Gall's Law and the healing arts.

 I found this little bit of commentary on a book thread: 

From these books came the principle known as Gall's Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

This explains why the Obamacare enrollment web sites were such unmitigated disasters. They tried to put together this massive system together from ground zero. Meanwhile, the Amazon order web sites, which started out small and grew over time, easily handle thousands of transactions per hour.

I read that and thought: this is so applicable to healing! Yes! I have to blog about it. 

You need a strong foundation

Foundation. Image here.

So as a recap, Gall's law is basically that complex systems can't just be designed from scratch and work: they have to evolve from simple systems that work. 

In my experience, this is why a lot of times you can't just make a major shift in one session. Sometimes you can, but only when the proper foundation is already there. When you can't make the complete shift, it's because you're missing the crucial simple system at the bottom.

The specific instance that comes to mind here is the issue of addiction. I work with addicts a lot on different issues--remember that EVERYONE is an addict to something, please--but many times there is an eventual relapse. In those cases, the problem is not that the energy work was ineffective; the problem is that it was conducted on a shaky foundation. There are underlying problems that need to be healed first.

Example: I need to be sick.

Sometimes finding the base issue feels like
looking for the bottom turtle when it's
turtles all the way down.

As an example, in my own life, I find that I tend to have the subconscious program running of "I need to be sick." Many times I have pulled it and replaced it with "I can be healthy," and so on, but it tends to come right back!

The problem isn't that I didn't effectively remove the program; the problem is that there was another program underneath it: "I can only rest when I'm sick." So when my body needed rest, it would get sick, and defend that sickness under a new program of "I need to be sick"--because it did believe it needed to be sick, because it needed to rest, and if it could only rest when sick... you get the idea.

So I pulled that program, but both programs still came back, and it was because underlying those programs was a subconscious objection, an assumption that if I could no longer rest when I was sick, I could never rest at all. So that caused a body rebellion. Underneath it all was a desperate need to rest, and a fundamental misunderstanding about when it is appropriate to rest and not rest. Getting to the foundation of the issue allowed the remainder of the healing to happen organically.

Cases of addiction

So many times I work with addicts, and we clear up the trapped emotions associated with their relapses, and we change some belief programming, and things are great for a week or two or four or six, and then there's a relapse. The issue, as Gall's law explains, is that complete emotional and spiritual health--i.e., life without addiction--is too complex of a system to be orchestrated from scratch. It has to be built on a strong base. A strong, simple foundation. 

The trouble with many addictions in particular is that the underlying needs going unmet are very powerful. Kind of like my body getting sick over and over again in an attempt to get the rest it needed. 

Addict brain. Image here.

Addictions are chemical in nature--even if you aren't taking drugs as your addiction, the addictive behavior, whatever it is, causes chemical secretions in the brain and body that make you feel good, and those are the chemicals you are truly addicted to. If your body decides it needs more of those chemicals, you're going to act out: it's your drug.

In the world of addiction recovery, it's often the case that there is a big focus on triggers, and identifying the things that make a person act out. Sometimes it's boredom. Or stress. Or anger. I'm reading a book on nicotine addiction right now--smoking--and the guy listed the triggers of boredom and concentration, stress and relaxation. People act out with all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons and there are lots of triggers. A lot of addiction recovery tends to focus on identifying and then avoiding triggers, but the secret is that the triggers are triggers in the first place because of something deeper. So pulling triggers can help--I used to do that a lot--but a new trigger will form or the old trigger will come back when the underlying issue is not met. 

Say the underlying issue for an addict is a feeling of being not good enough. In moments of boredom or stress, that feeling is triggered and the addict acts out. Pulling boredom or stress as a trigger is not good enough because the underlying issue was never stress or boredom in the first place--those were the external factors that set off the internal factor.

The plot thickens

But it's more complex even than that. So we discover that underneath this theoretical addiction is a feeling of not being good enough. Is it enough to just pull the subconscious programs of "not good enough"? Not necessarily. You can pull those programs, but they can come right back if the thing that caused those programs to be built in the first place is not dealt with. Say the program was caused by an early childhood trauma--Baby Addict was left to cry it out on his first night of life and felt it was because he wasn't good enough to be comforted. Or say the program was caused by a premortal trauma that the addict obviously is very unlikely to remember. Or perhaps the program was caused by a perfect storm of events--in middle school there was a bully AND his mom said something mean AND he failed a class AND his crush didn't like him AND he had acne--and all of those events combined and created--or even just reinforced--the original programming. 

So then, if we pull the program but don't heal the original issue that caused the formation of the belief in the first place, and that original trauma is rekindled for whatever reason, then you can have a reformation of the belief system.

Also important is the influence of unseen powers of darkness--unclean spirits can whisper these things in our ears and get into our minds that way. Clearing past trauma and changing the associated subconscious programming can only go so far if the influence of evil spirits goes unchecked. 

The important thing, though, is that we get to the root of the issue: if the very base of the problem gets resolved, if the foundation of the old system is rocked, the whole system can come falling down. 

When a strong, simple, new foundation is in place, the complex system of a life without addiction (or whatever the problem issue is) can be built on top. 

The best foundation

No discussion of foundations would be complete without a discussion of the best foundation! In the Gospel, we know that we're all supposed to build on the foundation of Jesus Christ: 

Image here.

Helaman 5:1212 And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.

Faith in Christ is in so many ways not just the strongest foundation, but the simplest foundation. Perhaps it is the strongest because it is the simplest. Unshakeable faith in Jesus Christ is the simple system that the complex systems are built around as we progress and become more like God.

Ephesians 4:13
13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:

A complete foundation

I suspect that one of the problems most people face is that their foundation is not just one thing: a person can have a foundation that is partially Christ and partially pride and partially self-loathing. In those cases, it's important to remove everything from the foundation that shouldn't be there. It isn't enough to have some Jesus in your foundation; He has to be the whole thing. Illusions of the ego, like pride and issues of self-worth, cannot be there at all.

Conclusion

Trying to build a fancy new self on a crap foundation is not going to end well. That is what we can learn from Gall's Law. Clearing up deeply ingrained struggles can take a lot of work in order to get to the root issue: the old foundation needs to be cleared before a new one can be put in place. The complex system of a whole new lifestyle can only be built on the simple system of a strong base.