Have you come across the term “rewilding”? It was coined in the 1990’s with the environment in mind – restoring large, self-regulating ecosystems: Reintroducing apex predators like wolves or cougars, removing barriers such as fences and roads, and allowing natural processes to re-establish balance. (Remember the resurgence of wildlife into urban environments and decrease in pollution during the pandemic when human activity decreased?) In the 2010’s, the concept of rewilding crossed over into the human psychology realm: Reconnecting people with their natural rhythms, instincts, and environments – essentially restoring balance between the modern, constructed world with our innate biological and emotional needs. This approach views psychological health as inseparable from ecological health. In essence, it suggests that many modern mental health struggles – anxiety, disconnection, burnout, depression – stem from “psychological domestication” and disconnection from the natural world. Therapeutic rewilding seeks to restore a sense of belonging, vitality, and coherence by re-engaging people with nature and their own embodied instincts. [Note: Definition of rewilding aided by ChatGPT]
I had already started thinking about the concept of rewilding in terms of mental health when the article “Sukkot and the Brain’s Art of Impermanence: How nomadism and neuroscience can help us find peace in uncertainty” by Alison Avigayl, came across my radar. The title caught my eye because it ties together a Jewish holiday with ancient human behavior AND neuroscience. Here’s a few passages:
“Modern society has long treated a “stable house and job” as the ultimate markers of success and maturity. Though our grandparents, and even our parents, were likely able to achieve this, for roughly ninety-five percent of our species’ existence, humans lived on the move. Only in the past ten thousand years have we begun to settle, trading open horizons for certain walls. For most of our history, we spent our days walking -following rivers, herds, plant cycles, and constellations of stars – and dwelling in impermanent structures with others.” “The skills we needed to survive were those of attunement. Our sense of knowing arose from an embodied experience of the world – a living dialogue between our bodies, brains, and the landscapes we moved through – not from control and cognition, rationality and abstraction. This way of life required minds finely tuned to spatial awareness, pattern recognition, memory, and social coordination rather than symbolic reasoning or detached analysis.”
And later: “The more I practice stillness amid uncertainty, the more efficiently my mind and body work together. Neuroscientists call this interoceptive awareness – the capacity to sense internal signals like heartbeat, breath, and subtle emotion. As this awareness strengthens, the brain’s default mode network—responsible for rumination and self-referential thought—begins to quiet, while the salience and attentional networks synchronize, allowing insight to surface without strain. Decisions come with less effort because perception itself becomes clearer; attention moves fluidly between intuition and reason.” Sounds a lot like Wise Mind in DBT, eh?
Passages like these sparked the understanding that reawakening (aka rewilding) our ancient survival thinking and behaviors that connect us to ourselves, to others and to the planet, first requires us to gain full awareness of any cognitions we may have that impair healthy functioning of our instinctual drives. And here comes the lightbulb moment: This is exactly what Dr. Perepletchikova’s Core Problem Analysis (CPA) does! Through decades of working with clients of all ages, she identified organically from the ground up the instinctual core senses of Safety, Belonging and Self-Love that drive our behavior as humans, and developed the CPA assessment and intervention tool to bring unconscious “malware in our brain software”* that causes vulnerabilities in these core senses to the conscious level of awareness so that we can override them with adaptive programs…and get on the psychological rewilding path!
For a deeper dive into each core sense, see these past articles and interviews on CPA on Dr. Perepletchikova’s ChildDBT site:
- Introduction to Core Problem Analysis:
- Sense of Self-Love:
- Sense of Safety:
- Sense of Belonging:
Bottom line: Whether you call it psychological rewilding or emotion regulation, the journey and the destination are the same.
*”Malware in our brain software” is Dr. Perepletchikova’s metaphor for a virus program that we construct via assigning meaning and making interpretation, where what is not real is treated as if it is. An example of this is the concept of self-worth: We are not born with price tags. We just are – we are entities of human beings, neither good nor bad. Only our actions can be useful or not useful, given our goals. When “what I do” is merged with “who I am” a virus program is written, damaging our relationship with self and causing suffering.