A crucial prerequisite to externalized adaptation is an understanding of how components are interconnected, or more particularly how and why they depend on one another. Such dependencies can be used to provide an architectural model, which provides a reference point for externalized adaptation. In this paper, it is described how dependencies are used as a basis to systems' self-understanding and subsequent architectural reconfigurations.The approach is based on the combination of: instrumentation services, a dependency meta-model and a system controller. In particular, the latter uses self-healing repair rules (or conflict resolution strategies), based on an Extensible Beliefs, Desires and Intention (EBDI) model, to reflect reconfiguration changes back to a target application under examination.