The Somato -Systemic Perspective

In systems theory, self-organizing systems are those that spontaneously generate order and coherent patterns without a central controller. In biological, ecological, and social domains alike, this phenomenon arises through localized interactions among components, governed by feedback loops, thresholds, and emergent properties. Living organisms, ecosystems, and even human societies can be viewed as self-organizing systems that regulate themselves dynamically, rather than through top-down control.

According to Camazine et al., self-organization is a process where “pattern at the global level of a system emerges solely from interactions among the lower-level components of the system” (2001). Donella Meadows describes self-organization as the capacity of a system to structure itself, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and evolve (2008). These capacities are not linear or mechanistic, but cyclical, adaptive, and dependent on context.

​

Buzz Holling’s concept of Panarchy offers a powerful model: adaptive cycles of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization (r, K, Ω, α) describe how systems evolve over time. These phases are not inherently good or bad—they are necessary for resilience and innovation. Collapse and renewal are not opposites but interlinked stages of transformation.

​

In this context, human beings can also be understood as living systems—not just physiologically, but emotionally, socially, and ecologically. Our patterns of behavior, stress, connection, and creativity are embedded within feedback loops that link inner processes to outer environments.

​

The somato-systemic Perspective is built on this foundation: that healing, growth, and transformation arise from the dynamic interplay between internal regulation and external interaction—between body, brain, relationships, and systems.

Living systems do not simply maintain homeostasis—they adapt, learn, and transform in response to internal and external demands. This adaptive quality is not random, but patterned and intelligent. Gregory Bateson referred to “the pattern which connects” as the essence of mind—not located within a brain, but in the relationships between parts. From this perspective, life is not a static state, but an ongoing choreography of interaction, differentiation, and re-integration.

​

Biological and cognitive systems continuously explore their “adjacent possible,” a term coined by Stuart Kauffman to describe the boundary between what is and what could be. The adjacent possible represents the latent configurations a system can reach from its current state—suggesting that living systems are not only reactive but creatively generative. Organisms seek novelty while retaining coherence. This dance of constraint and innovation allows evolution, healing, and learning to occur.

​

Cognition itself is increasingly understood as embodied and distributed. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced the concept of autopoiesis—the self-making nature of living systems. They argued that cognition is not computational but participatory; it arises through a system’s active engagement with its environment. This applies not only to cells or organisms, but to people, communities, and even ecosystems.

From a neurobiological perspective, creative intelligence is evident in how the nervous system anticipates, interprets, and reshapes internal and external stimuli. The brain is plastic, constantly updating its wiring based on embodied experience. Emotional, sensory, and relational feedback loops contribute to a flexible yet coherent sense of self.

Importantly, this intelligence is not just cognitive or verbal. It manifests through gesture, movement, affect, imagery, rhythm, and physiological synchrony. Trauma, dissociation, and rigidity are not failures of intelligence—but adaptations that reflect the system’s attempts to survive in conditions of overwhelm. By the same logic, healing emerges through creative re-patterning: micro-shifts in how a person moves, breathes, speaks, relates, and perceives the world.

​

In the somato-systemic view, creative intelligence is not an individual possession but a systemic function—a co-creation of organism and environment, shaped by the constraints and affordances of each moment. Therapy and self-development thus become acts of systemic tuning: restoring the capacity to improvise, synchronize, and evolve.

Trauma, from a somato-systemic perspective, is not merely an event—it is a rupture in the organism’s ability to regulate, integrate, and maintain coherence across its systems. It disrupts the natural rhythms of self-organization and pushes the system into states of fragmentation, hyperarousal, or collapse. These are not signs of dysfunction, but adaptations to overwhelming threat.

​

Daniel Siegel defines trauma as “an experience that overwhelms a person’s ability to integrate the emotions and cognitions involved in the experience.” From a neurobiological standpoint, trauma impairs integration—the linkage between differentiated parts of the brain (prefrontal cortex, limbic system, brainstem), and between body and mind. Integration supports resilience, flexibility, and meaning-making. Trauma dismantles this linkage and creates islands of experience: intrusive memories, flashbacks, somatic pain, or emotional numbness.

​

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory offers a crucial lens. It describes the autonomic nervous system as hierarchical: ventral vagal (social engagement), sympathetic (mobilization), and dorsal vagal (immobilization/freeze). In trauma, the nervous system may shift into sympathetic fight/flight or dorsal collapse—and remain stuck there, unable to return to safety. These defensive states become “new normal” baselines, altering perception, physiology, and behavior.

​

Bessel van der Kolk emphasized that “the body keeps the score.” Traumatic memory is stored not only in the narrative brain but in the sensorimotor and emotional systems. It lives in posture, muscle tone, gut sensation, startle reflexes, and disembodied numbness. These are forms of implicit memory—accessible not through talking alone but through somatic tracking, movement, and felt experience.

​

What distinguishes trauma from ordinary stress is the loss of agency and integration. The system cannot discharge the energy mobilized for defense; it gets trapped. The traumatic imprint becomes a rigid attractor state—nonlinear, recursive, self-reinforcing. Even in the absence of external threat, internal cues (sensations, emotions, images) can trigger the system into re-experiencing danger. This is not a failure of logic but a systemic survival strategy that has lost its context.

​

Understanding trauma as systemic disruption shifts the therapeutic focus: not on pathology to be fixed, but on patterns to be completed, metabolized, and re-integrated. It invites us to work not only with stories but with rhythms, sensations, and movements—restoring the organism’s ability to self-regulate, connect, and make meaning again.

Stuckness is a systemic condition. It occurs when a living system—such as a person, relationship, or community—settles into a rigid pattern that no longer serves its adaptation or vitality. These patterns may have once been protective or efficient, but over time they become entrenched, self-reinforcing, and resistant to change. The system is not static—it is actively maintaining the stuck state through circular feedback loops.

​

In the language of complex systems, such a pattern can be described as an attractor state. An attractor is a region in the system’s state-space toward which the system tends to evolve. Healthy systems may move fluidly between multiple attractors—rest, activation, creativity, relational engagement. Trauma and chronic stress, however, can produce maladaptive attractors: deep grooves of physiology and behavior that constrain the system’s options.

​

For example, a person who has survived early relational trauma may settle into a state of hypervigilance. Their body remains tense, their attention scans for threat, and their nervous system resists relaxation. Over time, this becomes a locked-in homeostasis—the system stabilizes, but at the cost of adaptability. The pattern becomes the “new normal.” This can also happen on the opposite end of the spectrum, in states of collapse or numbness, where the system avoids activation entirely.

​

This rigidity is often invisible to the person embedded in it. It feels like identity or temperament, rather than adaptation. Attempts to move out of the attractor may trigger fear, disorientation, or even physiological distress—leading the system to return to the familiar pattern. As Siegel puts it, “the system prefers the known misery to the unknown possibility.”

​

Defensive lock-in is especially powerful when the attractor is relationally co-regulated. For instance, families or organizations may collectively normalize suppression, perfectionism, or conflict avoidance. The attractor state is not individual but shared—maintained by mutual expectations, roles, and unconscious agreements. In these contexts, stuckness is systemic and relational: one part cannot change without affecting the whole.

​

To address stuckness, we must first understand it as an adaptive constraint. It is not a failure, but a solution that became obsolete. The work of transformation involves gently destabilizing the attractor—not through force, but through introducing novelty into the system: new experiences, movements, relationships, and signals of safety. These interventions begin to widen the system’s repertoire, allowing it to explore different patterns and reorganize toward greater coherence.

The hopeful message of the somato-systemic perspective is that even “stuck” systems can shift. Because living systems are inherently self-organizing, they retain the capacity for change and reorganization—especially when that change is introduced in ways that respect their internal rhythms, thresholds, and logic. The key is not top-down instruction, but bottom-up activation: reintroducing movement, feedback, and differentiation into a system that has become rigid or collapsed.

​

Bottom-up activation means beginning with the body—not as a passive object, but as an intelligent, sensing, and meaning-making system. When trauma disrupts integration, the path toward healing involves reconnecting sensation, perception, emotion, and movement. Rather than imposing a narrative or cognitive framework, bottom-up approaches allow the body to lead: to move, tremble, rest, orient, or breathe in ways that restore internal coherence.

​

Somatic psychotherapies all share this core insight: that the body is not just where trauma resides—it is where healing begins. They emphasize tracking internal states, attending to micro-movements, and following impulses that may have been suppressed during the original threat. When the system completes these patterns in a safe, supported environment, it reorganizes.

​

This principle applies beyond therapy. Everyday practices such as slow walking, breath awareness, stretching, humming, shaking, grounding through the feet, or orienting the gaze can support nervous system regulation. These micro-interventions introduce variability—a hallmark of health in dynamic systems. Variability prevents the system from locking into narrow attractor states and enables spontaneous re-patterning.

​

Another key dimension of bottom-up activation is behavioral activation. Often used in depression treatment, behavioral activation involves initiating small, structured actions (e.g. leaving the house, reaching out to someone, doing a simple task) that disrupt inertia and restore feedback between the system and its environment. These actions are not “fixes” but invitations: signals to the system that change is possible. Over time, they catalyze emotional and cognitive shifts—not because they bypass the deeper issue, but because they engage the system’s embodied intelligence.

​

Importantly, activation must be titrated. Too much intensity too quickly can overwhelm the system and reinforce defensive patterns. Skilled activation involves tracking internal states, adjusting pace, and integrating new input slowly. As Porges describes, the nervous system needs cues of safety, not urgency, to shift from defense to connection.

​

In relational contexts, co-regulation is a form of bottom-up activation. A calm, grounded presence can invite another’s system toward regulation—not through advice, but through tone, rhythm, and resonance. Eye contact, facial expression, touch, and voice all carry neuroceptive signals of safety or threat. When those signals align with trust and containment, the relational field becomes a transformational container.

​

In sum, bottom-up activation restores flexibility by engaging the system at its roots: body, breath, impulse, rhythm, and contact. It does not “force” change but invites emergence—trusting that, when supported, the system will seek new patterns of coherence on its own terms.

Lasting change in any living system involves shifts at multiple levels, from the individual’s biology and relationships to the wider community and environment. These levels – individual, relational, communal, societal, and eco-systemic – are deeply interdependent and nested. In complex systems, small local changes can scale up into emergent global patterns. By the same token, personal transformations (in our bodies and behaviors) can ripple outward to catalyze wider social change. A somato-systemic perspective recognizes that bottom-up change often begins with subtle shifts in individuals, which gradually propagate through relationships and communities until they reconfigure the larger society.

​

Levels of Systemic Transformation

​

In a systemic view, change can be examined across several nested levels:

​

• Individual: Mind-body regulation, somatic awareness, and emotional coherence.
   

• Relational: Co-regulation, attachment dynamics, mutual responsiveness.
   

• Communal: Norms, rituals, collective identities and support structures.
   

• Societal: Policies, narratives, institutional trauma or healing.
   

• Eco-systemic: Relationship to the Earth, rhythms of sustainability and interdependence.
  
   

Each level influences the others in a continuous feedback loop. While top-down structures shape lived experience, bottom-up change—initiated through embodied presence, regulation, and agency—can gradually reshape culture.

​

Collective Stuckness and Reorganization

​

Stuckness, like trauma, can also manifest collectively. Organizations, communities, or entire cultures can become entrenched in patterns of burnout, emotional suppression, disconnection, or fear. These become shared attractor states. For example, in a burnout culture, individuals are trapped in survival mode, reinforcing systemic overdrive. In intergenerational trauma, the emotional residue of past collective wounds continues shaping family systems, identity, and worldview.

​

Collective stuckness is not simply the sum of individual dysregulation—it is emergent, sustained by feedback loops across levels. Just as individuals can lock into freeze or flight states, so can groups.

​

However, systems can reorganize. A crisis—internal or external—can destabilize old patterns. This is a critical window: the system can collapse or evolve. If supported by embodied presence, relational safety, and creative engagement, the group can move toward integration. For example, when trauma-informed practices enter schools, teams, or communities, they seed new micro-patterns of safety, regulation, and expression.

​

Embodied Practice as a Vehicle for Cultural Change

​

Embodied practices—breathwork, grounding, movement, somatic tracking—are not only tools for individual healing, but portals for collective re-patterning. When practiced in relational fields (dyads, groups, communities), they generate coherence that can entrain the broader system. A single person’s regulation can shift a room. A team’s safety practices can change organizational norms. A community’s ritual of presence can ripple into societal discourse.

​

This is not idealism—it’s systems physics. Feedback loops amplify what is present. When embodied intelligence—slow, attuned, creative—is cultivated intentionally, it becomes a fractal: one part reflects and transforms the whole.

The somato-systemic perspective invites us to reimagine healing and transformation not as a linear path, but as a dynamic, embodied unfolding across multiple levels of life. From the micro-movements of an individual nervous system to the relational patterns of communities and the adaptive cycles of social systems, change is not imposed—it emerges. It is not the product of willpower alone, but of reactivated intelligence embedded in our bodies, interactions, and environments.

​

At its core, this perspective recognizes that systems learn—through feedback, resonance, and response. A frozen pattern is not failure, but the memory of a system doing what it had to in order to survive. The work of healing is not to override or destroy these adaptations, but to meet them with presence and invite new possibilities. In doing so, the system doesn’t return to a previous state—it evolves toward greater integration, creativity, and coherence.

​

Embodied practices are the medium of this evolution. They provide the missing vocabulary of change: sensation, rhythm, breath, orientation, impulse. They reintroduce variability and agency into systems that have become rigid, and allow for re-patterning that is not merely mental or behavioral, but physiological and relational. When practiced in resonance with others, these micro-shifts initiate macro-transformation. One calm breath, one authentic gesture, one moment of grounded presence can ripple outward, shifting relationships, communities, and cultures.

​

This is not utopia—it is bio-logic. Just as forests regenerate after fire, and nervous systems reorganize after trauma, human systems—when met with safety, resonance, and embodied intelligence—can self-organize toward healing. The task of the practitioner, facilitator, or community leader is not to control the system, but to attune to its thresholds and support its unfolding.

​

In a world facing intersecting crises—burnout, disconnection, ecological collapse—this perspective is not optional. It is necessary. Because it honors the full truth of who we are: living systems, shaped by trauma, capable of transformation.

​

Systemic change begins in the body, unfolds through relationship, and reorganizes the whole. It is not fast, but it is real. And it is already happening—every time we choose to breathe, feel, and connect differently.

Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam.

​

Camazine, S., Deneubourg, J. L., Franks, N. R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G., & Bonabeau, E. (2001). Self-organization in biological systems. Princeton University Press.

​

Capra, F. (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. Anchor Books.

​

Cozolino, L. (2014). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

​

Fogel, A. (2013). Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness. W. W. Norton & Company.

​

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional Contagion. Cambridge University Press.

​

Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems, 4(5), 390–405.

​

Kauffman, S. (2000). Investigations. Oxford University Press.

​

Kauffman, S. A. (1996). At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Oxford University Press.

​

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.

​

Martell, C. R., Dimidjian, S., & Herman-Dunn, R. (2010). Behavioral Activation for Depression: A Clinician’s Guide. Guilford Press.

​

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala.

​

Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

​

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

​

Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. Bantam Books.

​

Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

​

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

​

Walker, B., & Salt, D. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press.

​

Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Lehrner, A., Desarnaud, F., Bader, H. N., Makotkine, I., ... & Bierer, L. M. (2016). Influences of maternal and paternal PTSD on epigenetic regulation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene in Holocaust survivor offspring. American Journal of Psychiatry, 173(8), 856–864.

​

van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (2015). Genetic differential susceptibility on trial: Meta-analytic support from randomized controlled experiments. Development and Psychopathology, 27(1), 151–162.

​

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.