Chapter 38 · Canonical English edition

38. Closing: My Personal Position

Functional Systems Facilitation · Dmitry Shamenkov

Section 48 of 53version 1.1 · July 2026Source: Book_OD
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38. Closing: My Personal Position

I will end this document as I began it — directly and in the first person.

What I Know

I am convinced, on the basis of long practice and the data we have so far, that FSF helps many people — though I hold this as informed conviction, not proof, and the definitive trial still lies ahead. That conviction rests on twenty-five years of clinical, research, and educational practice; on thousands of case discussions conducted personally; on tens of thousands of program participants; on three independent quantitative studies; on an enormous corpus of living reflections; and on the convergent, supportive evidence from related methods.

I take the method to draw on several lines of thinking that I read as compatible — the theory of functional systems of academicians P. K. Anokhin and K. V. Sudakov, predictive coding in modern neuroscience, Michael Levin’s biology of collective intelligence, and the evidence base on acceptance, mindfulness, group formats, and purposeful living. I do not claim these have been unified into a single proven framework; I interpret them as converging.

I know that the method continues to develop — in my PhD program in Lisbon, in the work of an international scientific team, in the preparation of a new RCT, in the ongoing analysis of empirical data from practice, and in its expansion into new countries and languages.

What I Do Not Know

I do not know exactly how the method will work for a particular person who reads it. Every living system is unique, and I cannot predict an individual trajectory.

I do not know all the limits of the method — we keep discovering them in practice. Some I have described in this Part VII; others are probably still ahead.

I do not know the final form of the method — it is alive and keeps evolving. What I describe ten years from now will differ from what I describe today.

What the Method Does Not Do

The method does not turn you into a different person. It helps you meet the person you already are, beneath the defenses and the masks.

The method does not solve your problems for you. It creates conditions in which you can solve them yourself.

The method does not replace life. It returns you to life.

The method does not guarantee a result. It raises the probability that a living system will have the conditions under which it can reorganize and recover.

What the Method Gives Those Who Are Ready for It

For those who come ready to engage, the method often supports:

  • Clearer contact with yourself — the ability to distinguish your real states from your reactions;

  • Restored capacities for closeness — where they had been lost;

  • Genuine purposes — grown from depth rather than constructed by anxiety;

  • A supportive community — people with whom you can walk a long path;

  • Steadiness in difficult situations — the ability to move through crises without destroying yourself;

  • Joy as a background state — for many, a steadier baseline some describe as an underlying sense of joy, less an achievement than a natural quality of living in contact with yourself and the world.

These are not small things. Where they appear, they change a life.

What I Think About the Future

I believe approaches that treat people as living systems — rather than as symptoms to be “fixed” — have an important place in the future of mental and general health. I see lines from Anokhin and Sudakov, from Rogers and Grawe, from Friston and Levin, from the meta-analyses of ACT and mindfulness, from the data on social connectedness and purposefulness, that — as I read them — point in a similar direction: a human being is not a machine, and helping one is not a repair. A human being is a living system, and help is the creation of conditions. This is my synthesis, not a settled scientific consensus.

FSF is one realization of this approach. Not the only one and, I hope, not the last. But one that has been worked through, tested by time, supported by data, and developed within an academic program.

Gratitude

I am grateful to everyone who has passed through the program over these twenty-five years. Each of you — through your reflections, your breakthroughs, your difficulties, your questions — helped make the method what it is now.

I am grateful to my teachers and colleagues — academician K. V. Sudakov, my co-researchers, my scientific team, and all 1,000+ certified facilitators who carry out this work in different countries and languages.

I am grateful to my family — for their understanding, their support, and the space in which this work became possible.

And I am grateful to you, the reader, for staying with this document to the end. That is already a significant step — to take seriously what you want to pursue in the realm of your own development.

The path onward is yours.

In Place of a Closing Metaphor

I want to end not with a metaphor but with plain speech.

If you are here, now, reading these words, then you carry some living request, some living curiosity, some living doubt. And all of that consists of signs of a living system searching for how to be more fully itself.

That is the one essential condition for everything described in this document. Not education, not age, not profession, not country, not language. A readiness to be alive.

If it is there, this method may suit you.

If it is genuinely absent right now, this method is unlikely to reach you — though other forms of help still can.

That is all I can honestly say.

Dmitry Shamenkov
Lisbon, April 2026

In the Appendices to this document: a complete list of my published works, monographs, and patents; a glossary of key terms; a list of recommended reading for further study; and the full text of the protocol of the planned RCT (NCT07276451).