A Psychology of Anomaly

Living Heart Intelligence incorporates what could be called a psychology of anomalies. Science in the modern period, in pursuit of the illusory dream of a purely "objective" analysis of reality, has developed a debilitating allergy to anomalies. While this makes sense in some contexts (namely, research concerned solely with inanimate systems such as machines, buildings, bridges, and appliances), it ironically results in a profoundly non-objective perspective on living phenomena, including human experience. In other words, to neglect anomalies in the study of human life is to bring a highly biased and ontologically inaccurate perspective to the phenomena in question. This is because in living systems, and especially in modern and contemporary human life, anomalies are a fundamental, irreducible, and constitutive aspect of anything that occurs as, for, or through living beings.

Most psychological research looks for universal aspects of human life, mind, and cognition. It looks for trends, constants, repeating patterns, and the like, and then asks how and why individuals or groups deviate from this so-called "normal" behavior or function, defined as that which can be reliably predicted to occur in the same or similar fashion across differing contexts. Lurking in this ideology is a profound irony, however: research itself has revealed that one of the most important constants in human experience is the occurrence of anomalies, which is to say things that aren't constant!

Many lay people, and scholars alike, have noticed and commented on this throughout history. The phenomenon has been sloganized in sayings such as "change is the only constant." Oh geez...if only it were so simple! I won't go into the full detail of the many, complex ontological technicalities here. (If you're interested in that, I wrote about this in my PhD dissertation, accessible for free here.) I merely want to highlight the fact that to accurately study and understand human experience requires diligent attention to anomalies, not as pesky complications that undermine one's attempt to determine abstract, "objective," universal, predictable analyses of life (such as the weird construct of "laws of behavior" that supposedly describe human experience the way that the laws of aerodynamics describe the physical elements of ), but as vitally important factors that help to reveal the true nature of life.

Practically speaking, what does this mean? This means that, in my work with Living Heart Intelligence, I do not reduce or extrapolate your unique, individual experience to fit contrived psychological theories or abstract statistical models made up by academics and other researchers who gather data from isolated lab environments and other artificial contexts and then formulate self-claimed authoritative pronouncements about the universal nature of human experience, cognition, emotion, or whatever. Instead, I center your experience in its irreducible uniqueness and strategically reference theories and studies in the event that such research might help inform an appreciation of your total experience, anomalies and all. All your quirks, oddities, spontaneity, differences, weirdness, preferences, questions, beliefs, doubts, uncertainties, hopes, fears, and life experiences are welcomed. And, not only are these aspects of your uniqueness welcomed, they are embraced and seized upon as vital clues and means of better understanding the complex of events that is your life and how to optimize your experience in whatever ways currently call to you. At our core, we are irreducibly unique, dynamic, and constantly changing.

We are all anomalous, to some degree, and this must be respected as a fundamental component of what it means to really be alive, even as we recognize our unavoidable entanglement in social systems and ecologies that themselves cannot be reduced to their individual parts. The complexities here have, and forever will, evade neat and comprehensive description by abstract, "objective" theories of psychology and sociology that have no room for the ineffable dynamics of life that, by definition, cannot be codified in abstract concepts and quantitative analyses. The qualitative, poetic, narrative, imaginative, relational, mystical, spiritual, communal, creative, and explorative dimensions of life are the ontological nutrients that feed and sustain a rich experiential soil of a life worth living and sharing. Living Heart Intelligence is all about more fulling embracing these dynamics, not neglecting or repressing them in the vain pursuit of a mechanical, rigid "normality" that conforms to whatever contingent values are promoted by the mainstream of any given society at any given time.