Meta-model Overview, Part 3: Personal Unity

0:14The Catholic Christian metamodel of the person provides a vision of the person, family, and society for the work of the human social and behavioral sciences in general and for the helping professions in particular. As a metamodel, it offers a large basic philosophical and faith based theological frame of thought and action. It works at the level of a living tradition or worldview and value system. We presume that the best assessment and treatment will come out of the most accurate and robust understanding of the human person and family. Each human being is a personal unity. What is the benefit of affirming that each person is a personal unity seeking greater wholeness? This principle helps to identify the personal wholeness and identity of each client.

1:00In particular, it invites the helping professional to become aware of the strengths and struggles that ensue from partaking in the diverse gifts, cultures, religious practices, spiritualities, and family histories that shape the lives of each of his or her clients. The affirmation of being a whole person adds a dimension of ethical norms, including, but above, professional norms. In clinical practice, the concept of personal unity keeps us from jumping to any one particular facet of the person as the problem or solution. Personal unity brings us back to the need for this very comprehensive understanding of the individual or individuals in front of us. Without a firm grasp of the person's neurobiological makeup and temperament expressed through their intrapsychic, interpersonal, and broader social, cultural, and spiritual life and their narrative of moving towards greater wholeness, we cannot fully understand nor effectively help our clients.

2:04In addition, personal unity entails consideration of four functional dimensions of each person, sensory perceptual, emotional, rational, and volitional or free. Let's turn our focus to these four areas of the meta model now. Demon person is sensory perceptual. Our bodies are fully personal, and our persons are fully embodied. This affirmation holds in a nonexclusive way for the capacities of sensation and perception that enable humans to take interest in and interact with other people and the world. What are the benefits of recognizing that a person is sensory perceptual? Each person is normally in contact with the world and other persons through their senses and perceptions and imagination.

2:54When there are difficulties or obstructions in interpreting and interacting with the world for biochemical and neurological reasons. For example, individuals may suffer unintentional isolation and disorientation and may need the intervention of helping professionals. Understanding how a client experiences and perceives their sensory world is critical in understanding their life narrative and how they are functioning and responding now. An individual whose different sensory perceptual receptors have become under or over aroused, more precisely hypo or hyper aroused through neurodevelopmental difficulties, perhaps medical conditions, or even trauma may appear to respond in unusual ways to typical situations, while in fact, they are responding in a very human normal way given their sensory perceptual realities.

3:53The person is emotional. The human person is emotional both in common and unique ways because of his or her spiritual body soul unity. What are the implications of affirming that the person is emotional? The helping professional will learn a great deal by recognizing how clients experience and moderate their affects in personal and unique ways. Emotions influence one's intellectual, moral, and spiritual interactions and interpersonal relationships. For example, feeling anxious can affect the way that the client interacts with his spouse and children. Conversely, emotions are influenced by one's reason and will, as well as one's interpersonal relations and spiritual life. For example, a client's cognitive capacities to face dangers, motivations to focus on goals, and secure interpersonal attachments can serve in calming anxiety that occurs in a threatening situation.

4:48Perhaps the most important clinical implication with regard to emotions is the Catholic Christian meta model vision of emotions as created fundamentally good to move us towards others, to motivate our inclinations for good, and to be an early alert system to keep us from harm. The clinical goal with emotions is not to stop emotions or even necessarily to control them, but to understand emotions, become friends with them, and ally with them for the client's good. For example, a couple's emotions of anger and fear can be normal, typical responses in protecting their sense of vulnerability and intimacy, an early alert system. But these feelings can move them to think that they must hate each other if that's how they're feeling.

5:40However, usually, the couple has a deep love and desire to know each other. And as they move to deeper intimacy, this can connect them with earlier intimacy wounds with distressed emotional associations. This early alert system is saying, slow down. You love this person, but it feels scary because of past hurts. Helping a couple in that way can have a profound impact on their relationship. The human person is rational. Humans have pre rational and rational cognitions to know and understand people, make sense of the world around us, appreciate wisdom, and create beauty. What are the implications of appreciating the rationality of the human person? Reasons can help people to understand life as it really is, which is a goal of good mental health.

6:30On the contrary, distorted cognitions about life may be a sign or result of poor mental health. The cognitive and neurosciences have become powerful tools for understanding the person, but they need to be integrated into the larger frame of the person, family, and community in the search for counsel, understanding, and wisdom. The capacity of humans to think, analyze, and make decisions is quite amazing. This becomes a great resource in counseling for both the counselor and the client. However, the key danger of this great capacity within counseling is to believe that thinking is the primary problem and solution for clients and the primary technique for counselors. Being, relating, and doing are equally important and often bring about more healing than just thinking or bringing about changes in thinking.

7:25Man is volitional and free. To a large degree, we are capable of free and responsible action in the world. Because we have the freedom to choose and create, we can be considered moral agents. What are the benefits of an integrated vision of volition and free will? Growth and healing inevitably require the choice to move freely towards the proper goals of life. That is imagining a future and acting in innovative and responsible ways. Because we are free and have rational capacity, we can contribute to our own growth, healing, and flourishing. The capacity for freely chosen goals gives hope for change, for example. Change that can correct the past with one's spouse, engage the present with one's children, and approach the future with the family.

8:13The primary clinical implication that clients are free and have rational capacity is that telling clients what to do, imposing our will and values upon them is to negate this primary belief and value of our Catholic Christian vision of the flourishing person. We are called to understand, to walk alongside, to collaborate in the development of treatment plans and interventions, and to help expand their capacity to freely choose. To a large degree, this requires faith in our clients and in the process of clinical work that we believe we are called to do. These principles can help to recall the frame of flourishing and foster an experiential encounter with the client understood by the helping professional as sharing a common humanity and dignity, being a unique person, and being a mystery to meet and discover.