The Dynamics: the forces that move us through recovery
Before we explore the landscape of healing, we need to understand the currents that carry us across it. Here is an overview of the five Dynamics of Anastasis.
▶ Watch the film — Communion and Committee Opens on YouTube in a new window.
If the Domains of Anastasis are the places we journey through, the Dynamics are the forces that move us — or hold us back. I define a dynamic simply as a force that affects progress and/or change. And the process of overcoming developmental and relational trauma is, frankly, full of them: contradictory currents, inside us and around us, that by turns challenge, enable and inhibit our healing.
There are five Dynamics in the model. They can complement one another and they can contradict one another, and when they are held in balance and awareness they become a real source of healing as we travel through the Domains. In this post I want to give you the shape of all five together, so that the more detailed posts that follow have a frame to hang on.
Two relationships: the crucible of change
The first two Dynamics are about relationship, because relationship is the crucible in which relational healing happens. Communion is our relationship with others — and, I would add, with the transpersonal, the Source. Committee is our relationship with ourselves: with the many inner ‘voices’ we each carry, introjected from caregivers and developed in response to life.
These two must be held in balance. If we live entirely self-referentially, lost in our own inner committee, we lose the corrective mirror that other people offer. If we live entirely for the opinions and approval of others, we lose ourselves. Health lies in the holding of both — aware of our own inner world, and genuinely open to the world outside us — while remembering our finite human place in something larger than ourselves.
Our relationships with others mirror our relationship with ourselves. The way I respond to you is, more often than not, a reflection of how parts of me relate to each other.
Three movements: how we actually travel
The other three Dynamics describe the movement of the journey itself, and they too are interrelated — I separate them only for clarity. Think of riding a bicycle. Pedalling produces movement; movement is what makes steering and balance possible. Or think of walking: we need both legs to propel us, change direction and stay upright. We cannot get far on one leg. In the same way, real progress asks us to combine movement, direction and balance.
Labyrinth is the movement — the winding pathway we walk towards Anastasis. It is forward motion, but it is honest about the twists and turns, the sense of going two steps forward and three steps back. On paper I can only draw it in two dimensions, but in lived reality it has peaks and troughs, highs and lows, light and darkness. It takes us higher and deeper at the same time.
Omnibalance is the balance — the steering of our polarities and contradictions so that we do not, as it were, fall off the bike. It is the gradual mastery of both-and over either/or; the capacity to hold contradictory feelings without obliterating either of them.
The Vortex is what happens when the movement becomes too much — when it spins out of control and overwhelms us, or when the freeze and flop responses take over and we feel powerless, stuck, and sucked down the plughole. It names the dissociative episodes and flashbacks that are so much a part of living with trauma, and it offers a way through them.
Why name them at all?
You might reasonably ask why we need this vocabulary. After all, attachment, dissociation, the window of tolerance and the rest already have their own established literature — and Anastasis draws gratefully on all of it, on Bowlby and Ainsworth, on Rogers and Erikson, on Porges and van der Kolk and Bradshaw. The answer is that survivors do not experience their inner life as a set of clinical categories. They experience it as a journey, a committee, a vortex. Metaphor reaches places that diagnosis cannot. When a client tells me they feel like they are ‘in Groundhog Day, on repeat,’ or that ‘all my energy has gone down the plughole,’ they are describing the Vortex with great precision — and giving them a shared language for it is itself part of the healing.
This is also why these Dynamics matter so much for those of us who practise. To accompany someone wisely, we need to be able to feel where they are in their own currents: whether they are moving, balancing, or being swept away; whether the work right now is with their Communion or their Committee. The five Dynamics give us a way of tracking that — not to label the person, but to attune to them.
How the Dynamics behave in the room
It helps to see how these forces actually interact, because they rarely arrive one at a time. Imagine a client who comes to a session having bumped into an estranged family member at a wedding. The encounter has thrown her into the Vortex — she is foggy, slightly outside her body, much younger than her years. Her Committee is in uproar: a frightened child member has seized the microphone, while a harsh introjected voice insists the whole thing was her fault. Her Communion with you, the therapist, is the only steadying relationship in the room, and your calm, regulated presence is doing the co-regulating that her own system cannot yet manage. The work of that hour is not to ‘process the wedding’. It is to help her find the still centre of the Vortex, settle the Committee, and recover enough Omnibalance to step back onto the path of her Labyrinth.
Notice that all five Dynamics are present at once, and that they are pulling in different directions. This is the ordinary texture of trauma work. A practitioner who can feel which force is dominant in a given moment — and which one the client needs help to access — can respond far more precisely than one who is simply trying to be warm and hope for the best. Warmth matters enormously; it is just not, by itself, enough.
The Dynamics also remind us that healing is not only cognitive. A great deal of it happens below the level of words, in the body and the nervous system, in the felt sense of safety that grows between two people over many months. The vocabulary of Anastasis is there to help us stay attuned to that slower, deeper movement, rather than rushing the person towards insight before their system is ready to hold it.
Held together
Over the next four posts I will take each of the moving Dynamics in turn — Communion and Committee together, then Labyrinth, then Omnibalance, then the Vortex. As you read, try to hold them lightly and all at once. None of them works alone. Like pedalling, steering and balancing, they are only really useful together, and the art of the work is in how they combine. That art is precisely what we practise, slowly and experientially, on the Level 7 course.
For now, take heart. These forces are not your enemy. Even the Vortex, even the long demoralising stretches of the Labyrinth, are part of how we are carried towards a fuller life. Let us begin where we all began — in relationship.
A word for those newer to this work
If you are an accredited counsellor but relatively new to complex trauma, you may be feeling both drawn to this and slightly daunted by it. That is exactly the right response, and I want to honour it. Working with developmental and relational trauma asks more of us than general counselling does — more steadiness, more self-knowledge, a wider window of tolerance of our own. It is not work to be rushed into, and the Dynamics are part of how we learn to do it safely, for the client and for ourselves. None of us arrives fully formed. I certainly did not. We grow into this capacity gradually, through our own personal work, through good supervision, and through learning a framework solid enough to lean on when a session gets hard. That is precisely what an unhurried, deliberately small training cohort is for.
A few questions to sit with
- Which of the five Dynamics do you recognise most readily in your clients — and which in yourself?
- When you feel ‘stuck’ with a client, is it a problem of movement, of balance, or of being overwhelmed?
- How comfortable are you, honestly, holding both-and rather than either/or?
About the course
The Anastasis Model sits at the heart of a Level 7 Diploma in trauma-informed, advanced therapeutic practice — written for accredited counsellors and psychotherapists who want to work more deeply with developmental and relational trauma, and who are moving towards senior accreditation (SCoPEd Column C).
It runs online, with three in-person residentials, over fifteen months: October 2026 to December 2027. The group is deliberately small — capped at twelve — so no one is ever just a face in a crowded screen. The fee is £5,250, with payment plans available.
To enquire, email training@authentictandt.uk or call Annie on 07949 677405. We shape the cohort together through conversation, so do get in touch early.