Emily Singer - Evolution Is NOT so Random After All - We Evolve Toward Fitness

This is an interesting article on evolution experiments involving yeast and what they tell us about our own history and development. This article originally appeared at Quanta Magazine, under the title,
Evolution’s Random Paths Lead to One Place: A massive statistical study suggests that the final evolutionary outcome — fitness — is predictable.

If the World Started Over, Would Life Evolve the Same Way?

By Emily Singer, Quanta Magazine
10.03.14 | Permalink


Different strains of yeast grown under identical conditions develop different mutations but ultimately arrive at similar evolutionary endpoints.  Daniel Hertzberg for Quanta Magazine
In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker’s yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai’s robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?

Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. “If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction,” Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.

Desai’s yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published in Science in June, all of Desai’s yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It’s as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.

The findings also suggest a disconnect between evolution at the genetic level and at the level of the whole organism. Genetic mutations occur mostly at random, yet the sum of these aimless changes somehow creates a predictable pattern. The distinction could prove valuable, as much genetics research has focused on the impact of mutations in individual genes. For example, researchers often ask how a single mutation might affect a microbe’s tolerance for toxins, or a human’s risk for a disease. But if Desai’s findings hold true in other organisms, they could suggest that it’s equally important to examine how large numbers of individual genetic changes work in concert over time.

Michael Desai, a biologist at Harvard University, uses statistical methods to study basic questions in evolution.  Sergey Kryazhimskiy

“There’s a kind of tension in evolutionary biology between thinking about individual genes and the potential for evolution to change the whole organism,” said Michael Travisano, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. “All of biology has been focused on the importance of individual genes for the last 30 years, but the big take-home message of this study is that’s not necessarily important.

The key strength in Desai’s experiment is its unprecedented size, which has been described by others in the field as “audacious.” The experiment’s design is rooted in its creator’s background; Desai trained as a physicist, and from the time he launched his lab four years ago, he applied a statistical perspective to biology. He devised ways to use robots to precisely manipulate hundreds of lines of yeast so that he could run large-scale evolutionary experiments in a quantitative way. Scientists have long studied the genetic evolution of microbes, but until recently, it was possible to examine only a few strains at a time. Desai’s team, in contrast, analyzed 640 lines of yeast that had all evolved from a single parent cell. The approach allowed the team to statistically analyze evolution.

To efficiently analyze many strains of yeast simultaneously, scientists grow them on plates like this one, which has 96 individual wells.  Sergey Kryazhimskiy

“This is the physicist’s approach to evolution, stripping down everything to the simplest possible conditions,” said Joshua Plotkin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research but has worked with one of the authors. “They could partition how much of evolution is attributable to chance, how much to the starting point, and how much to measurement noise.”

Desai’s plan was to track the yeast strains as they grew under identical conditions and then compare their final fitness levels, which were determined by how quickly they grew in comparison to their original ancestral strain. The team employed specially designed robot arms to transfer yeast colonies to a new home every 12 hours. The colonies that had grown the most in that period advanced to the next round, and the process repeated for 500 generations. Sergey Kryazhimskiy, a postdoctoral researcher in Desai’s lab, sometimes spent the night in the lab, analyzing the fitness of each of the 640 strains at three different points in time. The researchers could then compare how much fitness varied among strains, and find out whether a strain’s initial capabilities affected its final standing. They also sequenced the genomes of 104 of the strains to figure out whether early mutations changed the ultimate performance.

Fluid-handling robots like this one make it possible to study hundreds of lines of yeast over many generations. Courtesy of Sergey Kryazhimskiy

Previous studies have indicated that small changes early in the evolutionary journey can lead to big differences later on, an idea known as historical contingency. Long-term evolution studies in E. coli bacteria, for example, found that the microbes can sometimes evolve to eat a new type of food, but that such substantial changes only happen when certain enabling mutations happen first. These early mutations don’t have a big effect on their own, but they lay the necessary groundwork for later mutations that do.

But because of the small scale of such studies, it wasn’t clear to Desai whether these cases were the exception or the rule. “Do you typically get big differences in evolutionary potential that arise in the natural course of evolution, or for the most part is evolution predictable?” he said. “To answer this we needed the large scale of our experiment.”

As in previous studies, Desai found that early mutations influence future evolution, shaping the path the yeast takes. But in Desai’s experiment, that path didn’t affect the final destination. “This particular kind of contingency actually makes fitness evolution more predictable, not less,” Desai said.

Sidebar: Diminishing Returns

Desai’s study isn’t the first to suggest that the law of diminishing returns applies to evolution. A famous decades-long experiment from Richard Lenski’s lab at Michigan State University, which has tracked E. coli for thousands of generations, found that fitness converged over time. But because of limitations in genomics technology in the 1990s, that study didn’t identify the mutations underlying those changes. “The 36 populations we had then would have been much more expensive to sequence than the hundred they did here,” said Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, who worked on the Michigan State study.

More recently, two papers published in Science in 2011 mixed and matched a handful of beneficial mutations in different types of bacteria. When the researchers engineered those mutations into different strains of bacteria, they found that the fitter strains enjoyed a smaller benefit. Desai’s study examined a much broader combination of possible mutations, showing that the rule is much more general.

Desai found that just as a single trip to the gym benefits a couch potato more than an athlete, microbes that started off growing slowly gained a lot more from beneficial mutations than their fitter counterparts that shot out of the gate. “If you lag behind at the beginning because of bad luck, you’ll tend to do better in the future,” Desai said. He compares this phenomenon to the economic principle of diminishing returns — after a certain point, each added unit of effort helps less and less.

Scientists don’t know why all genetic roads in yeast seem to arrive at the same endpoint, a question that Desai and others in the field find particularly intriguing. The yeast developed mutations in many different genes, and scientists found no obvious link among them, so it’s unclear how these genes interact in the cell, if they do at all. “Perhaps there is another layer of metabolism that no one has a handle on,” said Vaughn Cooper, a biologist at the University of New Hampshire who was not involved in the study.

It’s also not yet clear whether Desai’s carefully controlled results are applicable to more complex organisms or to the chaotic real world, where both the organism and its environment are constantly changing. “In the real world, organisms get good at different things, partitioning the environment,” Travisano said. He predicts that populations within those ecological niches would still be subject to diminishing returns, particularly as they undergo adaptation. But it remains an open question, he said.

Nevertheless, there are hints that complex organisms can also quickly evolve to become more alike. A study published in May analyzed groups of genetically distinct fruit flies as they adapted to a new environment. Despite traveling along different evolutionary trajectories, the groups developed similarities in attributes such as fecundity and body size after just 22 generations. “I think many people think about one gene for one trait, a deterministic way of evolution solving problems,” said David Reznick, a biologist at the University of California, Riverside. “This says that’s not true; you can evolve to be better suited to the environment in many ways.”

Ability to Adapt Gave Early Humans the Edge Over Other Hominins (Smithsonian)

Looking at the evolution of the homo genus, it may be that the whole lineage is renamed homo adaptus, in that our own defining characteristic seems to be our ability to adapt to our environment. This article from the Smithsonian magazine looks at this adaptive quality in the homo genus.

Ability to Adapt Gave Early Humans the Edge Over Other Hominins

Features thought to be characteristic of early Homo lineages actually evolved before Homo arose. Rather, our flexible nature defines us

By Mohi Kumar
smithsonian.com | July 4, 2014

Skulls of the genus Homo, including two from Homo erectus on the right (Chip Clark, Smithsonian Human Origins Program/Guram Bumbiashvili, Georgian National Museum)

From the cold Arctic to the sweltering Sahara, from the high Himalayas to the deep reaches of the Amazon, humans are everywhere. Our ability to adapt and even thrive in a variety of environments is one of the hallmarks of our species.

In fact, adaptability might be THE defining characteristic of our broader genus, Homo. According to new research published in Science, the ability of early humans to adjust to wild climate fluctuations likely enabled them to diversify, differentiate, and spread out of Africa 1.85 million years ago.

Before this study, prevailing scientific thought generally held that several traits—large brains, long legs, the ability to make tools, a prolonged time before juveniles mature into adults—all evolved together as a package between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago. This collection of traits, scientists thought, separated the Homo genus from other hominins, such as Australopithecus or Ardipithecus, and arose when the Earth’s climate became cooler and drier and the African grasslands expanded in range.

However, a close examination of how early hominin fossils correlate with the emergence of certain behaviors seems to show otherwise. Many of the traits thought to make up this Homo package evolved independently, and some not even in Homo species at all. For example, “the origin of stone tool making doesn’t correlate to anything regarding the origins of the genus Homo,” says coauthor Richard Potts, a paleoanthropologist and director of Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Further, some features once considered characteristic to members of early Homo lineages, such as long hind limbs, can be found in Australopithecus species—hominins that existed before the earliest Homo walked the earth. Australopithecus died out around 2 million years ago.

Hominin evolution from 3.0 million to 1.5 million years ago. Green: Australopithecus, Yellow: Paranthropus, Red: Homo. The icons indicate from the bottom the first appearance of stone tools at ~2.6 million years ago, the dispersal of Homo to Eurasia at ~1.85 million years ago, and the appearance of stone axes at ~1.76 million years ago. The cultural milestones do not correlate with the known first appearances of any of the currently recognized Homo specimens. (Courtesy of Antón, Potts and Aiello/Science)

Tracking the origins of Homo's supposedly defining traits involved a thorough review of fossils from three hominin groups—Paranthropus, Australopithecus, and Homo. Researchers paid careful attention to when these groups and the species within them emerged and died out.

Scientists can tell different species apart “based on differences in the shape of their skulls, especially their face and jaws,” explains Susan Antón, a professor of anthropology at New York University and the paper’s lead author. These differences persist over hundreds of thousands of years in the fossil record, defining distinct species.

With the fossil record for hominins divvied up into genera and species, the next step was to date when the species had lived. In the East African Rift Valley, determining the age of a fossil can be done rather reliably. Sediments surrounding fossil finds contain ash and pumice from volcanic eruptions—minerals in this ash and pumice can be dated using radioisotopes.

With the dates of the fossils established, what’s left was to pinpoint the age of the emergence of different behaviors. Figuring out when Homo migrated out of Africa is easy enough and can be done by dating fossils found in Eurasia. Early stone tools and hand axes found in East Africa can also be dated according to the minerals in the sediments that surround them.

Some traits, however, are more difficult to date. The ability to walk upright over long distances required the scientists to look at the fossils themselves. “We know where the muscles attached based on fossil bones; we can measure the cross-sectional area of the thigh bones and look at the mechanical properties of the pelvises that occur in the fossil records,” Potts explains.

Matching those findings to the fact that, as Potts notes, “animals that have elongated legs have greater strides and greater efficiency in locomotion,” allowed the scientists to estimate when long-distance walking emerged.

What results from these analyses is the realization that there is no simple, clear picture; no obvious mechanism as to why the genus we know as Homo came to arise and dominate. What we've long thought of as a coherent picture—the package of traits that make Homo species special—actually formed slowly over time. Stone tools first started appearing around 2.6 million years ago. Homo species left Africa 1.85 million years ago. Stone axes started to be used around 1.76 million years ago. And by at least 3 million years ago, Australopithecus developed elongated limbs and the ability to traverse long distances.

In fact, a similarly close look at other traits thought to be associated with the origin of Homo shows that they are similarly scattered through time, and not necessarily unique to early humans.

Evolutionary timeline of important anatomical, behavioral and life history characteristics that were once thought to be associated with the origin of the genus Homo or earliest H. erectus. (Antón et al., Science/AAAS 2014)

So what could have propelled our earliest ancestors to change? According to a detailed climate model of the past that was refined by the authors, the Homo lineage did not originate during a calm, cool, stable climate period as previously thought. Rather, East Africa at the time was dynamic, with “fluctuating moisture and aridity, [and] shifting resource regimes,” the authors write.

That early Homo species would have had to cope with this constantly-changing climate fits with the idea that it was not our hands, nor our gait, nor our tools that made us special. Rather, it was our adaptability.

Unstable climate conditions not only “favored the evolution of the roots of human flexibility in our ancestors,” explains Potts. “The origin of our human genus is characterized by early forms of adaptability. There’s a phasing of evolutionary innovations over time, and many evolved traits are not unique to the genus Homo even if the entire package is unique to Homo sapiens.”

Related Content

• Multiple Species of Early Homo Lived in Africa
• Four Species of Homo You've Never Heard Of
• What Chimps Could Tell Us About How Humans Started Walking on Two Legs

A Trauma-Based Model of Mental Illness (preliminary thoughts)

Here is another section (still in the process of being written) from the paper I have been working on for a couple of months now - or maybe it will be a monograph, since it keeps getting longer and longer.

This section (much of which is still missing citations) proposes a new model of mental illness that does away with many of the diagnoses we now find in the DSM. Rather, it proposes a trauma-based model that sees symptoms as adaptations to the traumatic experience.

As I said, this is VERY preliminary - just began writing it yesterday. Any feedback is welcome.

A Trauma-Based Model of Mental Illness

It is my belief, based on years of reading the trauma literature and working with sexual trauma clients in therapy, that nearly all the traits we label as mental illness are more accurately understood as adaptations (or clusters of adaptations) to traumatic experience, either interpersonal or "shock."

Interpersonal traumas are those occurring between people in relationship, such as neglect, abuse, bullying, and attachment failures. The younger one is when these traumas occur, the more profound their impact on brain development.

"Shock" traumas are those single frightening events that can seriously disrupt our lives and our basic understanding of the world. These may include natural disasters, accidents, stranger rape, muggings, and other unexpected, unpredictable violent disruptions of our lives.

The greater the severity of the trauma, the more extreme the adaptations a survivor makes to cope with the experience. Early interpersonal trauma tends to be more difficult to treat than shock traumas, unless the person experiencing the shock trauma has also experienced adverse child events. I propose that we can create a spectrum of how these adaptations are generated and how they function, ranging from less extreme to more extreme.

At one end we might have the adaptation cluster often labeled as an adjustment disorder, with anxiety or depression being common expressions. Addictions and other forms of self-numbing behavior would also likely be in the first half of the spectrum.

An issue with some of the adaptations, particularly addictions, is that they generally co-occur with other adaptations. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often co-occurs with mood symptoms, addictions, or disordered personality structures.

PTSD would be somewhere near the middle, although its manifestation can be mild to severe. Further down the spectrum would be dissociative disorders, the most extreme form of PTSD, with the most extreme adaptation being dissociative identity disorder (DID).

At the far end would be full-blown psychosis, representing a cumulative experience so awful and unbearable that reality become intolerable, necessitating a retreat into an alternate reality often imbued with a sense of importance or specialness, which is even true in paranoid iterations of psychosis.

It's important to keep in mind that when these interpersonal traumas occur during development, they create changes in the way the brain is wired, particularly the right hemisphere, the source of affect regulation, interpersonal skills, and body-mind integration.

Likewise, many of the adaptations noted here will manifest in the brain as shrinkage of one set of circuits or enlargement of another. For example, PTSD can produce an enlarged amygdala and a smaller hippocampus. Prolonged environmental stress also generates excessive levels of cortisol and other stress hormones that can damage brain function and leave the survivor in a near constant state of hypervigilance.

How Trauma Changes the Brain

When confronted with a stressor, a series of events occurs in the body that generates what we now call the “fight or flight response.” This process evolved early in the history of life on Earth to allow organisms to act in a situation where their life was in danger. In response, the body generates the energy for either a “fight” or a “flight” through activation of the nervous system and the endocrine system in order to maximize resources for surviving the threat (the stressor).

The following is paraphrased from Neigh, Gillespie, and Nemeroff (2009).

Researchers have identified two phases to this process. When the stressor is detected, the initial phase of the stress response begins. The sympathetic nervous system (associated with action, the "fight or flight" response) releases norepinephrine from nerve terminals and epinephrine from the adrenal medulla into the general circulation. Both of these neurochemicals and stimulants in their effects on the body.

In the secondary phase, moments later, corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is released by “parvocellular neurons of the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus into the hypothalamo-hypophyseal portal system for transport to the anterior pituitary gland where it stimulates the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) into the general circulation” (Swanson, Sawchenko, Rivier, & Vale, 1983; cited in Neigh, Gillespie, and Nemeroff, 2009). The ACTH travels to the adrenal cortex where it stimulates the release of glucocorticoids (cortisol is the primary stress hormone in primates). It generally takes several minutes for these processes, which are characteristic of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response, to become fully activated.

Following the crisis, activity in the HPA axis is dampened through negative feedback (the parasympathetic nervous system, associated with "recuperation") via stimulation of glucocorticoid receptors within the hippocampus, hypothalamus, and anterior pituitary (Jacobson & Sapolsky, 1991). When there is a crisis, this stress response allows an organism to shift biological resources away from whatever activity was the focus and engages physiological functions that promote survival.

However, if the stress response becomes chronic due to repeated exposure to stressors, or a physiological deficit in the negative feedback system (or both), the organism experiences an on-going excess in stress hormone levels, which can trigger pathological changes in a variety of physiological systems, leading to stress-related diseases (McEwen, 2008).

This near-constant state of "activation" also leads to many of the symptoms of PTSD, including anxiety, memory deficits, hypervigilance, and the exaggerated startle response. The inability or failure of the body to metabolize the stress hormones, representing in essence that the situation cannot be escaped, results in the third and fourth of the Four F's - fight, flight, freeze, and fold. The freeze response is the most common experience for those who experienced on-going trauma, and the fold represents complete surrender, a profound state of "giving up."   

Whitehouse and Heller explains it this way:

Part of the problem is that when these states occur, discharge of the intense energies mobilized to meet threat often becomes thwarted. Often we just don't have the time necessary to complete them. Nevertheless, the survival energy has mobilized for fight or flight, but literally has no place to go and ends being converted into symptoms. (Whitehouse & Heller, 2008)

The freeze response (fold is very rare, so it will not be discussed here) is characterized by a simultaneous activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. According to Peter Levine, the creator of Somatic Experiencing:

We have several synonyms for freeze, including dissociation, immobility, spacing out, deer in the headlights look. In the healthy nervous system it still serves and protects us humans, but often freeze is associated with the residual crippling effects of trauma. Here's what happens that causes humans to get stuck in trauma. (Levine, 1992)

References (partial)

• Neigh, GN, Gillespie, CF, and Nemeroff, CB. (2009, Aug 6). The Neurobiological Toll of Child Abuse and Neglect. Trauma Violence Abuse; 10: 389-410. DOI: 10.1177/1524838009339758
• Jacobson, L., & Sapolsky, R. (1991). The role of the hippocampus in feedback regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis. Endocrine Reviews, 12, 118-134.
• McEwen, BS. (2008). Central effects of stress hormones in health and disease: Understanding the protective and damaging effects of stress and stress mediators. European Journal of Pharmacology, 583, 174-185.
• Whitehouse, B., & Heller, DP. (2008). Heart Rate in Trauma: Patterns Found in Somatic Experiencing and Trauma Resolution. Biofeedback, 36(1).
• Levine, P. (1992). Somatic Experiencing. The Foundation for Human Enrichment. http://www. traumahealing. com/index. html.

Preliminary Thoughts on a New Nomenclature of Psychotherapeutic Diagnosis and Practice

 

Above is one model of integrative psychotherapy (Erskine and Trautmann, 1996). What follows below are some preliminary thoughts on how I practice as a therapist and how I might change the existing nomenclature to reflect a more client-centered, relational model that rejects pathologizing language and structures (i.e., the DSM).

Premise: 

What counselors and psychotherapists have been taught to identify as symptoms of a corresponding condition pejoratively defined as "mental illness" should rather be understood as adaptations to experience.

All adaptations are at their genesis the best available mechanism for survival. As a person ages, these adaptations become either skillful (healthy) or unskillful (not supporting physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health).

Disclaimer:

Short-term responses to challenging situations are not, in general, to be seen as adaptations to that experience (i.e., normal human emotional responses to life events such as death of a loved one, losing a job or promotion, surviving an accident, and so on). If, however, there are several similar experiences over a person's lifetime, with a corresponding response pattern that has solidified into what Carl Jung defined as a "complex," then this then can be seen as an adaption and not a response. 

Diagnosis:

When we join a new client on their healing journey, our task is to identify with them the somatic symptoms, affect dysregulation, cognitive distortions, lost spirituality, the core beliefs, and each domain's corresponding defense mechanisms that block an integrative experience of full health.

An integrative approach assesses from (at least) five domains, four of which are addressed by specific models of psychotherapy that contend their model is the only necessary model:

• Body - somatic symptoms and unconscious behaviors
• Affect - ability to regulate affect and for affect to match verbal and behavioral expression
• Cognitive - possessing rational and non-distorted self-concepts, lack or pervasive thinking errors, or other forms of unskillful cognitive and behavioral scripts
• Spiritual - a sense of purpose and meaning in one's life whether it's religious, spiritual, or atheist/humanist

The fifth domain is the Core Beliefs a person holds about who s/he is and what other people believe about him or her. These beliefs are deeply held and generally unconscious. They tend to originate in infancy and early childhood, making them difficult to uproot in order to plant new seeds for healthier core beliefs. Further, core beliefs tend to manifest in each of the four other domains listed above.

Multiplicity

We are all born (barring organic defects) with a whole and healthy Self-seed (our genetic and characterological template) that will become a mature sense of Self. However, no one escapes childhood without that Self being compromised in some way. Some children are so abused and/or neglected that they never develop a solid sense of self.

Consequently, parts of the self that are either overwhelming (emotional responses to trauma), unsafe (natural behaviors that are punished by caregivers), or not nurtured (for example, capacity for compassion or generosity) are split off from the Self and become self-fragments, ego states, parts, or subpersonalities that often remain unconscious and tend to show up in various forms of projection.

For each split off part, there is a part or parts that manages the outside world in some way to keep those "exiled" parts out of consciousness. Some of the common "managers" are the Pusher (focused on achievement and constant movement toward the next goal), Perfectionist (all or nothing thinking, a need for personal perfection, the failure of which brings intense shame), Pleaser (often middle children or first children who try to make everyone else happy, often at the expense of their own happiness), and the Inner Critic (a part who seeks to ensure the client is never criticized by others by being so hyper-critical of the client that any other criticism will be avoided). 

In order for splitting to become "hard-wired," there must be repeated episodes of the experiences that lead to the splitting. Normal misattunement between child and caregiver will not lead to splitting and, in fact, such misattunements are necessary for the development of resilience when they are quickly repaired by the caregiver.

Worldviews or Reality Frames

It is incumbant upon the therapist to be "experience near" (Kohut) with the client and be able to identify their basic worldview or reality model. This does not mean that the therapist necessarily supports the client's worldview, however, but it does require that the therapist be able to work within that reality frame.

It's also important that a client's worldview be held lightly - different parts of the client will possess alternate worldviews with anywhere from slight to profound variations.

Likewise, when a therapist encounters a new client whose worldview is unfamiliar (for example, someone from another country, or members of Tribal Nations, and so on), it is essential that therapists educate themselves as best they can and that they inquire with the client when they start to make assumptions about the client's experience that may not fit their reality frame.

Models of Psychotherapy

Successful therapeutic interventions require the all five domains are addressed. Here are a few examples of the therapeutic models that address the various domains:

Body - nutrition, exercise, somatic therapies (Somatic Experiencing, Bioenergetics, Yoga Therapy), behavioral psychotherapies, mindfulness-based therapies, Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS - "parts work"), Hakomi, Eye Movement Desensitization, and Reprocessing (EMDR)
Affect - affective neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, intersubjective and relational psychotherapies, mindfulness-based therapies, IFS
Cognitive - cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), neurolinguistic programming (NLP), rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT), script analysis (Transactional Analysis), existential psychotherapy, narrative therapy, IFS
Spiritual - transpersonal psychotherapy, Jungian Analytical Psychotherapy, contemplative practices, meta-narrative therapies, existential psychotherapy, IFS (developing "Self-Leadership"), expressive therapies
Core Beliefs - cognitive therapies, relational psychotherapies, IFS, narrative therapies, creative visualization, soul retrieval, expressive therapies

Undoubtedly, there are other models I am not familiar with or that have slipped my mind at the moment, so this list should not be taken as my final position on this topic.

Goals of Psychotherapy

First rule: Do No Harm. Second rule: It's not the therapy, it's the relationship.

If therapists can successfully follow these two rules, and hold a belief in the inherent ability of the client to heal, as well as a belief in the client's ability to know what therapeutic pace and which interventions are best for them, then the client becomes his or her own healer and the therapist simply "midwife" that process with them.

The goal is never to impose a therapist's sense of "mental health" but, rather, to explore with the client what their own sense of mental health looks like and feels like in their lives. Having done so, then it becomes easier for the therapist to identify with the client which areas or domains of their life are not functioning optimally.

Areas of less-than-optimal function are the adaptations defined as unskillful that therapy seeks to minimize while also helping the client learn skillful adaptations to replace those being minimized.

***

Okay then, that is my first-pass at a new model. Please share your thoughts, comments, and criticisms in the comments section here or at Facebook.