Attractors
The states towards which a system keeps moving, whether helpful or not.
An attractor is a state towards which a complex system is drawn again and again. Just as a marble in a bowl keeps rolling to the lowest point, dynamical systems move towards certain patterns, even when they start from different initial situations.
Attractors are one of the central concepts of dynamical systems theory. They describe the stable behaviour of a system: the patterns that do not simply disappear, not even when the system is stimulated or perturbed.
Three kinds of attractors
Fixed-point attractors are the simplest. The system comes to rest in one particular state, like a pendulum swinging to a halt, a marble in a bowl, or a heart rate that returns to its resting pulse after exertion.
Limit cycles or periodic attractors are cyclical patterns: the beating of the heart, the sleep-wake rhythm, a seasonal depression that returns every winter. Here the system does not come to rest in a single point but in a repeating movement.
Strange attractors or chaotic attractors are perhaps the most intriguing. The system stays within a certain region of its state space but never follows exactly the same route twice. One might think of a butterfly that takes a different flight each time yet stays within the same garden. The Lorenz attractor, which traces its paths on the home page of this platform, is the best-known example.
Healthy and unhealthy attractors
For mental health care the concept of an attractor is quite useful, because many complaints behave as if they have themselves become attractors. A depression that will not lift, an addiction that keeps returning, an anxiety pattern that takes up more and more of life: these are states towards which the system moves again and again, even when circumstances improve. It is as if the bowl has become so deep that the marble can no longer get out.
"Some attractors are healthy, others are precisely the problem. Therapy need not always bring the system to a new place; sometimes the point is to make the old attractor less deep."
What that means for treatment
This way of thinking casts a different light on interventions. Some interventions work in the moment: they give the patient a better day or a better week, but as soon as the stimulus falls away, the system returns to its attractor. Others work on the structure: they make the existing attractor less deep, or help another state to emerge that also gains a pull of its own.
In depression, antidepressants can soften the symptoms and a holiday can bring relief. As long as the underlying attractor remains, however, relapse is quite possible. What we attempt therapeutically, such as behavioural activation, meaning-making, restoring social contacts and sometimes medication, seems to achieve most when it changes the landscape in which the patient lives, and not only her temporary position within it.
For a clinician there are then two questions: which attractor is at work here? and what might change the landscape? Sometimes the honest answer to the second question is: little, at this moment. Sometimes a tipping point arises, a moment at which a small intervention can loosen the attractor after all. Learning to recognise such moments is, in our view, one of the valuable gains of complexity-aware work.