What is Attuned Systemic Repair?
We believe that while there is an infinite variety of personalities and contexts, human beings have fundamental needs and longings. These needs and longings are often expressed through the way we feel. When we get what we need or long for, we feel good. When we don’t, we feel distressed. Our feelings look to us for leadership and to others for understanding, compassion, and connection. ASR works both internally and relationally and addresses both cognitive and emotional issues.
The secret sauce of ASR is in our method of attunement. Attunement prevents stigmatization of clients as the therapist is able to connect to the felt experience of the issue and make sense of why existing strategies exist. Rather than engage in a strict protocol of engagement, ASR works in a seamless intuitive process. Or as we say, ASR is client lead and therapist directed.
ASR is the first therapeutic approach that integrates core principles commonly found in modern therapeutic approaches and integrates them into a seamless, intuitive process. ASR organizes these principles across five specific domains, referred to as the 5 Moves. ASR allows the therapist to work within the appropriate domain as needed throughout the course of therapy.
What CORE PRINCIPLES DOES ASR integratE?
INTERPERSONAL NEUROBIOLOGY
Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) explores how brain function and relational experiences intersect to shape human behavior and emotional well-being. Both individual and relational aspects of humans are recursive, one influencing the other. ASR leverages how our brains and bodies are wired to respond which helps us facilitate deeper change faster.
Multiplicity theory
The brain links aspects of our experiences into a neural construct. These aspects include the memory, feeling, self-state, and constructed meaning at the time of formation . When these neural constructs activate, they influence much of how we interpret and engage our lives. ASR restructures the internal relationship between the Self and distressed constructs by engaging the associated feeling to facilitate healing and repair within oneself and with external relationships.
Meanings drive behaviors
Humans are wired to make sense of their experiences. These constructed meanings then inform how we make decisions and engage our life. Behavioral therapies have long leveraged this principle. If you can change the thought, you can change the behavior. ASR leverages this principle to help clients construct more adaptive meanings without sacrificing the deeper experiential aspects of clients’ experience.
Securing relational connections
Humans have many relational systems. While most attachment based approaches tend to focus on intimate partner relationships, ASR works in every relational context. ASR uses its unique assessment process to effect change in relationships through an evolving process that adapts to the willingness and capacity of the parties involved, whether they are present in the room or not. Interaction strategies are designed to facilitate increased relational security, which then reciprocally assist clients to engage and lead themselves.
Whole brain integration
Where most modalities are generally either cognitive or emotional (affective) focused, modern approaches have found bilateral hemispheric regulation and integration significantly contributes to healing and healthy functioning. ASR utilizes cognitive and affective interventions adaptively to clients’ evolving experience in each moment.
What makes ASR Different from other models?
It’s a question we get a lot! ASR is not a blend of other modalities any more than one car is the same as another by a different maker. While they are both cars, the way they are put together make them uniquely different. Other approaches have structured approaches that are focused on a core principle of human functioning. ASR also leverages these core principles but is not limited to one or two.
By integrating five different core principles, ASR is able to accomplish more with one approach. With ASR, therapists do not need to spend countless hours and thousands of dollars learning multiple approaches to ensure they can address these core principles.
In addition to this, ASR has a unique approach not found in other modalities. Our method of attunement leverages the relationship between the therapist and the client in a profound way. Interventions within ASR are also unique to us and not found in other approaches.
The Science Behind ASR
Because ASR leverages core principles found in other modalities, all research validating these principles naturally validates ASR. In addition, ASR is multi-disciplinary as it pulls significantly from research in neuroscience and neurobiology; attachment science; developmental, cognitive, affective, and behavioral psychology; sociology; and ecology.
Significant researchers and authors ASR draws from include Dan Siegel, Allan Schore, Stephen Porges, James Coan, Richard Erskine, Paul Ekman, Philip Bromberg, Marco Iacoboni, and more.
Research on ASR as a unique approach is active and evolving. Aron Strong has partnered Dr. Jennifer White Van Boxel at Northwestern University to complete research on ASR and other research related to systemic interventions for complex trauma.
About Aron Strong, Creator of Attuned Systemic Repair
Aron noticed the recursive dynamic between people’s distress and the quality of their relationships. Researching why this was lead him to interpersonal neurobiology. The more he read about the interplay between individuals internal experiences and their relational interactions, the more he sought solutions that could seamlessly address both domains.
Over time, he grew frustrated at the limitations of modern approaches to address both of these needs. While effective at one thing or another, each was niched into a specific psychological principle. None were able to address all the aspects his clients needed.
Investigating interpersonal neurobiology also lead him to change the way he interacted with his clients. He challenged himself to connect as deeply as possible with his clients to understand them from the inside out rather from an external intellectual framework. Within an attuned posture, he began to explore how to integrate universal core principles into a cohesive framework.
Framing the core principles into 5 specific domains of therapy, he found he was able to move in and between them in an intuitive, responsive way. This allowed clients to feel a greater sense of security and connection in the therapeutic relationship, better engage with their distress, increase their self-compassion and self-leadership, and discover relational strategies that increased their sense of confidence and security in their relationships.
Aron Strong is the founder and owner of Pathways Counseling in Middle Tennessee, and is the co-founder of inRelationship, a company focused on helping professionals and the public grow and develop their relational and therapeutic skills.
Aron is a regionally recognized speaker, trainer, author, and supervisor. He is engaged in research related to ASR and other therapy-related issues.
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