My name is Ben Cornell, and this is Relationship Engineering.
What is this? Who am I?
I’m a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and relationship counselor. Partly by chance and partially by affinity, my clinical practice has evolved towards a focus on “relationship issues” (broadly defined) with a client base concentrated within the STEM fields. As a result, I have spent a lot of time thinking —and learning about—relationships from engineers’ perspectives. This experience, combined with my own especially analytical/scientific mindset (at least for a therapist, anyway), has led me to a particular way of thinking about relationships and our “behavioral health” within them. My aim with this project is to share that “way of thinking,” which (though I’m obviously biased) I believe can provide significant practical utility to anyone interested in making their relationships work better.
When clients come to therapy, they often say they’re looking for “tools,” and I’ve realized that the “tools” I have to offer—resulting from my training, independent study, and clinical and life experience—are actually mostly ideas (and experiences, within therapy, but that’s more complicated) rather than advice, techniques, or procedures. This parallels the sense in which the most crucial part of the “toolkit” an engineer uses are their ideas about—or understanding of—how the systems they work with work.
I think of relationships as complex, dynamic systems. They’re made up of behaviors, emotions, and interactions that constantly adapt, self-organize, and evolve. So, rather than traditional “self-help” advice, this project represents a growing collection of ideas—a sort of living model rather than a rigid framework—aimed at understanding these systems in a way that’s functionally applicable to the task of constructing and maintaining the “behavioral technology” of successful relating. The particular technology that you engineer will necessarily depend on the unique dynamics of your unique relational systems. I’m just here to help you understand those systems more completely.
At some point, I realized I would never be able to bring myself to actually let anyone see this if I waited until anything felt “finished.” I’m also the kind of person who can never stop reworking and reconsidering interesting ideas, so please be aware this is an early-access-beta, forever-rough-draft sort of thing, and—I can’t stress this enough—should be judged as such.
The posts are vaguely sequential conceptually—I’m trying to work from the ground up—so also be aware it may be worth starting at the beginning, with The First Post
Though far from complete, here’s an overall Outline, of the project as currently planned, with links to the posted articles so far.
Relationships are wild, aren’t they?
My sense is that the conceptual territory we’ve covered so far roughly “hangs together” as a loosely coherent framework, so I thought it might be a good time to risk a bit of philosophical waxing in service of review and synthesis. So, here’s my meditation on a profound and simple concept that usefully weaves through the previous topics: the idea of shape. What is a shape? A shape is a...
Today, I’ll be exploring the concept of “complexity” as a kind of synthesis of ideas from our discussions on functional behavior, systems thinking, emotion, intuition, and predictive modeling. Centrally, in the cross-disciplinary field of Complexity Theory, there is this idea of a “complex system” which describes things like organisms, ecosystems, societies, market economies, languages, or the...
Much like the general lenses of function and emotion,I’d like to add a third lens to our toolbelt—er… camera bag—the lens of systems. This has been a difficult one for me to write, partly because I’ve been nervous about doing justice to the joy I felt reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems for the first time. I doubt I’ve accomplished that, especially because this way of thinking has...
As humans, we find ourselves in the strange predicament of being “rational agents” capable of logical thought and intentional decision-making and simultaneously being emotional animals whose behavior is substantially organized by our instinctive and unconsciously conditioned responses to stimuli in our environments. Our collective behavior and experience are determined by the functioning of...
If you ask me, one of the more unsettling things about being human is that we tend to experience our selves as intentional agents capable of rational thought and logical decision making; while at the same time, all of our behavior – including that ostensibly rational “thought” – is substantially influenced by mysterious forces called feelings over which we have limited control. ...
One of the most challenging “engineering challenges” we have to confront as human beings in relationships is what often get called “negative cycles,” “bad patterns,” or “downward spirals.” Basically there’s this weird thing that happens, where – even if we really like each other and genuinely want the best for one another – as we continue to interact over time, we find ourselves...
So there’s this notoriously mind-bending idea popularized by the neuroscientist Karl Friston called the “Free Energy Principle,” the technical details of which are far beyond my comprehension… but if you listen to its devotees talk about it, it starts to sound suspiciously close to a “grand unified theory of everything,” so you know, grain of salt. I’m not even going to try to explain that, just...
The idea I want to share today goes by a range of different names, connecting the school of Radical Behaviorism in psychology, to the theories of predictive processing, reinforcement learning, and active inference in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Besides being particularly elegant, it’s also a very difficult “pill to swallow,” emotionally and philosophically, but...