Adaptive Intelligence
Innate with limitless potential to grow and flourish, restore and regenerate.
Before your cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence emerged for others to observe, you first had adaptive intelligence. No one taught it to you. Adaptive intelligence is embedded in us, a gift of nature.
Adaptive intelligence underpins our formation and development.
No one directly does it to us; yet it happens in dynamic with the environment.
Built into the innate human guidance system is the function to develop its own algorithms for not only surviving immediate threats but also for flourishing throughout the lifetime. Adaptive intelligence is what I’ve coined the invisible dynamics by which the guidance system is programmed through our experiences interacting with our environment.
In each phase of living, there is a reliance on the guidance system developed in the prior phase. During the experiences in the current phase, the system develops the algorithms necessary for the next phase.
Before we named stress, burnout, trauma, adverse childhood experiences, disorders, and disease, there was adaptive intelligence. Adaptive intelligence is the innate functioning within us that guides our existence. Our survival. Our growth.
When we understand stress, burnout, trauma, disorders, and disease through a lens of adaptive intelligence, we lean into another feature available by nature: our restoration. The natural rhythms of restoration, as well as our intentional pause of expansion to contract back into earlier patterns for regeneration are available throughout our lifetime. Our vitality of ongoing renewal. The mechanism underpinning natural longevity.
Principles of innate Adaptive Intelligence
This biocomputer develops its survival algorithms in the habitat which is first the dynamics with the biological mother and expands outward. It has a natural blueprint for development and growth. Yet it also uses lived experiences, since being a single cell, to determine necessary adaptations for survival in the moment and, as necessary, sustained for future phases.
Adaptations for healthy growth and development depend on a ‘just right’ habitat of resourcing. There needs to be some challenge as a prompt for growth WITH adequate support that we’re not alone and are energetically resourced.
What we look ‘back’ on and call intergenerational trauma is actually the prior generations informing our blueprint of necessities for survival. If they were not able to restore the imprints, it is necessary to the adaptive intelligence to feed it forward to future generations. Survival depends on it.
Similarly for adverse childhood experiences and trauma. The adaptations were natural if the environment was not adequate. The person is not broken; he/she is amazingly adaptive. He/she is not stuck with those adaptations for life nor dependent on controlling them.
Adaptations happen at the level of the whole organism, but they may not be apparent through observed symptoms or behaviors until years or even decades later. Experiences that are too much or not enough through the first 1000 days implicate future cognitive patterns, emotional processing, relational needs, physical functioning, and spiritual experiencing.
As we ‘complete’ experiences in a small habitat, the control system transfers responsibility to a higher order control system. Developmental scaffolding is necessary for healthy functioning in each expanded habitat.
As development/growth occurs, we naturally shift from dependence on other to differentiated with inter-regulation. This ability to individuate from the caregiver opens our capacity for intentional growth (or restoration of adaptations that no longer serve us.)
This includes the restoration of intergenerational imprints. However, it requires intentionally restoration with adequate support in the present. It is not possible without intention. The biocomputer will not give up protective algorithms until it deems survival is possible without them.
A collection of humans also has an implicit inter-regulating control system that is experienced, not taught.
Once we reach the organismic maturity of cortical processing, we have the capacity to intentionally seek experiences to continue adaptations out of the originals. Neuroplasticity is available our entire life. But if not pursued intentionally, the biocomputer holds the algorithms. Survival is too important to take any chances! False alarms of a survival threat are ‘worth it’ regardless the consequences.
The Opportunities through this Lens
Through this dynamic lens of human functioning at our core, we can
Appreciate current behaviors, symptoms, and patterns as first adaptive - necessary from some earlier phase. We can stop trying to control and manage what is natural, further agitating the guidance system that naturally responsible for our best living.
Take responsibility for the environment in which development occurs and provide the conditions for healthy development from the start. Reduce the natural development of adaptations that lead to what we call trauma, disorders, and disease.
Start listening to ‘stress’ as information about the current functioning of the guidance system. Is it asking for restoration of younger algorithms? Is it guiding your navigation through the stimulus in the present?
If the former, focus on creating the environment that allows restoration and natural reprogramming to occur.
If the latter, take action consistent with it and stop holding yourself hostage to an unhealthy environment.
Be intentional about what interventions and substances we continue to push on our guidance system to sort as safe or threat, reducing the tangles we create in trying to falsely ‘fix.’
Eliminate the dependence on skills and substances to manage symptoms and replace with access to restorative services.
Systemically, we could
Educate young adults, young couples, young parents on the process for jumping into restoration as soon as there are indications from within them. This is their adaptive intelligence speaking to them We could encourage listening as they take the reigns on their adult development (growth and restoration).
Stop funding research to prove universal good/bad of interventions and accept individuality and contextual nature of outcomes.
Return science to the understanding of human health and wellbeing rather than scientific method for profit.
Give people the most complete information to make their decision, based on their values, for a situation they are facing. No more learning as an adult that the prenatal environment was too much / not enough or that the medical intervention at birth had consequences. Stop gatekeeping information based on the professionals’ belief structures and allow people to be in the drivers seat of their short term and long term trade-offs.
Understand children’s behaviors through a lens of safety and development, not compliance with societal norms.
Accept that professional bias is real and natural to professionals also being human. Provide services to support their professional safeness (e.g., no blaming or shaming) to see a more expanded view than the current medical model.
This includes freeing them from the double binds they face being in the center of the tension between care and profit in healthcare and mental healthcare.
Similarly for the business professionals in the binds of marketing methods that have become predatory and are creating unhealth.
Similarly for education professionals who have built systems on compliance and performance that are inhibiting natural child development and removing foundational childhood developmental experiences. It is natural that these environments are overloaded with protective patterns of conflict and burnout.
Begin restorative techniques of vibrational medicine, nervous system restoration, sensorimotor resets after a situation occurs rather than waiting until the implication is observable years later.
Utilize traumatizing interventions only when restoration is futile rather than as automatic for everyone. Just because the logical mind (or the professional bias) says it’s helpful, the guidance system will still doing its detect-assess-communicate-act/adapt. Logic is not a part of survival or adaptation.
Educate on the importance of continuing to naturally expand our belief structures through new experiences. This is the development essential for societal growth of inclusivity, belonging, and caring for the planet as well as people. This isn’t about teaching. Development is a whole organism experience not a cognitive one.