The social atom

The social atom goes back to Jacob Levy Moreno, who assumed that people carry within them a subjectively experienced and interpreted network of relationships which embeds the individual in this world.

To work out the coachee's social atom, the coachee is first asked to find a symbol for themselves on a sheet of paper or a flip chart. The coachee then adds another symbol, which may represent an important person, an animal, a hobby, work or something similar. Next, the intensity of the relationship is shown by the number of lines drawn between the "self symbol" and the symbol just added. If the relationship is painful or negative, this is indicated by a line drawn across it that "crosses out" the relationship line. The symbol is then given the number "1". The process is repeated until the coachee has represented all of their important relationships.

The coachee has now expressed their current, unconscious network of relationships. This network can then be explored – for example, by the coach drawing the coachee's attention to the order in which the symbols were drawn, to the size or appearance of a symbol, or to its distance from the coachee's own symbol. In this way, the coachee learns to perceive and understand their network of relationships consciously, and can deliberately change relationships or draw on them when making decisions.