ABSTRACT
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Hemingway, 1929
As a psychoanalyst and holistic psychiatrist, I have long been interested in understanding how exactly it is that my patients get better-in other words, what exactly it is that allows them to reverse underlying dysfunctionality so that they can advance
11.1 Optimal Frustration and Optimal Challenge .............................................202 11.2 Environmental Stressors ............................................................................203 11.3 Stressful Stuff Happens ..............................................................................204 11.4 Web of Life .................................................................................................204 11.5 Optimization of Flow .................................................................................205 11.6 Hormetic Dose-Response Relationship ......................................................206 11.7 MindBodyMatrix: A Chaotic System ........................................................207 11.8 Healing Cycles of Defensive Collapse and Adaptive Recovery .................208 11.9 Self-Organizing Systems Resist Perturbation ............................................209 11.10 Challenge versus Support of the Patient’s Defensive Structures ................209 11.11 Traumatic versus Optimal Stress ............................................................... 210 11.12 Creation of Cognitive Dissonance .............................................................. 211 11.13 From Gain to Pain ...................................................................................... 212 11.14 Relentless Hope: The Refusal to Grieve..................................................... 213 11.15 From Relentless Hope to Sober Acceptance .............................................. 213 11.16 Grieving Process ........................................................................................ 214 11.17 Belated Processing of Unmastered Experience ......................................... 216 11.18 Sandpile Model and the Paradoxical Impact of Stress ............................... 216 11.19 Difference between a Poison and a Medication ......................................... 217 11.20 Resilience: Continuous Adjustment to Instability ...................................... 218 11.21 Optimization of Mental Potential ............................................................... 219 11.22 Dis-Order and Dis-Ease .............................................................................220 11.23 Conclusion ..................................................................................................220 References .............................................................................................................. 221
from illness to wellness. Over the course of the years, I have come to appreciate something that is at once both completely obvious and quite profound, namely, that it will be input from the outside and the patient’s capacity to process, integrate, and adapt to its impact that will ultimately enable the patient to get better. In other words, there must be both environmental input (which will constitute the dose) and capacity of the system to manage that input (which will constitute the response).
