IFS /IFIO Therapy with Martin Linton.

12/11/2025

The Machine and Human: Relational Reflections on the Erosion and Restoration of Self

There is a quiet hum beneath modern life — the sound of servers, data flows, and evidence protocols — an invisible rhythm to which society now keeps time. It is a hum that promises certainty: that the science is clear, the data know best, the machine will decide. But beneath the clinical glow of evidence and efficiency, something subtler is fading. The inner voice — once the compass of human agency — grows faint.

The Cult of Evidence

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) was born in medicine as a beacon of reason, a bulwark against superstition. Yet, as Greenhalgh, Howick and Maskrey (2014) warned in The BMJ, its promise has soured into rigidity. Protocols have multiplied, guidelines ossified, and clinical judgment — once an art — has become bureaucratic compliance. The “movement in crisis,” they called it: a system that mistakes statistical significance for moral authority.

When every decision must be justified by a citation, the clinician’s intuition and the patient’s story lose standing. Allen (2014) argues that evidence hierarchies have become idols of certainty, silencing the messy truth of lived experience. What began as a method to empower professionals to think critically has, paradoxically, externalised their authority. The scientist, the regulator, the algorithmic evidence engine — these become the new oracles.

Rotter (1966) defined locus of control as the degree to which individuals believe outcomes depend on their own actions rather than external forces. In the shadow of the evidence cult, that locus has drifted outward. The clinician obeys the guideline; the client defers to the treatment protocol. The Self — in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) sense of inner leadership — is quietly replaced by adherence.

The Algorithmic Priesthood

If evidence-based practice is the creed, technology is its high church. Alon-Barkat and Busuioc (2023) describe the phenomenon of automation bias: human decision-makers deferring to algorithms even when the data contradict common sense. Public servants, doctors, and judges begin to trust the machine more than themselves. The hum grows louder.

Automation bias is not just a cognitive glitch — it is a spiritual displacement. When code becomes the arbiter of truth, human agency is dislodged from its own centre. Studies show that individuals prefer algorithmic decision-makers over human ones in redistribution tasks (Ruled by Robots, 2024). The algorithm, unburdened by empathy or fatigue, feels safer, cleaner. Yet this safety is sterile.

The German philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2017) called this psychopolitics: a society where control no longer needs force, because individuals willingly surrender their freedom to systems that promise optimisation. The result is a subtler tyranny — one not of ideology, but of efficiency.

The Mirror Stage of Culture

While machines decide, humans perform. Social media, the grand theatre of external validation, trains its users to seek reflection rather than substance. Meta-analyses reveal a consistent link between social networking and narcissism (Gnambs and Appel, 2017). Grandiose traits correlate with frequency of selfies, number of followers, and time spent online (McCain and Campbell, 2018).

In the flicker of the screen, the self becomes a commodity. The number of hearts and thumbs becomes the metric of worth. This is a new mirror stage — not the infant’s first recognition of self, but culture’s collective loss of it. Turkle (2011) writes of people “alone together,” tethered to devices that simulate connection while eroding intimacy.

Empathy, too, shows statistical decline. Konrath, O’Brien and Hsing (2011) found that American college students’ empathy scores dropped 40 percent between 1979 and 2009, with the steepest fall after 2000 — the dawn of the digital age. As empathy wanes, performative selfhood expands. The more we curate ourselves for others, the less we inhabit ourselves for real.

Sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman (2000) call this liquid modernity: a culture where identities are constantly updated but never rooted. Hartmut Rosa (2019) describes it as social acceleration, where relationships, careers, and even emotions must match the speed of data. The faster we move, the less we feel.

The Exile of Intuition and the Erosion of Artistry

If modern technocratic culture exiles intuition, it is because intuition resists capture. It cannot be codified into evidence hierarchies or digitised into datasets; it speaks in symbol, metaphor, and embodied knowing. In this sense, intuition is subversive — the last frontier of internal locus in a world colonised by external validation.

The arts, long humanity’s laboratory of inner truth, suffer a similar exile. Artistic substance — the capacity to perceive beauty, ambiguity, and contradiction — withers in a climate obsessed with measurable outcomes. The decline of aesthetic education mirrors the decline of empathy (Konrath et al., 2011). Both are casualties of a culture that rewards replication over reflection.

This exile is not accidental; it is systemic. The logic of control — once military, then bureaucratic — now permeates the psyche. To feel deeply is inefficient; to question data is heresy. The Self becomes the machine’s missing variable, and the human imagination its collateral damage.

The Mechanisation of Morality

Underneath these trends is a quiet moral deformation. When metrics replace meaning, the moral imagination atrophies. Science becomes not a method but an orthodoxy; technology not a tool but an ontology. The human being is subtly re-engineered as a data point — efficient, measurable, and replaceable.

This mechanisation is not a return to fascism but a new species of authoritarianism — one of systems rather than slogans. It requires no violence, only compliance. Han (2017) observes that in the neoliberal era, individuals exploit themselves under the illusion of freedom: “The subject of achievement is faster and more productive than the subject of obedience.” The result is a populace that self-surveils, self-optimises, self-brands — all in service of invisible algorithms.

Narcissism here is not merely vanity; it is survival. To be visible is to exist. The social ego becomes a digital construct constantly recalibrated by feedback loops. Yet, as Twenge et al. (2008) showed, rising narcissism correlates with fragility, entitlement, and declining interpersonal trust. The culture that worships the self paradoxically erodes it.

Schismogenesis: People of the Head and People of the Heart

Gregory Bateson (1935) used the term schismogenesis to describe self-reinforcing divisions between social groups — a spiral of differentiation where each side defines itself in opposition to the other. In contemporary culture, this manifests as a polarisation between People of the Head and People of the Heart.

The People of the Head are rational, data-driven, and technocratic. They value measurement, logic, and control. Efficiency is their ethic; clarity, their aesthetic. Their world is precise but often cold.

The People of the Heart, by contrast, are intuitive, relational, and humanistic. They trust empathy, story, and presence. Meaning is discovered in resonance, not replication. Their world is messy, uncertain, but alive.

Once in dynamic tension, these currents now amplify each other in schismogenesis. The Head sees the Heart as naïve; the Heart sees the Head as soulless. Polarisation is reinforced at individual and collective levels, echoing the internal fragmentation each therapy seeks to resolve. Rosa (2019) notes that social acceleration exacerbates this divide: “The faster the world spins, the less we can hear each other.” Each side hardens in response to the other, mirroring the splitting of internal parts.

Yet integration remains possible. The head without the heart becomes tyrannical; the heart without the head becomes lost. Systemic dialogue and relational presence offer pathways for bridging this divide, both in individuals and in culture.

The Return of the Self

Against this mechanised and polarised tide, Internal Family Systems (IFS) offers a counter-current — not as nostalgia but as rebalancing. As Schwartz (2021) writes, IFS assumes inherent wisdom within rather than instruction without. It restores what technocracy denies — the possibility that truth arises from presence, not protocol.

In IFS, the Self is embodied awareness marked by curiosity, compassion, calm, and clarity. It does not dominate parts but listens to them. This act of inner listening contrasts sharply with a world that demands performance and compliance. IFS makes explicit what person-centred therapy (Rogers) always implied — that healing emerges not from external expertise but from relational authenticity.

Systemic practice aligns with this ethos. It is not reducible to evidence-based orthodoxy but guided by process ethics — valuing responsiveness, dialogue, and context over prescription. As Varela (1992) proposed in ethical know-how, true ethics arises not from rules but from embodied awareness within relationships. Listening to the human, in this sense, is more important than enforcing what humans have created to control humans.

Where EBP codifies knowledge, systemic ethics re-humanises it. Where the algorithm optimises, the therapist attunes. Each act of presence, each moment of curiosity, becomes a small rebellion against the grand narrative of control and polarisation.

Epilogue: The Fading Hum

The hum persists, steady as breath — servers spinning, algorithms learning, guidelines updating. But somewhere beneath it, another sound waits to be heard: the pulse of the inner voice, quiet but insistent. It is the voice that says: I am not my metrics. I am not my protocol. I am not the reflection in the glass.

Whether we listen may decide not only the future of psychotherapy but of personhood itself. For the machines do not demand our souls; we volunteer them — each time we trade inner knowing for external proof, each time we measure our worth by data.

The question is not whether the machine will think like us, but whether we will remember how to feel like ourselves.

⸻

References

Alon-Barkat, S. & Busuioc, M. (2023) ‘Human–AI Interactions in Public Sector Decision Making: “Automation Bias” and “Selective Adherence” to Algorithmic Advice’, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 33(1), pp. 153–169.
Allen, P. (2014) ‘Is evidence-based public health in crisis?’, European Journal of Public Health, 24(6), pp. 874–876.
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bateson, G. (1935) Culture and Schismogenesis. [Manuscript].
Greenhalgh, T., Howick, J. & Maskrey, N. (2014) ‘Evidence based medicine: a movement in crisis?’, BMJ, 348, g3725.
Gnambs, T. & Appel, M. (2017) ‘Narcissism and Social Networking Behavior: A Meta-Analysis’, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 6(4), pp. 386–399.
Han, B.-C. (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Power. London: Verso.
Konrath, S., O’Brien, E. & Hsing, C. (2011) ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(2), pp. 180–198.
McCain, J. L. & Campbell, W. K. (2018) ‘Narcissism and Social Media Use: A Meta-Analytic Review’, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 7(3), pp. 308–327.
Rotter, J. B. (1966) ‘Generalized Expectancies for Internal versus External Control of Reinforcement’, Psychological Monographs, 80(1), pp. 1–28.
Rosa, H. (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021) No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Turkle, S. (2011) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.
Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K. & Bushman, B. J. (2008) ‘Egos Inflating Over Time: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory’, Journal of Personality, 76(4), pp. 875–902.
Varela, F. J. (1992) Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

11/11/2025

Introverts are more oriented to the internal systems - Intra-relationally tuned.
Extroverts are more tuned to the inter relational domain.
Which one serves “internal” family systems?
Inter / Intra parts balance.

10/11/2025

[Article]: A response to The Cut’s article]…

Are You as a Therapist Here — and Attached More to the Person or a Scientifically Proven Script?

Reclaiming Presence, Mystery, and Safe Uncertainty in an Age of Manualised Therapy

⸻

Abstract

Therapists today are increasingly expected to deliver “evidence-based” treatments through replicable protocols. While this movement has advanced accountability, it risks replacing relational presence with procedural certainty. This paper explores how therapeutic effectiveness depends on qualities often excluded from manualised systems — presence, tolerance of uncertainty, and openness to creative emergence. Drawing on Barry Mason’s concept of safe uncertainty and empirical work in humanistic, systemic, and mindfulness-based traditions, we argue for a “middle way” that honours both scientific integrity and the irreducible mystery of human change.

We also interrogate the socio-political dimensions of “gold-standard” therapies, noting that they are typically government-funded and shaped by broader economic structures — the same systems that license harmful industrial practices as solutions in other domains. Approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS), which are largely self-funded and independent of state or pharmaceutical backing, remain relationally authentic and principle-driven. Therapy is not neutral; reclaiming relational presence is both a clinical necessity and a subtle act of systemic resistance.

⸻

1. The Central Question: Presence or Protocol?

The modern therapist faces an ethical and relational dilemma: Am I here with the person — or with the script and its pragmatic effect?

Manualised therapies have advanced standardisation and research rigour, but they also risk constraining responsiveness and devaluing the relational encounter. Carl Rogers (1961) warned that overcontrol “cuts the taproot of therapy’s vitality.” Likewise, Barry Mason (1993) urged practitioners to move toward safe uncertainty — a state of grounded openness in which structure provides safety, but not rigidity.

Are we empowering balanced autonomy, or exerting power over it? What makes the difference to health: a reductionist runaway logic, or logic deeply connected to humanism?

In Mason’s terms, safe certainty (rigid attachment to methods) inhibits exploration, while unsafe uncertainty (chaotic uncontainment) breeds confusion. The therapeutic task is to occupy safe uncertainty: a relational stance that is both anchored and curious, structured and flexible, informed by science yet guided by presence.

⸻

2. Mystery and the Therapeutic Encounter

2.1. The Value of the Unknown

Empirical work across psychotherapy and medicine shows that tolerance of uncertainty is linked to better professional adaptability, creativity, and emotional resilience (Hillen et al., 2017). Therapists who can remain with the unknown — rather than rushing toward premature closure — help clients explore deeper emotional and existential truths.

Questions become suspicious when practitioners hesitate to go to emotional places unless guided by the force of protocol. It is not their ability that is lacking, but the freedom to use it. Why can they not be with the client?

The unknown is not a clinical threat but a creative field where new meanings emerge. Winnicott (1965) called this the “potential space” — a relational zone between safety and risk where play, discovery, and selfhood unfold. Mason’s safe uncertainty operationalises this space, calling therapists to practice their own emotional capacities in order to join a client beyond any technique or tool.

2.2. Creativity and Innovative Moments

Narrative process studies describe “innovative moments” — spontaneous departures from a client’s problem-saturated story — as reliable markers of change (Gonçalves et al., 2008). These moments cannot be pre-scripted; they arise through mutual attunement and genuine, deeply felt curiosity. Research on creativity and wellbeing (Mansfield et al., 2024) shows that flexible, exploratory engagement predicts greater psychological integration and meaning.

Human-to-human interaction matters more than human-to-script interaction, which the therapist can overly attach to.

2.3. Presence and Mindfulness

Mindfulness and compassion-based interventions (Kabat-Zinn, 2015; Garland et al., 2015) reinforce that transformation arises from awareness and acceptance, not control. The mindful stance is an experiential form of safe uncertainty — attending with openness and non-judgment to what unfolds, rather than imposing predefined interpretations on a person.

⸻

3. When Manuals Become Attachments

3.1. Manualisation and the Loss of Responsiveness

Meta-analytic reviews (Forbat et al., 2015) note that rigid adherence to manuals can weaken the therapeutic alliance by reducing moment-to-moment responsiveness. Therapists describe tension between “doing the manual” and “being with the client.”

3.2. The Power Dimension of Certainty

Institutional reliance on manualised approaches reflects not only scientific preference but systems of power. When “evidence-based” becomes synonymous with “manualised,” relational, cultural, and systemic ways of knowing are marginalised (Harper & Moss, 2003). Mason’s systemic vision challenges this by placing dialogue, co-construction, and uncertainty at the centre of professional ethics — decentralising expertise and empowering clients’ beneficial autonomies.

3.3. The Paradox of Safety

Certainty gives therapists a sense of competence and safety. Yet overattachment to procedural safety can serve as a defence against relational vulnerability. In contrast, safe uncertainty invites humility: the therapist holds a coherent framework but allows the process — and the client — to lead over an externalized standard.

3.4. The Political Economy of “Gold Standards” and the Authenticity of IFS

Gold-standard therapies are often government-funded and regulated, shaped by broader economic and political interests. The same authorities that license harmful industrial foods as solutions also define which therapies are legitimate. “Evidence-based” does not purely reflect neutral science; it reflects what is institutionally convenient, scalable, and economically manageable.

By contrast, Internal Family Systems (IFS) is largely self-funded. Training and dissemination rely on practitioner initiative rather than state or pharmaceutical support. This independence contributes to higher costs, but it also fosters authenticity: IFS remains relationally grounded, principle-driven, and less subject to market or institutional pressures. Its very structure — cultivating a Self that is both safe and open to uncertainty — makes it inherently resistant to co-optation.

The clarity that Self-process brings can shatter social illusions, exposing systemic forces that maintain harmful norms. Therapy, like nutrition or public health, can otherwise become a technical fix for systemic dysfunction, helping individuals adapt rather than addressing structural or relational causes of suffering. IFS exemplifies a model that protects relational depth, presence, and creative exploration precisely because it avoids reliance on external validation. Reclaiming presence, curiosity, and relational depth is therefore both a clinical necessity and a subtle act of systemic resistance.

⸻

4. The Middle Way: Safe Uncertainty as Evidence-Informed Practice

4.1. Mechanistic Convergence Across Traditions

IFS, person-centred, and mindfulness-based approaches share core mechanisms validated by research: empathy, presence, self-compassion, and decentering (Elliott et al., 2021; Garland et al., 2015). IFS operationalises safe uncertainty internally — cultivating a Self that is grounded (safe) and open (uncertain) toward its parts. This convergence suggests that openness and curiosity are empirically supported across frameworks.

4.2. Principle-Based Fidelity

Rather than rigid adherence to steps, therapists can uphold fidelity to principles — compassion, curiosity, coherence, and responsiveness. Principle-based fidelity (Elliott & Greenberg, 2021) maintains scientific legitimacy while protecting the artistry of the therapeutic encounter.

4.3. Expanding the Evidence Paradigm

Pluralistic research methods — mixed-methods, qualitative inquiry, and practice-based data — offer ways to study safe uncertainty empirically. They respect the co-created, contextual nature of therapy while generating generalisable knowledge grounded in process ethics.

⸻

5. Conclusion: Returning to Safe Presence

Mason’s (1993) safe uncertainty offers a moral and methodological compass for modern therapy. It invites us to stand between knowledge and not-knowing, between fidelity and freedom — trusting that growth occurs when both therapist and client step into the uncertain together.

Therapists must continually ask: Am I here with the person, or attached to a pre-set script?
Am I attached to humanism or socialised narratives?
If our attachment lies in manualised coherence, we risk reducing therapeutic power to institutional convenience — losing the living encounter and the fluidity of being human. If it lies in the person, within a framework of safe uncertainty, we reclaim therapy as a relational, creative, and scientifically honourable act of living presence.

⸻

Key References
• Mason, B. (1993). Towards positions of safe uncertainty. Human Systems: The Journal of Systemic Consultation and Management, 4, 189–200.
• Elliott, R., et al. (2021). Research on Humanistic-Experiential Psychotherapies: Updated Review and Meta-Analysis. Psychotherapy, 58(4).
• Forbat, L., et al. (2015). What Clinicians Think of Manualised Psychotherapy: A Systematic Review. Journal of Clinical Psychology.
• Garland, E. L., Farb, N. A., Goldin, P. R., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2015). Mindfulness Broadens Awareness and Builds Meaning. Psychological Science.
• Gonçalves, M. M., Matos, M., & Santos, L. (2008). Innovative Moments and Change in Narrative Therapy. Psychotherapy Research.
• Hillen, M. A., et al. (2017). Tolerance of Uncertainty: A Review and Integrative Model. Patient Education and Counseling.
• Mansfield, L., et al. (2024). Creativity and Pathways to Wellbeing: A Scoping Review. BMC Public Health.
• Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.
• Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. Hogarth Press.
• Harper, D., & Moss, D. (2003). Deconstructing Evidence-Based Practice: Systemic Considerations. Journal of Family Therapy, 25(4).

10/11/2025

The stronger you hold a prejudice against another, that formation shadows another part of you that makes you feel incomplete.

09/11/2025

What part of your….

Harvard Neuroscientist DR. JILL BOLTE TAYLOR reveals How to Retrain Your Brain, Heal Trauma, Control Emotions, and Unlock the 4 Characters Running Your Mind....

07/11/2025

IFS is a systemic therapy that works and that is dangerous to the machine of control and sales of drugs because IFS does not need drugs to be effective.
Billy Hardy spoke a lot for this 👍🏼

A long history of the medical / biological tribe trampling the psycho spiritual camps and retreats.
Books, papers and articles have been published if you search and dig under the sugar coated surface of the so called gold standard…

Podcast Episode · back from the borderline · 04/11/2025 · 1h 26m

07/11/2025

Humans made a scientific study - humans have science or does science have humans?
Is science the new church of control ???
The ego attaches to scripts of complexity and rejects the simplicity of nature.
There has been a long history that this pattern where the machine tramples the humanistic practices that actually do work and without the sales of drugs.
IFS is dangerous to those systems.

Could it be that we’ve gone too far in stripping the spirit and soul out of therapy and have created a new altar of empirical science at which to worship?

06/11/2025

The systemic and humanistic world has always been at odds with the machine power of governance and lineal projection. It’s been written about for a long time and I have been warning this to be on the horizon.

Internal Family Systems is a widely popular trauma treatment. Some patients say it’s destroyed their lives.

06/11/2025

When you realize you are the courage, curiosity, wider and wiser nature that holds the wounds, trauma, and shame, you, the energy auto-heals them and by default of chain reaction the harsh critical thinking dissolves.