Contents of Article
Who are we really? And what does it mean when we say, “this is me”?
What is the “this” that we call “the self”? And why are so many studies revealing that in our modern life people are feeling ever more isolated even though they are more digitally connected? How can we be “together” yet feel so alone?
One way of understanding this is that a sense of a “self” is being created from our cultural contexts that in fact is being reinforced as individual, alone, isolated, disconnected, and encased in a body without real closeness with others.
What is sorely lacking is a needed experience of belonging – of being a part of something much larger than what is defined by the body alone.
Studies show that this isolated “me” is filled with stress and despair, and it does not create happiness, health, or longevity. Other studies suggest that the more disparity a society has between the income levels of the poor and the wealthy, the more mental disorders, drug addiction, mistrust, and impaired medical health and longevity for all people living in that social environment.
We are profoundly influenced by the cultural and economic settings in which we live, when we live with a sense of injustice, of mistrust and disconnection…
…we all suffer…
Siegel, 2012
The embodied and relational Self in context
Though modern socio-cultural and neuro-normative narratives may not recognise it nor appreciate it, we are created as affective and adaptive, dispositional and dynamic, neuroplastic beings who are inherently ever-emerging and Self-organising.
From the moment we are born to the moment we die, we seek connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making, not as optional extras, but as conditions of survival within an interconnected field of life.
And yet modern life often promotes the idea that we should be independent, Self-contained, and Self-regulating beings, as though this were the singular measure of maturity and health. In many settings, power and dominance promote control and order, and relational life becomes organised around rank, compliance, performance, and containment. Under such conditions, inter- and intra-personal dynamics often reflect imbalance, injustice, isolation, and a disconnection that permeates our sense of Self. Rather than movements toward connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making, movements can become shaped by chaos, meaninglessness, and a deep sense of alarmed-aloneness.
Here is the central proposition. There exists a depth of complexity within and between the Self, the Other, and the World that surrounds us. When we honour this complexity, we open space to understand that we are embodied and relationally embedded.
We are not limited to a body and cannot be understood without an all-encompassing, complexity-embracing perspective. In this way, we invite a shift away from seeing distress as something located solely within the individual and something to be fixed, and toward the recognition that who we are is inseparable from where and how we live.
Health and wellbeing involve more than symptom reduction, because symptom expression is often a surface expression of deeper spatiotemporal patterning across Self, Other(s), and World.
This is a lived phenomenological reality. Our systems are shaped by experience, and experience is never only internal. It is relational, environmental, cultural, economic, historical. The body holds memory in implicit forms. The mind makes meaning through sensation, perception, and interpretation.
Relationship shapes expectation, safety, and the capacity to remain present. When the World that surrounds us is organised in ways that erode belonging, distort trust, and reward disconnection, it is unsurprising that people experience despair, mistrust, dysregulation, or collapse. It is not that the Self is substandard. It is that the Self is responding, adapting, and organising under conditions that may not support coherence.
When distress is located solely inside the individual, the person becomes the problem. The context disappears. The relational field disappears. The histories of safety and threat disappear. The structural conditions of injustice disappear. And so the protective patterns that have arisen can be misread as pathology, stubbornness, weakness, or personal failure. When we honour complexity, a different understanding becomes possible. Protective patterns can be recognised as intelligible responses to lived conditions, as adaptations that preserved survival, continuity, and belonging in the only ways available at the time.
We could say it simply, without reducing it. The Self is not only a noun. The Self is a process. The Self is an embodied system shaped within relationship, embedded within environments, organised across time, and continually influenced by the World that surrounds us.
Who we are is not merely what we think, or what we do, or even what we feel. Who we are includes what we sense, how we perceive, how we interpret, and how our system learned to respond under particular conditions. What later appears as anxiety, withdrawal, hyper-vigilance, emotional numbing, self-criticism, perfectionism, appeasement, or control often began as coherent protection within incoherent circumstances.
Why context matters
Context is often treated as background, a secondary feature that sits around the “real issue.” Yet context should never be a side note. Context is the living condition in which the Self formed.
Broadly speaking, context refers to the interrelated conditions in which something exists. More specifically, context includes the internal and external constraints that shape how energy and information move within and between Self(s), Other(s), and the World. These constraints include relationship patterns, roles, power dynamics, culture, economics, belief systems, social position, and histories of safety and threat. Context is therefore not simply content, not simply what happened. Context includes the conditions under which what happened was sensed, perceived, interpreted, and embodied, and how those patterns continued to reorganise across time.
This matters because human experience is not linear. We are not shaped by one event in one moment in a direct cause-and-effect line.
We are shaped through reciprocal influence, through repetition, through accumulation, through relational dynamics that stabilise certain expectations and foreclose others. What becomes “me” is not merely who I decided to be. What becomes “me” is often how my system organised in response to what was required, permitted, punished, or absent in the environments I lived within.
When context is made visible, several shifts become possible. Shame begins to soften, because the Self is no longer framed as defective. Confusion begins to clarify, because protective patterns can be linked to their original function. Compassion becomes more grounded, because it rests in understanding rather than sentiment. And change becomes more realistic, because it is no longer reduced to willpower or insight alone, but understood as an emergent process that requires conditions supportive of reorganisation.
Context as layered systems of influence
One way to hold the full complexity of context is to recognise that we live within layered systems, nested environments that interact with and shape one another. Some of these systems are intimate and immediate, and some are distant yet still influential. Some involve direct participation, and some affect us without our direct involvement. The point is not to memorise categories. The point is to see that Self(s) and Other(s) do not exist apart from the World that surrounds us, and that distress, too, must be understood within these layered conditions.
At the most immediate layer are the settings in which we have face-to-face life. Home. Family. Close relationships. Workplace. School. Religious community. Social groups. These settings hold patterns of roles, expectations, recognition, and power. They shape what is permitted to be expressed, what must be hidden, how conflict is navigated, how safety is offered or withheld, and what kinds of connection are possible.
Then there are the interrelations between these settings, the ways one world speaks to another, and the ways a person must travel between them. How does family affect work? How does work affect parenting? How does culture shape what can be spoken at home? How do community values shape what the Self is allowed to want? When settings communicate well, when trust and mutual regard exist, when power is not excessively imbalanced, a person’s system is more likely to experience coherence. When settings contradict each other, when a person must compartmentalise to survive, when belonging in one setting requires disowning oneself in another, fragmentation and alarmed-aloneness more readily arise.
There are also settings that shape our lives without our active participation. Institutions, workplaces of caregivers, organisational decisions, medical systems, legal systems, funding systems, broader community events. These forces can alter stress load, access to resources, exposure to harm, and the felt sense of future. A person can be deeply affected by events that happen “elsewhere,” precisely because the Self is relationally embedded, not isolated.
And then there is the broader cultural layer, the macrosystem, which includes belief systems, ideology, norms about autonomy and dependence, attitudes toward mental health, trauma, disability, gender, class, race, religion, and worth. This layer quietly shapes what is respected, what is dismissed, what is blamed, what is celebrated, and what is silenced. When the macrosystem values productivity over wellbeing, independence over interdependence, and compliance over authenticity, many people internalise distress as personal failure rather than as a signal of contextual strain.
Through all these layers runs time. What was adaptive in one season may become restrictive in another. What kept a person safe in a childhood environment may become a source of suffering in adult relationship. A protective pattern can remain in place long after the original threat has passed, not because the person is choosing it, but because the system is organised around an earlier reality. In this way, context is spatiotemporal. It is patterned across time, carried in the body, and reactivated in present-day relational fields.
Protective patterns and the movement toward coherence
When we hold this complexity, protective patterns become understandable as the Self’s attempt to create coherence under conditions of threat, instability, disconnection, or relational danger.
Protection may take many forms. It may involve vigilance, control, appeasement, withdrawal, self-reliance, intellectualisation, perfectionism, numbness, or collapse. Each pattern has meaning. Each pattern has a function. Each pattern is an adaptation that once served survival, even if it now comes with cost.
And yet, complexity also includes hope. Self-organising systems can reorganise. Neuroplastic systems can change. Human beings can move toward coherence, integration, and renewed vitality, particularly when conditions support safety, connection, autonomy, and belonging, with communicative meaning-making.
This is why health and wellbeing involve more than symptom reduction. Symptoms can reduce without coherence. Symptoms can return when the underlying conditions remain unchanged. Symptoms can shift forms when meaning has not been made.
Wellbeing, in a deeper sense, involves the cultivation of contextual coherence, the capacity to sense the present as distinct from the past, the capacity to remain embodied in relationship without losing Self, and the capacity to respond with greater flexibility rather than being driven by protective necessity.
When context is honoured, the Self is no longer framed as broken or failing. The Self is framed as shaped. The question becomes less “what is wrong with me?” and more “what has my system had to do to survive, and what might it need now to move toward greater contextual coherence?” This shift does not remove responsibility or accountability. It relocates responsibility into reality. It invites us to take accountability by working with the actual conditions that shape human life, rather than pretending we are isolated units who should be able to fix ourselves in a vacuum.
Complexity is Vitality
There exists a depth of complexity within and between the Self, the Other, and the World that surrounds us. When we honour this complexity, we invite understanding, compassion, and a more accurate sense-making of why we are who we are: we honour our innate sense of emergent vitality.
We are embodied and relationally embedded, shaped by layered systems across time, organised by patterns of energy and information that have moved through our lives, and protective in the ways we needed to be.
When we shift from individual blame toward contextual understanding, new possibilities emerge, not as simplistic fixes, but as meaningful movements toward coherence, integration, and wellbeing that is deeper than symptom reduction.
Welcome, my name is Chele, I am a therapist primarily specialising in Trauma – specifically as it presents as Burnout and Breakdown. As a psychotherapist & PACFA & CCAA Clinical Counsellor I work individually with beautiful humans such as yourself who feel alone, lost, confused, & overwhelmed; those of you who are longing for something different.
As such, I offer my knowledge, skills, and inherent gifts with ears that listen to hear, and a heart open to receive who you are, no matter the suffering you bring; to support you in an exploration of how your past has impacted you and the ways that shows up presently. Together we will rediscover your hope and your sense of Self; we will reconnect you to what matters reclaiming the joy and delight in life you so deserve.
I welcome you to view my services or connect with me to explore how I can assist you in your journey.
References & Resources
The following references are offered for those who wish to explore the ideas informing this work. Brief annotations are included to support orientation rather than prescribe interpretation.
Badenoch, B. (2018). The heart of trauma: Healing the embodied brain in the context of relationships.
A relational and neurobiological exploration of trauma that places embodiment, attachment, and co-regulation at the centre of healing, emphasising that integration arises through relationship rather than in isolation.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.
A foundational articulation of belonging as a core human need, offering empirical grounding for the understanding that connection is not a luxury, but a primary organising force of human experience.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design.
A seminal framework for understanding how layered systems of influence shape development across time, highlighting that the Self cannot be understood apart from the environments in which it lives and moves.
Capuzzi, D., & Stauffer, M. D. (2016). Human growth and development across the lifespan: Applications for counselors.
An integrative overview of human development that situates psychological change within relational, cultural, and developmental contexts across the lifespan.
Charuvastra, A., & Cloitre, M. (2010). Emotions and emotion regulation in the process of trauma recovery.
A trauma-specific account of how emotional regulation develops within relational contexts, emphasising that recovery involves restoring safety, meaning, and connection rather than managing symptoms alone.
Cozolino, L. (2002). The neuroscience of psychotherapy: Building and rebuilding the human brain.
An accessible synthesis of neuroscience and psychotherapy that illustrates how relationships shape the brain and how change emerges through sustained relational experience.
Davis, M., & Wallbridge, D. (1991). Boundary and space: An introduction to the work of D. W. Winnicott.
An exploration of holding, boundary, and space that underscores the importance of a safe relational setting in which spontaneity, meaning, and Self-continuity can emerge.
Harms, L. (2007). Working with people: Communication skills for reflective practice.
A reflective text that emphasises presence, dialogue, and responsiveness, supporting an understanding of communication as a relational process rather than a technical skill.
Ivey, A. E., Ivey, M. B., & Zalaquett, C. P. (2010). Intentional interviewing and counseling.
A relational and multicultural approach to communication that foregrounds context, power, and culture in shaping how people make meaning and express themselves.
Lapworth, P., & Sills, C. (2010). Integration in counselling and psychotherapy.
A thoughtful exploration of integration that values coherence, responsiveness, and context over rigid adherence to technique or singular models.
Leslie, P. (2020). Natural resources: The importance of contexts in generating change.
A clear articulation of how change arises from within supportive contexts, emphasising that growth is facilitated rather than imposed.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. (2013). Attachment orientations and meaning in life.
An attachment-informed exploration of how relational patterns influence meaning-making, purpose, and the experience of belonging across the lifespan.
Savard, I., & Mizoguchi, R. (2019). Context or culture: What is the difference?
A nuanced discussion that clarifies distinctions and overlaps between context and culture, supporting more precise and respectful understanding of lived experience.
Siegel, D. J. (2010). The mindful therapist: A clinician’s guide to Mindsight and neural integration.
An exploration of awareness, integration, and presence that situates wellbeing within the capacity to sense, perceive, and reflect within relational safety.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). Pocket guide to interpersonal neurobiology.
A concise synthesis of mind, brain, and relationship that frames human beings as embodied, relational, and self-organising systems capable of movement toward coherence.
Skovholt, T. M., & Trotter-Mathison, M. (2016). The resilient practitioner.
A reflective text on sustainability, humility, and uncertainty that honours not-knowing as intrinsic to relational and developmental work.
