Entangled Autopoiesis Meets HNP: Why “Therapy” Works as a System

By Dr. Patty Gently on October 5, 2025

Autopoiesis

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patricia Gently supports gifted and twice-exceptional adults in their own autopsychotherapy through identity exploration, structured reflection, and alignment with inner values. A writer, educator, and 2e adult, Dr. Patty centers depth, integrity, and complexity in all aspects of her work.

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The Nonlinear Turn in Therapy

Change in therapy rarely follows a straight line. One session may see both client and practitioner feeling stuck until a small empathic reflection shifts the entire emotional field. Breath slows, posture eases, and a new possibility opens. Linear models struggle to explain these sudden turns, where a complexity lens may do more to explain this phenomenon.

A dear friend who embodies this way of working shared an article that drew me in immediately. Rad et al. (2025) reframe therapy as entangled autopoiesis: the mind as a self‑organizing, adaptive system coupled across neural, embodied, relational, cultural, and technological loops. In this piece, I draw out their central threads and braid them with trans‑actional autopoiesis in language (Sánchez‑Flores, 2020), Luhmann’s social autopoiesis (Overwijk, 2018), Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD), and my work on Hyperneuroplasticity (HNP). Readers can expect a metatheoretical treatment that shows why small, well‑timed shifts can reorganize entire systems and a practice‑forward reflection on why HNP systems benefit from autopsychotherapy as stance.

The Limits of the Myth of Therapy

In an earlier article, I explored the limits of therapy’s guiding myths, the ways medicalization shapes its practice, and the developmental mismatches that emerge for gifted/galvanic and neurodivergent clients. These themes clarify why conventional approaches frequently under‑serve HNP systems. More typical therapy forms can provide safety and scaffolding, and they can also compress or misinterpret experience. Entangled autopoiesis offers a systemic frame that honors nonlinearity and self‑organization, and it illuminates why autopsychotherapy, self‑directed value reconstruction under conditions of safety, resonance, and reverence, becomes essential. These frameworks help explain why traditional approaches often feel insufficient, and why an orientation toward accompaniment, resonance, and self-directed growth matters for hyperneuroplastic individuals.

From Cells to Societies: Nested Autopoietic Systems

The term autopoiesis, coined by Maturana and Varela (1980), literally means self‑producing. Living systems sustain themselves through recursive loops of feedback in which their components produce both the system’s elements and its boundary. The cell’s enzymes create the membrane that maintains its autonomy, along with metabolic molecules, in a closed loop of self‑production and self‑organization.

Jan Overwijk (2018), a Dutch philosopher and scholar of social theory and systems, draws on Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), a German sociologist and systems theorist best known for applying Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis to society. In Luhmann’s model, social systems reproduce themselves through communication: society consists of communications that produce further communications based on existing structures. These systems draw boundaries between themselves and their environments that are operationally closed yet structurally coupled. Per this model, environmental “irritations” must be translated into the system’s internal code (e.g., legal/illegal, profitable/unprofitable) to have effects. Because communication observes and reproduces itself, the system is self‑referential and contingent, generating complexity, reduction, and paradox. Viewed through this lens, therapy is a social autopoietic micro‑system, communication producing further communication, continually reorganizing its own boundaries.

Entangled Autopoiesis and Trans‑Actional Language

Sánchez‑Flores expands this vision into trans-actional autopoiesis, a Deweyan view of language as a living, co‑constitutive process. Rather than seeing language a vessel for ideas that is, trans-actional autopoiesis is seen as the medium through which organisms shape and are shaped by each other. Each exchange transforms both speaker and listener simultaneously. The trans-actional frame dissolves the Cartesian split between mind and body or subject and object, showing that meaning‑making occurs through mutual, embodied participation.

“Human language is a by‑product of the relationships that human beings build with one another and on which they depend as organisms to survive, thrive, and emerge as persons.” — Mónica Sánchez‑Flores

When these ideas meet Rad et al.’s entangled autopoiesis, therapy becomes visible as an open, recursive ecology: neural, relational, linguistic, and cultural systems intertwined. In this ecology, language is not separate from biology. It is one of the ways biology maintains itself.

HNP Through the Autopoietic Frame

Hyperneuroplasticity (HNP) names an orientation toward rapid, deep reconfiguration across levels that are neural, embodied, relational, and symbolic. Some gifted/galvanic, ADHD‑profiled, autistic, and/or trauma‑responsive systems carry heightened sensitivity at the level of metaplasticity, reconsolidation dynamics, glial modulation, and neuromodulator tuning. In TPD, growth emerges through dissonance and reorganization, and autopsychotherapy is a central self‑directed re‑evaluation of values, confrontation of inner contradictions, and identity reconstruction. Trans-actional language processes give these reorganizations a medium: conversation, silence, metaphor, and micro‑timing co‑produce new attractors for experience.

Three Windows into Entangled Change

And, again, hyperneuroplastic systems don’t respond to change in simple (neuronormatively) predictable ways. They reorganize through patterns of sensitivity, embodiment, and interconnection. What follows are three perspectives that align with my own practice, exemplify how entangled autopoiesis unfolds in lived experience, and show why it resonates so strongly with the processes of hyperneuroplastic development.

Nonlinearity and Attractors: When I conceptualize HNP systems, one of the first qualities that comes to mind is how exquisitely sensitive they are to context. A single relational cue, such as a tone of voice, a glance of understanding, or even a pause, can redirect the entire trajectory of a conversation or experience. Complexity science gives language to this, describing how small perturbations can move a system into a new attractor basin (a stable pattern or state toward which a system naturally gravitates). When a therapeutic moment shifts, the person’s emotional or cognitive system moves into a new attractor basin or emergent configuration of stability, meaning, and coherence.

Embodied and Enactive Change: Here we realize that therapy is not only about words and talk. It is about subtle synchronies of breath, rhythm, and posture that reorganize regulation. Interactive journaling, the layout of a room, or a digital scaffold can hold process when typical language falters. Using a trans-actional lens, these are not seen as add‑ons. As components of cognition, language widens here to include gesture, prosody, silence, and shared attention as co‑regulatory acts.

Networked Brains: Pessoa’s (2022) idea of the “entangled brain” resonates significantly with what I observe, while emphasizing how cognition and affect are intertwined. In HNP systems, a shift in one domain, such as safety, ripples toward intellectual clarity, creative flow, or bodily ease. Change rarely remains local and often cascades in ways that feel surprising and inevitable. Through a trans-actional lens, these cascades are seen as relational‑linguistic events rather than simply neural phenomena.

Together, these qualities also show why HNP systems are best engaged through conditions where new coherence can emerge rather than through attempts to control change. The work is to shape ecologies of coherence where renewal, clarity, and meaning self‑organize through complexity and relationship.

Practice Principles for HNP-Aware, Autopoietic Therapy

When I turn from theory to practice, I find myself asking: what does this actually look like in-office? How does an autopoietic stance honor the autopsychotherapy process and the way we show up with hyperneuroplastic systems? What follows are some guiding stances that have proven essential in my own work and align with this exploration.

Coherence Before Content: Safety and attunement down‑regulate stress physiology, opening the system to plastic reorganization. Embodied signals such as a steadier breath and softening shoulders indicate readiness. Without coherence, content becomes noise. With coherence, content metabolizes into meaning. In trans-actional terms, and rather than placing the burden of regulation on the client alone, coherence is a property of the dyad and the shared linguistic field.

Titrated Perturbation: Small mismatches, carefully introduced, destabilize rigid patterns without overwhelming the system. The timing may look like a single question or a slight contradiction to habitual thought. In EMDR this sometimes appears as a cognitive interweave, a brief targeted intervention that introduces adaptive information or perspective to help the client’s natural reprocessing resume when it becomes stuck. In Gestalt therapy, the perturbation may take the form of an awareness experiment that invites direct experience in the here and now to reveal fixed patterns and open us to new realizations. Trans-actionally, these perturbations are not simply delivered and are co‑created within a linguistic dance that both parties shape.

External Scaffolds: I have witnessed how contextual tools such as journaling, body practices, or even a simple sensory ritual can hold someone’s process between sessions and act as extensions of mind. This may include AI in a limited role as a digital mirror or feedback node rather than a substitute. Per Rad et al., AI can be used carefully, echoing Gestalt therapy’s concept of 'field awareness' by emphasizing presence and relational attunement rather than detached analysis to surface hidden rhythms or stress markers and amplify awareness or timing. Yet its role must remain bounded: optional, supportive, and never replacing the essential work of human co-regulation. In a trans-actional frame, these scaffolds enlarge the conversational system that supports self‑organization across sessions.

Relational Synchrony: Micro-timing, cadence, and rhythm shape emergent properties like trust and coherence. Think of the way laughter arises simultaneously or silence settles mutually; these moments are central to healing. Synchrony is how two systems find coherence together, and it often does more for the work than any technique or interpretation I use. I see it as regulatory language in action.

Presence Over Expertise: Support should honor the client’s inner knowing, not impose external interpretation. This means showing up with humility, curiosity, and patience. Sometimes I may name what is seen, while other times I step back so the client’s sense-making can more fully lead. Presence resists the urge to fix, instead trusting the client’s own capacity to orient, integrate, and experience growth. In trans-actional language, presence de‑centers the one‑way delivery of meaning and centers co‑creation.

These principles highlight a fundamental shift where the goal is to co-create conditions where the system’s own intelligence can reorganize into new forms of stability and meaning (rather than managing or correcting from the outside). They remind us that rather than intervention, imposition, or a fix, therapy at its best is accompaniment, resonance, and protection of the space where transformation can unfold, authentically and organically. This framing places the therapist or coach in a position of offering reverent scaffolding rather than a treatment or solution. 

Where HNP Extends and Grounds the Frame

Rad et al. provide the metatheory for systemic change, and HNP supplies mechanisms for who tends to change quickly and why. Heightened sensitivity at the levels of metaplasticity, reconsolidation, glia, and neuromodulators means micro‑shifts can reorganize whole networks. This sensitivity creates both vulnerability and potency, along with susceptibility to fragmentation under stress and capacity for extraordinary integration when supported. Entangled autopoiesis clarifies the how of systemic change. HNP clarifies the for whom and under what conditions. Trans-actional language theory clarifies the through what medium, describing the co‑generated linguistic and embodied field where new attractors emerge.

In Dąbrowskian terms, reorganizations can be seen as movements toward higher internal differentiation and value structure, where the self becomes both observer and participant in its own evolution. Autopsychotherapy names that conscious, value‑laden self‑production and aligns with autopoiesis at a higher order of organization.

Quantum Metaphors (with Care)

Sánchez‑Flores invokes entanglement from quantum physics as a metaphor for simultaneity and mutual co‑constitution. The metaphor can clarify the departure from linear, billiard‑ball causality and remains a metaphor at the human scale. The therapeutic takeaway is practical: observation changes the observed, and participation changes possibilities. The dyad is a coupled system where timing, language, and presence co‑create outcomes.

An Ecology of Coherence In-Office

Therapy in this light becomes an ecology of coherence and an adaptive space where the system reorganizes itself into patterns of renewal, clarity, and meaning. And here, humility, accompaniment, and reverence as conditions of growth are not extras. They are essential. A session may hinge on silence and shared presence that allow insight to surface, or on a subtle embodied cue that shifts the trajectory of meaning‑making. The deepest work emerges through protecting the space where self‑organization can happen and through language practices that honor trans‑actional coupling.

References

Dewey, J., & Bentley, A. F. (1949). Knowing and the known. Beacon Press.

Luhmann, N. (2012). Theory of society (Vol. 1, R. Barrett, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Reidel.

Overwijk, J. (2018, March 11). Autopoietic system. Retrieved from The Philosophy Encyclopedia.

Pessoa, L. (2022). The entangled brain: How perception, cognition, and emotion are woven together. MIT Press.

Rad, D., Maier, M., Triff, Z., & Marcu, R. (2025). Entangled autopoiesis: Reframing psychotherapy and neuroscience through cognitive science and systems engineering. Brain Sciences, 15(10), 1032. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15101032

Sánchez‑Flores, M. (2020). Trans‑actional autopoiesis: A relational view of human language. Research Outreach. Retrieved from https://researchoutreach.org/articles/trans-actional-autopoiesis-relational-view-human-language/