THE SOCIAL ATOM: MAP THE PEOPLE WHO SHAPE YOUR LIFE

Based primarily on Scott Giacomucci, DSW, LCSW, The Social Atom and Sociometry, Phoenix Trauma Center, and on the sociometric work of J. L. Moreno.

YOUR RELATIONSHIPS FORM A LIVING SYSTEM

You do not live as an isolated individual. You live within a changing network of relationships—with family members, lovers, friends, coworkers, teachers, groups, communities, and other people who matter to you. Psychiatrist JACOB L. MORENO, founder of psychodrama and sociometry, called the smallest meaningful structure of this network your SOCIAL ATOM.

Your social atom includes the people who occupy important places in your emotional world. Some feel close. Others feel distant. Some relationships nourish you. Some involve conflict. Some people may be gone from your life but remain psychologically important. Your social atom therefore gives you a picture of YOU-IN-RELATIONSHIP rather than pretending that your feelings and problems exist entirely inside you.

DRAW YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

Scott Giacomucci describes a wonderfully simple way to make your social atom visible. Put YOURSELF in the center of a page. Then place the important people in your life around you.

You need not use traditional symbols that assign one shape to men and another to women. Instead, Giacomucci recommends allowing people to choose whatever shapes seem appropriate. The SIZE of a shape can show how much space that person occupies in your life. Its DISTANCE FROM YOU can show how emotionally close or distant you feel. Different kinds of lines can represent connection, conflict, loss, or other qualities of the relationship.

In ten or fifteen minutes, you may see something that hours of ordinary conversation failed to make obvious. You have transformed an invisible web of relationships into something you can actually look at.

MAP YOUR PAST, PRESENT, AND POSSIBLE FUTURE

Your social atom does not have to represent only today. Draw the social world you inhabited five, ten, or twenty years ago. Who surrounded you then? Who disappeared? Who came closer? Which kinds of relationships seem to repeat themselves?

Then draw the social atom you would LIKE TO HAVE IN THE FUTURE. Whom would you like closer? From whom might you need greater distance? What friendships, communities, groups, or loving relationships would you like to develop?

The social atom thus becomes more than an assessment. It can become a MAP FOR CHANGE.

FROM ONE PERSON TO AN ENTIRE SOCIETY

Moreno saw something larger in this deceptively simple exercise. Several relationships make a social atom. Social atoms connect with other social atoms to form SOCIAL NETWORKS. Networks connect with other networks and eventually form communities and societies.

Within these networks, people continually experience ATTRACTION AND REPULSION, CLOSENESS AND DISTANCE, BELONGING AND EXCLUSION. Moreno used the term SOCIOSTASIS for the tendency of this relational system to seek a kind of balance.

This perspective suggests that some of what we experience as an individual psychological problem may also arise from the relationships and social environments in which we live. Change the relationships, and sometimes you change the person’s experience of themselves.

PUT YOUR SOCIAL ATOM INTO ACTION

A social atom need not remain a drawing. In psychodrama, people can physically represent members of your social network. You can position them around you, experience how those relationships feel in your body, reverse roles, experiment with different distances and positions, and discover what happens when you alter the arrangement.

You can also include more than people. Depending upon what you want to understand, your social atom might contain GROUPS, COMMUNITIES, ORGANIZATIONS, WORK, SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, CREATIVE ACTIVITIES, PLACES, OR OTHER POWERFUL ELEMENTS OF YOUR LIFE.

The essential question remains wonderfully simple:

WHO AND WHAT SURROUNDS YOU—AND HOW DOES THAT CONSTELLATION SHAPE THE PERSON YOU BECOME?

Once you can SEE your social atom, you can begin asking another question:

HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHANGE IT?