Psychotopology fieldwork carries considerable potential. It’s possible to enter inner realms with great agency and relative ease. But I also want to be clear with you that it also carries some risks and limitations at this time.
First, as is true whenever science breaks through into new territory, there is a lot we do not yet know. What that means is this: If you choose to enter this world with me, you must take full responsibility for your well-being and the well-being of those with whom you share the work.
In other words, please be realistic about what you can expect from me. My role at the moment is to give you my absolute best effort to share what I have discovered in a form that you can use. Your role is to be mindful about how you use it.
Best scenario: You have a lot of experience doing inner work, or guiding others in their inner work, and you have many tools in your toolbox to fall back on if you find yourself in perplexing territory.
On the other hand: If you are very vulnerable or unstable, and/or if you have very little experience in these realms, please do not use fieldwork either on your own or facilitating another person.
For those who are appropriately (in your estimation) skilled and resourced, there is power here to traverse this new realm, but there is also some uncertainty about the shapes of the various landscapes as they inhabit individual people. This will be something we will need to study carefully, and together.
Second, psychotopology fieldwork may turn out to be one of the most reliable tools available for undoing patterns of distress and suffering. However, the work is still in its youth with respect to developing practices of integration. At the moment, at least until I can get some more advanced trainings underway, fieldwork will best be paired with other practices that assist in the re-integration of the restored portions of the self back into the tapestries of life. Those practices should always include multiple sources of support of various kinds.
Some Specific Limitations
Let me make more clear some of the places where I have bumped up against fieldwork’s limits, and other places where I have not yet had an opportunity to explore how it might be applied. Most of the examples below have to do with the requirement in fieldwork that the explorer is able to bring a coherent witness awareness to their inner experience. Without that capacity, fieldwork cannot proceed.
Young Children
I have had great success in working with children above the age of self-awareness. Depending on the child, the ability to witness their own inner territory may emerge anywhere from five to twelve years old. Once it is there, the work is very effective in helping kids restore their natural functioning after a disruption of some kind. In fact, in some ways children find it easier to clear reactive states than adults because they don’t have as much history, and have not built extensive thought, belief and behavior structures around keeping their reactive states suppressed.
On the flip side, they do not have much control of their environment, including the people and behaviors that may have played a role in the formation of their inner compensations. Nevertheless, helping them learn a stronger, more stable witness relationship to their feeling states will enable them to better adapt in the long run.
For teens, fieldwork is especially useful. Many young people have not built the kind of verbal awareness of their inner states required for many therapies to function well. In fieldwork, all they need is their present experience. They don’t need to try to put interpretive words to things that resist being compartmentalized. They don’t need to share story specifics they find too vulnerable. There’s a safety and freedom in simply bringing their awareness to feeling and describing its tangible properties, and working primarily with that.
For younger kids, though, doing fieldwork is more challenging. One of my clients had a three-year-old that he reported being able to support with rudimentary mapping, but I haven’t personally had a chance to explore how that might work, or how best to approach it.
Psychosis
One person was brought to me by a family member hoping fieldwork could help. She was in an active psychotic break, and although I was able to enter her world to some extent, I found that the mapping practice did not take hold in the way it does for someone not experiencing psychosis. Things were much more fluid and changeable, with very little effect on the apparent actual felt experiences.
It is possible there might be a way to approach the work with someone experiencing psychosis, and that would probably need to focus on the actual experience of self in some way. But I have not had any further opportunities to explore that, and I have doubts about whether it would be effective.
Psychiatric Medications
Over the years, I have from time to time worked with people whose medications seemed to get in the way of successful fieldwork. I am not a medical doctor and so cannot go into any level of detail about this, but I can share what I noticed.
It seemed that with a few medications, particularly those given for bipolar disorder, the person was able to go through the mapping and moving process, but did not experience the tangible shift in feeling as a result. It was as if they experienced the mapping and moving as simply an intellectual exercise.
My guess is that these particular medications work by somehow disconnecting the link between the field dimension of experience and the body’s responses. Normally, when you shift a reactive state to an ideal one, you feel that shift with your entire being, body included. With these meds, that entrainment with the body seems to be unhooked, and so there is an absence of strong feedback that something good is happening.
It is possible that the work in those situations still has the normal effect. But in the absence of tangible somatic feedback, it’s hard for someone to justify what seems like going through the motions when they’re paying for private sessions. I haven’t had the opportunity to explore what would happen if someone were to engage in comprehensive fieldwork around their issue to plant new patterns of being, and then work with their psychiatrist to come off the medications to find out whether the roots have grown deep enough to sustain themselves once the meds are gone.
As I said, my experience of this has come up only with a few particular medications. I can’t say with confidence in retrospect which ones they were, and anyone’s experience with any med will be unique. So my recommendation is simply to follow the fieldwork fundamentals and trust your / the explorer’s experience to guide the way. And of course, rely only on qualified professionals to advise on any medication management decisions.
Big Life Changes
In the kinds of transformations that typically happen in fieldwork, people often “wake up” to conditions in their lives that do not support their greatest well-being. Relationships, living situations, work environments and more become illuminated as having played a role in maintaining a dysfunctional pattern of existence. Even small things like the photo hanging on the living room wall can become suspect.
Our lives are of a whole. What is inside us is reflected outside like a hall of mirrors, and when we change what is inside, those outside reflections can sometimes be jarring to witness. At the same time, we are multiple. We have many more aspects of ourselves beyond whatever is being transformed in the moment through fieldwork.
Many times, emerging from a cycle of fieldwork, we may find ourselves wanting to make a big, life-changing decision. I caution against radical changes in direction and recommend, instead, a slow breathing into the new way of being.
When we take our time to more fully integrate the changes within ourselves, we begin to spontaneously make new micro-decisions. We make different choices in the moment when faced with the familiar conditions of our lives, and those small moments of redirection accumulate over time in a much more organic and healthy way than a radical leap will tend to be.
If in fact there is a big change coming, much better to lay the groundwork for that change both inside and outside, in small ways, establishing a comfort in the new way of being that can support an integrated decision. Much more important than the act of moving away from what is unhealthy is the choice of what new healthy condition we move toward. Getting clear about that can take some time.
That said, every life situation is unique, and when we find ourselves on such a threshold, the best we can do is to bring as much of our whole selves to the question as possible, and to move from there.
Other Conditions
There are infinite ways that people’s inner worlds and their relationship with the outer worlds can be configured in the context of genetic, societal, familial and experiential influences over time. We are very complex. The field of psychiatry has attempted to simplify this complexity into workable form through the design of its lexicon of diagnoses and their criteria. But psychotopology’s introduction of the field topology of being brings us face to face with that complexity and asks us to respond to it.
I cannot tell you much at all about the forms inhabited by any given person, even when they have been assigned a formal diagnosis from the DSM-5 or other taxonomy of dysfunction. This is something I hope to see happen as research begins to take place, taken up by people in positions that give them access to the resources and opportunities to conduct such research into the actual inner structures of people’s challenges. I believe there are entire careers and institutions waiting to be established in this effort.
For now, what is important is that anyone practicing fieldwork simply keeps coming back to the basics. Always prioritize the explorer’s experience, follow what emerges, and establish stable places to stand. This territory of the inner human world is rich beyond our current imaginations, and it is begging to be known.
Addressing the Inner Challenges of Modern Life
I want to make the case for mindful care if you choose to begin using psychotopology fieldwork for your own journey or to assist others. With psychotopology, we get to turn the light on in the dark basement of our own inner selves. Very often, what we discover there can be uncomfortable, to say the least. There’s a lot in there, a lot that’s been buried for a long time. And there are good reasons for that.
Although the experience of feeling is the foundation of conscious experience, modern society has become relentless in its suppression of feeling by privileging thought and behavior, applying rules and expectations, setting up dynamics like competition for status, hijacking our brains for the shallow stimulation of screens, and much more. These forces impact every one of us starting even before birth, in the womb of a mother living through the onslaught.
I’m going to give you a brief overview of the consequences of this separation from feeling as I see them. My perspective comes not only from the structural discoveries of psychotopology but from the highly detailed expositions of people’s experience of unpacking these consequences in the course of doing in-depth fieldwork. When we dive in with fieldwork and shine the light into the previously-hidden basement, we get to examine in depth just what are the short- and long-term impacts of our society’s turn away from feeling into the hegemony of thought.
First, a Bit of Context
What I share below reaches into the broad expanse of psychotopology’s discoveries, much of which I have not yet explicitly covered. I’ve decided to share this chapter anyway because of wanting to offer a bit of context for our current collective struggle moment. We’re all in this, all of us together, and we have a lot of work to do in getting through to the other side. What I’ve written here provides a glimpse of how our collective struggle lives deep within every one of us. You’ll learn more about all of this in Volumes 2 & 3.
Our Inner Honeycomb
Our inner world of feeling carries a highly complex structure. Chamber upon chamber nestles one against the other in a rich, wide architecture of many-faceted being. Each of these chambers houses an inner self, and each of these inner selves functions to embody a specific life capacity unique to that self.
These capacities range from the most basic abilities such as managing the movement of our body or sustaining its vitality, through enacting the manifestation of our desires and giving and receiving in relationship, all the way to those such as fulfilling our life purpose or making a contribution to our community. Optimally, as we grow up, life presents opportunities to develop one capacity after another, and each self grows into its full functionality. Our natural, healthy adulthood contains the potential for a wide repertoire of modes of being, wonderfully adaptable to changing contexts and conditions.
Feeling as Essential Guide
Crucial to the development of these capacities is the smooth, integrated functionality of feeling. Each capacity comes with needs and gifts, and feeling guides us to meet the needs and deliver the gifts. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, modern life undermines this functionality.
As a result, many of our natural capacities never fully develop. What develops instead are thought and behavior compensations for needs that cannot be met and gifts that cannot be delivered. The inner selves hosting these compensations experience life as distressing, often with very intense and intolerable states locked into place to retain a functional response to a distorted world.
Locking Chambers Away
Take the capacity for intimacy with others, for example. When we learn that the need for being seen and held is not available, and that the asset of being able to offer such seeing and holding has no place to be received, we may take on a position of self-reliance in order to mask the intense pain of that unmet need and unaccepted gift, and keep us from getting close to anyone who might trigger it back into our awareness. Once this compensation is in place, we bypass the compromised capacity for intimacy by only engaging in relationships that clearly do not offer it.
In this way, over time, we systematically shut the door to one capacity chamber after another, one inner self after another. We find a few capacities that are better supported in our particular wing of society, and we shoehorn all of our life experience into those few selves. One example of such a privileged capacity in modern society is that for productivity. Many people become obsessive achievers as a result. The other selves get stored in the basement.
Many Selves in Storage
I will have a lot more to share about this over time. For now, what I want to emphasize is that fieldwork is powerful. When you work on undoing the compensations of a surface self or two, that liberation opens up a space for more deeply buried selves to come to the surface. Our natural state is one of many selves, hosting many capacities, seamlessly shifting from one self/capacity to the next as life’s context changes. So when we restore those selves at the surface, rather than remaining locked in place as defenses regardless of what capacities are naturally called for, they step aside to make space for the appropriate capacity to come to the foreground. But that relevant self/capacity may have been long buried and deeply compromised. Bringing it to the foreground can be painful and disruptive.
Fieldwork enables us to meet such emergent compensations with a next round of work — excavating the states, mapping and moving, restoring the parts’ access to their ideal states. But once they have been restored, that capacity still needs to learn how to function well. It needs to go through its original developmental process again, hopefully this time with more access to needs being met, stronger inner resources, and better receptivity for its gifts to support a healthy maturation.
What all this means is that fieldwork opens the door to an epic scope of personal (re)development. We folks in modern times all have chambers upon chambers of compromised selves locked away in the basement. And when we gain access, it can be overwhelming to realize just how much work there is to do. There is no easy path to complete inner thriving. At this point in history, for every one of us, given the compensations of our society and the impact of those compensations on our individual development, we each have a massive amount of work to do.
Not only that, but we absolutely require the involvement of one another to reassemble the thriving that is our birthright. So many of our needs require the contributions of others around us, and when so many of those others are themselves locked into societal habits of compensation, that becomes quite challenging. We cannot fully heal alone. We must do this together.
Moving Forward Wisely
All this is to say, it can be easy to dive into psychotopology fieldwork with a little too much zeal and wind up in over your head. When you discover this amazing method that lets you efficiently clear your inner baggage, of course you want to start applying it to every limitation that comes to mind. Be more now!
But what I am telling you, and what I want you to hear, is that under the surface are far more dark shadows than you are aware of at the moment. Our society has supported and encouraged you for many years to sideline pain, to bury it deeply, and to shunt all your conscious energy into those small spaces in which you are able to shine according to the standards by which your particular collective measures you.
That society and its standards still surrounds you. You still inhabit the world it has built. In order to fully heal, you absolutely must start small, go slowly, and begin to recraft your personal world to support your thriving. This may require a redesign of some aspects of your life, from the patterns of your activity to the dynamics of your relationships to the food you eat and the work you do with your body.
You cannot fully heal from deeply buried pain without excavating and exposing the pain, restoring those parts’ access to their gifts and wisdom, and integrating the restoration into the shape of your embodied and interconnected life. This will take time, and you cannot do it alone.
Taking One Measured Step at a Time
As you begin your journey with psychotopology fieldwork, it will be enough to simply map and move two or three states at a time. In doing so, you will train your capacity for focused attention to bring feeling into awareness, and you will develop a stronger witness position from which to do the work. Strengthening your inner witness will also serve you in other contexts, making it much easier to avoid getting swallowed up by reactive states and make choices about how to respond, when triggered, from a much healthier place.
As you restore these parts of you to their natural functioning, a few at a time, other parts related to them will surface, and it may take some effort to maintain your gains. That’s OK. Focus on cultivating the shift you have experienced, and invite the other states to support the integration. If needed, enroll those new states into the fieldwork process to strengthen the shift.
Over time, and as you access more detailed training, you will learn to identify and work with full sets of nine parts, surfacing the structure of a full self. Restoring the nine-part set of a full self will initiate a more profound experience of dissolving old patterns and opening the door to new ways of being. As you begin to work with full sets like this, give yourself time to approach slowly as you observe the self in action, make sure you have the space to enter and steadily conduct the fieldwork to take you through the shift, and give yourself plenty of time for integration when you have completed.
The Long-Term Journey of Restoration
As you become more familiar with working with sets, you will learn to identify and work with full constellations comprised of three sets. These excursions will be more epic in scope. At the end of working a full constellation, you may experience a period of disorientation as your old ways of being fall away. You will need significant time to become familiar with the new capacities that come forward and to learn how to activate and embody these capacities in the context of your life. Give yourself that time, we’re talking a few months at least for each constellation you undertake.
To give you a little context for the whole journey, my research suggests we have within us 27 such constellations. It is possible we may be even more complex than this. As inhabitants of the modern world, at this time in history, we can be fairly certain that many — if not most — of these have been compromised. Not only that, but the older you are, the more decades of life have been devoted to practicing and deepening the compensations for these compromises, and the more fully the outer shape of our life mirrors and supports these compensations. Healing the whole self requires immense effort and prolonged devotion.
In my own experience, I came upon the central structure of constellations in 2015. Until that time I had worked one-off on nine-part sets starting when I discovered that structure in 2007 or so. Before then my inner work was more haphazard, working with a few states at a time but not able to clearly discern the structures they formed.
Starting in 2015, I spent the next eight years systematically working through all 27 constellations. But while I released the old patterns and restored my access to their natural functioning, my resources and access to community were very limited, and so for many of the restored capacities I did not have much opportunity to complete their integration. I’m still working on that.
What Lies Within, Among, and Around Us All
At the heart of the universal topology underlying all conscious experience is a three-component structure that should inform everything we do. I will be unpacking this in great detail, in ways that make it easy for you to access what I am describing directly in your own experience, in Volumes 2 & 3. For now, let me offer this summary of the three-component structure of the self. Each component is itself comprised of three parts, or modules of conscious experience.
Inside: What is within us, available to be offered outward into the world. The inside parts are anchored by what I call the inside source, a kind of portal located somewhere along the midline core of our body, from which limitless resource in the form of a feeling substance flows, radiates, or otherwise enters the space of our being.
Outside: What is outside of us, available to be received into our being. The outside parts are anchored by what I call the outside source, a kind of portal located outside our body, from which a limitless supply of resource in the form of a feeling substance flowing, radiating, or otherwise entering the space of our being travels into and through our body.
Context: What holds the inside and outside, making possible the relationship between them. The context parts are anchored by what I call the context source, a supply of limitless resource located everywhere inside and around us, extending infinitely in all directions.
The key takeaway here for our current discussion is this. Two thirds of the structure of our being is devoted to what lies outside of us. In order to thrive, we must be fully engaged with others around us, and with the broader context which informs and supports (or constrains) our relationships. In other words, very simply, none of us can fully heal until all of us approach healing.
Establishing Community to Support Our Journeys
One of the biggest challenges of this work is its divergence from dominant cultural norms carried by religion and spirituality, neuroscience and medicine, psychotherapy and healing, and even many of the ascendant modalities such as psychedelic journeying, somatic processing and more. These divergences include:
Psychotopology flips the relationship between concepts and our raw experience of being, placing concepts in service to being rather than fitting being into concepts.
Psychotopology shifts our raw conscious experience of feeling into the foreground as our primary guidance for navigating the experience of our lives, with sensory, somatic, and cognitive experience shifted to the background.
Psychotopology fully trusts and supports the drive toward wholeness inherent in all being, and devotes itself to supporting that natural drive.
Psychotopology supports the wholeness and wisdom inherent within us all, embracing the unique genius and beauty of every individual and supporting an emergent thriving, individually and collectively, as our natural state of being.
Because of these and other divergences from generally-assumed and mostly-unexamined norms, it can be difficult to inhabit the universe of experience opened up by psychotopology when we are surrounded by other people who have not experienced these openings. As I mentioned, fully two-thirds of our being is devoted to hosting and navigating our experiences of others and of the contexts that hold our relationships. When those others and those contexts inhabit the old reality, it can indeed be difficult to hold our new position and honor the aliveness within ourselves. It’s a perplexing conundrum with no easy solution beyond time, patience and creative experimentation.
For this reason, I believe that bringing these new ways of being, these new frameworks and experiences, into the world for ourselves and others requires us to do so in community. And I believe we can get things started right here.
As we become familiar with this new awareness of our inner topology, and as we gain skills in navigating it by ourselves and with others, we can join together in making meaning of our experiences. As we craft new stories and practices that support our new ways of being, these stories and practices can serve as wider containers that can nourish an expanding network of communities supporting thriving all around the world.
For Now, Mapping Is Enough
OK, let me acknowledge that I’ve just taken you on a ridiculously deep dive. I felt it was important to give you a glance at the depth and complexity of what lies within, to make sure you’re not carrying unreasonable expectations. Once we get to Volume 2, I’ll be able to lay this out in a much more substantial way. For now, given the limits of what I am able to provide here in Volume 1, I would like to reassure you that placing fieldwork mapping at the center of your explorations will take you very, very far on its own.
Fieldwork mapping adds a substantial new capacity for highly discerning perception of our inner terrain, and that new capacity enables us to support our growth and healing in many ways. Mapping works beautifully as a complement to many other modalities and practices, and I’ve made sure to provide you with extensive descriptions and instructions for doing so in the first Applications chapter, Enhancing Your Agency for Growth. Check that out for suggestions in applying mapping to everything from therapy to creative arts, from relationship strengthening to spiritual practices.