The Prochaska Cycle of Change was developed in the field of cognitive behaviour and is used in areas such as nursing and criminal justice to effect behavioural changes in people. This proposes a cycle with the phases of pre-contemplation, contemplation, determination, action and maintenance. The Holling Adaptive Cycle was developed from research into ecological systems and is also used in such areas as financial and organizational systems. This model proposes a cycle of exploitation, conservation, release and re-organization. This paper attempts to map the two cycles on top of each other and explore how this mapping might provide useful metaphors, enhance our understanding of both cycles and provide useful tools for offenders to understand their behaviour. Resilience is a central concept of the Adaptive Cycle and in work with offenders. Just as building resilience helps natural and organizational systems to be adaptive, so too will it assist offenders to gain appropriate governance over themselves and avoid falling back into further offending.
Dominance-based hierarchies have been taken for granted as the way we structure our organizations, but they are a part of a paradigm that has put our whole existence in peril. There is an urgent need to explore alternative paradigms that take us away from dystopic futures towards preferred, life enhancing paradigms based on wellbeing. One of the alternative ways of organizing ourselves that avoids much of the structural violence of existing organizations is the acephalous group (operating without any structured, ongoing leadership). Decision making becomes distributed, transitory and self-selecting. Such groups are not always appropriate and have their strengths and weaknesses, but they can be a more effective, humane way of organizing ourselves and can open windows to new ways of being. Acephalous groups operate at many different scales and adapt their structure accordingly. For this reason, a comparison of small, medium and large-scale acephalous groups reveals some of the dynamics involved in acephalous functioning and provides a useful overview of these emergent forms of organization and foreshadows the role they may play in future.
The models, concepts, and theories commonly used in family violence programme work tend to only employ one perspective. Approaches like CBT, DBT, wise mind, transactional analysis and mindfulness focus on the mind. Many tools like Time Out, Karpman’s Triangle, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Duluth Wheels aim at the relationships level of social interaction, while others focus on wider social issues like the Social Atom, the Man Box, and theories of Colonialisation. There is generally a lack of body-based approaches. Individual pieces of a jigsaw have value but become much more powerful when the wider connections and relationships are revealed.
In contrast, Te Whare Tapa Wha provides an excellent indigenous overview of human nature using the metaphor of a house with four interlocking walls to describe tinana, hinengaro, whanau, and wairua. Gregg Henriques’ Unified Theory of Knowledge describes human life as the optimised management of flows of matter, energy, and information operating simultaneously through nested layers of matter, life, mind, culture, and spirit that harmonise with Te Whare Tapa Wha. Each level arises out of and is dependent on the previous layer. The layers are said to rhyme because although there are clear differences, similarities resonate through the whole evolutionary tree. When flows are impeded, or boundaries invaded, abuse and violence results.
This paper attempts to integrate the model and concepts into a coherent practical form that clients can more easily relate to. They were developed through countless hours of exploration with both 1-1 and group clients.
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