to restore the human being to the possibility of becoming fully human.