Mindful Flow in Clinical Contexts: Applying the Archetypal Spiral

Part 1

This blog maps out how the Archetypal Spiral Model can relate to different psychological problems/presentations and in the context of psychotherapy. This is part 1 - covering Depression, Generalised Anxiety and Trauma.

For context on the Archetypal Spiral model. or framework, that we apply in this blog, please see previous blogs, such as The Spiral of Connection & Disconnection: Archetypes, Values, and the Journey Towards Wholeness and Mindful Flow - Utilising the Archetypal Spiral Model

You can also see and explore the interactive representation of the model here.

1.  Depression - The Collapse of Courage and the Shadow of Love

Within the Spiral framework, depression represents not merely a neurochemical or cognitive state but a systemic collapse in the organism's movement toward life - a breakdown in the oscillation between connection and disconnection. When Truth (awareness of suffering) becomes unbearable and is no longer balanced by Courage (movement) or Love (compassion and connection), consciousness contracts into paralysis. The psyche, overwhelmed by grief, loss, or chronic invalidation, turns into self-pity and withdrwal - a form of protective hibernation that once ensured survival but now perpetuates stasis.

From an evolutionary perspective, this can be understood through Life History Theory as an involuntary defeat response (Price, Sloman, Gilbert, & Gardner, 1994): a biological program that conserves energy when the system perceives that effort cannot change the environment. Yet, in psychological life, this adaptive submission becomes unhelpful when it locks awareness into helplessness. The self is not so much "depressed" as it is arrested - stuck between the truth of pain and the fear of re-engagement.

Within the Drama Triangle, depression manifests as a collapse into the Victim role - not as manipulation but as genuine paralysis. The inner Persecutor turns inward with vicious self-criticism ("I'm worthless"), while the Rescuer - whether internal or external - tries to fix the pain through premature positivity or avoidance. The depressed individual oscillates between these positions internally: attacking the self for being depressed, attempting to force recovery through willpower, then collapsing back into helplessness when these strategies fail.

In Spiral terms, depression represents multiple simultaneous collapses: Courage dissolves into paralysis and anhedonia; Truth distorts into rumination - endless loops circling pain without integration; Love retreats into isolation - protective withdrawal from relationships that might witness one's shame. The system loses its capacity for upward oscillation, becoming trapped in the lower levels of shame, denial, and disconnection.

Depression as a Failure of Temporal Integration

As Ratcliffe (2015) notes, depression alters time itself - the past expands to fill the present, while the future collapses into impossibility. The person may see meaning conceptually but cannot feel it somatically. The person knows they "should" care but cannot mobilise the Courage to act; the will and value fields have gone out of sync.

Healing begins not by demanding movement, but by honouring stillness as the body's attempt to survive disconnection. The therapeutic task is to restore oscillation - tiny, titrated acts of re-engagement that reintroduce the qualities of Flow. These micro-movements reawaken the organism's innate rhythm of Truth, Courage, and Love.

Consider a client paralysed by loss who describes every day as "pointless repetition." The therapist invites not goal-setting but compassionate truth-telling: first establishing a field of self-compassion ("This is suffering, and suffering deserves tenderness"), then naming the reality of grief ("You miss them deeply"), without rushing to correct it. From there, a small action - watering a plant, having a shower, sorting through the mail, become acts of Courage. The client begins to feel the faint stir of Compassion for their own struggle, recognising the effort it takes just to keep breathing. Over time, Justice/Fairness emerges: a discernment between what suffering is self-imposed and what was unjustly borne. That discernment grounds Responsibility, the ability to respond again to life, to take ownership only of what is truly one’s own.

As energy returns, new layers unfold: the capacity to Forgive oneself for perceived failures, to Recognise one’s inherent worth despite loss, and finally to experience Gratitude - not as denial, but as reverence for the persistence of life despite despair. At the upper frequency, Love/Oneness reappears - not the romantic or sentimental love, but the quiet recognition that being itself is still here, waiting to be rejoined.

This upward movement can be visualised as the organism’s slow reanimation:

Truth → Courage → Compassion → Justice → Responsibility → Forgiveness → Recognition → Gratitude → Love.

Each turn of the Spiral reintroduces vitality. In the language of Mindful Flow, this is the gradual recalibration of the Challenge - Skill ratio: micro-challenges (standing up, reaching out, making a meal) balanced by micro-skills (self-compassion, grounding, relational safeness). Each act of value-aligned engagement re-establishes congruence between awareness and action.

EMDR and the reanimation of movement

For clients whose depression follows trauma or chronic invalidation, EMDR can restore movement where the system froze. Through bilateral stimulation, the mind oscillates between memory and present safety, mirroring the Spiral’s own rhythm of connection and disconnection. As these memories integrate, the person discovers they can grieve without collapse - Courage and Love can coexist.

In practice, EMDR may target not only past events but also the core beliefs that maintain disconnection - such as “I am powerless,” “I am defective,” “I am responsible for everything,” or “It’s not safe to trust.” Each of these beliefs represents a distortion of one of the Spiral’s archetypal forces:

• Powerlessness reflects a collapse of Courage;

• Defectiveness or shame reflects a distortion of Love;

• Excessive responsibility or control distorts Truth into moral rigidity.

  
  

Reprocessing these targets allows awareness to re-establish coherence across the triadic forces. The client learns, at an embodied level, that vulnerability need not mean danger, imperfection need not mean unworthiness, and responsibility need not mean control. This restores fluidity in the system - the capacity to move again between Courage, Love, and Truth without collapse.

Ultimately, recovery from depression is not the elimination of sadness but the restoration of rhythmic participation in life. Mindful Flow reframes healing as coherence: when awareness (Truth) is held by Compassion, informed by Justice, expressed through Responsible action, and nourished by Gratitude, the system re-enters synchrony with itself. The person no longer seeks escape from pain but movement through it. In doing so, they rediscover Love - not as a feeling, but as a field of belonging that includes all states, even despair.

2. Generalised Anxiety - The Restless Search for Safety

Within the Spiral of Connection and Disconnection, generalised anxiety can be understood as a looping oscillation between Truth and Courage that cannot find Love's resting place. It is a restless striving toward safety through prediction and control - a life lived half a step ahead of the present moment. Where depression represents the system’s collapse into stillness, anxiety is its refusal to rest. Awareness expands but loses coherence; vigilance becomes a substitute for trust.

At its core, chronic worry is not irrational - it is a creative but costly adaptation to uncertainty. The anxious mind attempts to regulate fear by rehearsing every possible outcome, believing that understanding or anticipating the future will prevent harm. Yet the very act of constant anticipation sustains the state of alarm it seeks to avoid. In this sense, anxiety represents parasitic processing (Vervaeke, 2021): awareness caught in repetitive loops of “what if,” consuming energy without producing adaptive movement.

From a Life History Theory perspective, this pattern exemplifies a fast life-history strategy - adaptive in volatile contexts where vigilance and quick payoff optimise survival (Del Giudice, 2014). When resources and threats are hard to predict, it pays to weigh the present more heavily than a doubtful future. In contemporary settings, that same bias can persist as parasitic processing (Vervaeke, 2021): sustained hyper-alertness to largely psychological threats, with uncertainty felt as existential rather than physical - functional for survival, but costly for integration and long-term coherence.

Within the Drama Triangle, the internal choreography is one where the Victim fears catastrophe and is played out as helplessness ("What if I can't cope?"), driving the inner Persecutor to demand perfect preparation ("You should have anticipated this"), while the Rescuer justifies endless worry as responsibility ("If I think through everything, I can keep everyone safe"). This triangulated system maintains homeostasis - preventing collapse into depression while never allowing genuine rest.

In Spiral terms, generalised anxiety arises when the three archetypal forces distort in typical ways. Truth becomes threat-biased awareness - unable to tolerate uncertainty, scanning for control while denying the limits of what can be known. Love shifts into rescuer mode, trying to soothe fear by controlling the environment or the self, reducing the sense of threat through over-management rather than compassion. Courage slips into pure survival mode, pushing through just to keep the head above water. The system keeps resisting because it has not yet learned that uncertainty can coexist with safety, or that rest does not require guarantees.

One client described it as “living with the volume turned up too high.” She lay awake each night, rehearsing endless scenarios - car accidents, illnesses, job failures - convinced that vigilance equalled protection. Over time, we uncovered that her mind had learned this strategy long ago. As a child, she had lived with an unpredictable parent: affection one day, anger the next. Safety was conditional, and love could vanish without warning. Her nervous system learned that scanning for subtle cues of danger- tone, silence, footsteps -was essential to survival. Now, decades later, that same vigilance had evolved into chronic worry.

In Spiral terms, Truth- her awareness of instability - had not been adequately soothed by Love, the witnessing presence that signals safeness (the sense of being held, accompanied, and not alone, as distinct from safety, which refers merely to the absence of external threat). Without that felt safeness, Courage could only brace. Instead of supporting movement, it contracted into effortful endurance: pushing through each day, holding everything together, and never letting her guard down. The system kept resisting because it had learned that only vigilance prevented loss, and that rest itself was dangerous.

In Mindful Flow terms, anxiety reflects a fundamental miscalibration of the Challenge versus Skill equation. The anxious mind perceives excessive challenge (infinite possible threats) while underestimating available skills (capacity for present-moment response). This creates what might be called "anticipatory overflow" - the system prepares for challenges that exist only in imagination, exhausting resources needed for actual present-moment engagement. Mindful Flow invites awareness to return from the imagined future to the living present, reuniting Truth with Love through the micro-movements of Courage.

For the client mentioned above, this began with the simple act of noticing her breath. Initially, even mindfulness exercises triggered more worry (“I’m not doing this right”). So we reframed the practice through the lens of Courage - not as relaxation, but as a willingness to stay with uncertainty without fleeing into thought. Over weeks, she learned to name sensations - tightness in her chest, the quickening of breath - as signs not of danger, but of activation. This embodied awareness transformed anxiety from an abstract catastrophe into something tangible, and therefore workable. Gradually, she could recognise when her mind was trying to protect her, whispering, “If you worry enough, you’ll stay safe.” Instead of fighting the worry, she began to thank it - a gesture of Compassion for the part of her that had carried fear for so long.

Within the Mindful Flow formula, anxiety reflects an imbalance between Challenge and Skill: excessive challenge (uncertainty) overwhelms insufficient skill (self-regulation). The therapeutic process therefore involves titrating exposure to uncertainty - inviting just enough challenge to evoke Courage, but not so much that the system collapses into panic. Each small act of staying present without reassurance becomes a micro-movement of integration, rebuilding the link between Courage and Love. When the client resisted the urge to send one more checking message to her partner and instead took a breath, she was enacting the Spiral’s upward turn - an act of Courage guided by Truth and held in Compassion.

The client mentioned above began her healing through a simple but profound practice: distinguishing between "planning" and "worrying." Planning, we discovered, has a beginning, middle, and end - it results in concrete action. Worrying is recursive - it circles the same concerns without resolution. When she caught herself in worry loops, she would ask: "Is this planning or worrying?" If planning, she would complete it or schedule when to do so. If worrying, she would name it: "This is my mind trying to love through control."

This naming itself was an act of Truth that created space for Courage - the willingness to stop the mental rehearsal and return to the body. Initially, this felt terrifying. "If I stop thinking ahead, something terrible might happen." But gradually, through titrated experiments in presence, she discovered that her body knew how to respond to actual challenges when they arose. The anticipatory simulations weren't increasing her competence - they were depleting it.

The Somatic Dimension: Anxiety as Frozen Flight

Polyvagal Theory illuminates anxiety's somatic signature: a nervous system stuck between mobilisation and safety, unable to fully fight, flee, or rest (Porges, 2011). The breath becomes shallow, muscles remain partially tensed, the heart quickens without purpose. This physiological state maintains the cognitive loops - the body's activation convinces the mind that danger must be present.

Therapeutic intervention therefore must include somatic regulation. For the client, this meant learning to recognise anxiety's physical precursors - the slight shoulder lift, the held breath, the clenched jaw. These became cues for micro-interventions: dropping the shoulders, extending the exhale, softening the tongue from the roof of the mouth. Each small somatic shift sent a signal through the vagus nerve: "It's safe enough to soften."

EMDR and the Updating of Threat Detection

Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) can help reprocess the memories and beliefs that sustain the vigilance loop. Therefore, by reprocessing memories, it updates the threat detection system itself. Common targets include “It’s not safe to relax,” “I must stay in control,” or “Something bad will happen if I stop worrying.” During bilateral stimulation, the client oscillates between activation (old fear) and present safety, mirroring the Spiral’s rhythm of connection and disconnection. As processing unfolds, awareness integrates what was once fragmented: vigilance is recognised as love in disguise - the mind’s way of caring when no one else could. The nervous system learns, at last, that rest does not equal danger.

In the client’s case, EMDR brought her back to an early scene: hiding in her bedroom as her parents argued downstairs. The tension of those nights - the silence that preceded shouting - had trained her to anticipate chaos. Through bilateral processing, she could hold simultaneously the child's need for vigilance and the adult's recognition of safety. The memory transformed from an instruction ("always be ready") to information ("that was then, this is now"). She also realised that her anxiety was frozen love. The child who listened so carefully was trying to protect not just herself but her younger siblings, even her parents. The hypervigilance was care that had nowhere to go. As this recognition integrated, her whole system began to reorganise. Worry transformed back into its original essence: appropriate concern that could be felt, acknowledged, and released.

The Upward Spiral: From Vigilance to Presence

The journey through anxiety follows a specific path through the Spiral's values:

Truth emerges as accurate assessment rather than catastrophic prediction - seeing what is rather than what might be. Courage shifts from controlling the future to facing the present moment's inherent uncertainty. Compassion softens toward the anxious parts, recognising their protective intention. Justice discerns between genuine responsibilities and imagined obligations. Responsibility means responding to actual rather than anticipated challenges. As the spiral continues upward, Forgiveness releases self-blame for not preventing the unpredictable. Recognition affirms worth independent of performance or control. Gratitude celebrates moments of peace as gifts rather than achievements. Finally, Love emerges not as the absence of concern but as trust in life's capacity to hold us even in uncertainty.

3. Trauma - Reintegrating Fragmented Energy

Trauma represents the most fundamental rupture in the flow of the spiral - when experience is overwhelmed and awareness splinters into disconnected fragments. In physiological terms, the nervous system enters a state of alarm, activating patterns of fight, flight, or freeze that once ensured survival. Psychologically, these states persist as frozen loops of perception and action; the body remains vigilant, while consciousness narrows around threat. What was adaptive at the time is only adaptive in terms of maintaining identity - preserving a consistent narrative and a fragile sense of certainty or control (Flores 2019). However, this coherence is defensive rather than integrative: trauma locks psyche in the the lower oscillations of disconnection. Courage, the energy of movement, collapses into paralysis or dissociation; Love, the capacity for connection, retreats into protective isolation out of fear; and Truth, the acceptance of reality, becomes distorted through denial, avoidance, or intrusive flashbacks. The system’s rhythm of expansion and integration halts, and parasitic processing takes over - attention circling endlessly around the wound in an attempt to achieve safety by control.

Healing begins when the system rediscovers the possibility of oscillation through learning to move again between safety and challenge, connection and autonomy. As Peter Levine (1997) describes, trauma is “the uncompleted act of survival.” The task of therapy is therefore to allow the body and psyche to complete what was once interrupted: to release the energy of survival without retraumatisation. Mindful Flow provides a framework for this process. By grounding in present awareness (Truth), approaching the stored energy of fear with tolerance (Courage), and holding it within a compassionate field (Love), the individual begins to metabolise frozen experience into coherence.

This oscillation can take many forms: the measured breath that balances sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, supported by the vagal regulation described in Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011); the therapist’s attuned presence that signals safety; the act of naming sensations rather than being consumed by them - somatic approaches highlight that integration occurs through mindful interoceptive awareness rather than cognitive insight alone (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). In EMDR, the rhythmic movement of the eyes mirrors this process at the neurobiological level - attention alternating between the poles of memory and present safety until a new integration emerges. In Compassion-Focused Therapy, the soothing system re-engages to regulate the threat system, restoring physiological safeness (Gilbert, 2020). 

Clients often know, deep down, that this is what they need to do - like a child who has a bad experience on a slide and instinctively understands they must try again; otherwise, the fear will harden into avoidance. Likewise, the client who sobs in EMDR when they offer compassion to their younger self and give that part hope symbolises the moment of regained autonomy - the return of life’s movement toward love and trust, the recognition of self and others.

In Spiral terms, healing trauma corresponds to the upward movement from Compassion (meeting suffering with unconditional love), through Justice (learning from experience and naming the harm that has been done), to Responsibility (reclaiming agency), Gratitude (recognising the resilience of life), and eventually Love/Oneness (loving unreservedly and belonging). The individual who once felt broken begins to see that survival itself was an act of Courage and that integrating pain does not erase the past but transforms it into meaning.

From a therapeutic standpoint, Mindful Flow invites both client and therapist to attune to the process as a living system rather than a set of techniques. The work unfolds through reciprocal regulation: the therapist’s grounded presence models coherence, while the client’s system gradually entrains to it. In this shared field, moments of disconnection are not treated as regressions but as opportunities for reorganisation. Each return to presence reaffirms that healing is not a linear ascent but an oscillation toward wholeness - an ongoing act of Truth, Courage, and Love enacted in relationship.

*This is part 1 of Mindful Flow in Clinical Contexts: Applying the Archetypal Spiral. The next blog (part 2 )will cover Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Panic and Social Anxiety *

References

American Psychological Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). APA.

Del Giudice, M., Gangestad, S. W., & Kaplan, H. S. (2015). Life history theory and evolutionary psychology. In The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 88–114). Wiley.

Flores, F. (2019). Life history theory and mentalization in the assessment of psychopathology [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Essex.

Gilbert, P. (2020). Compassion: From its evolution to a psychotherapy. Routledge.

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor psychotherapy: Interventions for trauma and attachment. W. W. Norton.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Vervaeke, J. (2021). Awakening from the meaning crisis [Lecture series]. University of Toronto.