Essays
I do not write about one subject. I tend to follow the same questions through different systems. Some pieces establish principles. Some explain where the lens came from. Some build models. Others apply those models to religion, trauma, organizations, technology, culture, and whatever else seems worth pulling apart.
Start Here
Principles
The basic rules I use when evaluating claims, systems, beliefs, and outcomes.
Why I Write About These ThingsIn progress
Why technology, trauma, religion, belief, healing, organizations, and human behavior are not unrelated subjects to me.
Why It MattersIn progress
Why getting the mechanism wrong matters, especially when we turn adaptation into character judgment or containment into healing.
The Reach
The central idea behind the book and much of the human systems work.
Containment Versus HealingIn progress
A foundational distinction between something that stabilizes a person and something that actually changes the condition producing the need for stabilization.
Principles
A question is only meaningful to the degree you are willing to let it cost you certainty.
How I examine claims, question certainty, understand systems, and determine what needs to change. These are working principles, not settled truths. They change when they fail.
UnderstandRepresentation, causality, evidence
- The model is not the thing.
Every model simplifies reality. Understand what it excludes, where it fails, and what happens when we mistake it for the thing it represents.
- Follow the mechanism, not just the outcome.
An outcome tells us what happened. Understanding the mechanisms that produced it tells us why it happened and what might change it.
- Never mistake certainty for evidence.
The strength of someone's conviction tells us nothing about the reliability of the process by which they arrived at it.
InvestigateInquiry, architecture, adaptation
- A question should be allowed to change the questioner.
If no possible answer could change what I believe, I'm not investigating. I'm defending a conclusion.
- Inspect the architecture before judging the behavior.
Understand the conditions, constraints, incentives, and adaptations producing an outcome before assigning responsibility. Explanation is not exoneration.
- Today's dysfunction may be yesterday's solution.
Systems preserve adaptations long after the conditions that made them useful have changed. Ask what a behavior originally accomplished and what it costs now.
EvaluateEffectiveness, boundaries, costs, revision
- Relief is not necessarily resolution.
A system can become more stable without correcting the conditions that made stabilization necessary. Measure what changed, at what layer, and what remains.
- Every explanation has boundaries.
Ask under what conditions a claim holds, where it stops working, who it excludes, and what alternative explanations remain possible.
- Follow the cost, including who pays it.
Every decision, belief, and intervention has consequences. Evaluate not only the benefits a system produces, but the costs it transfers to others.
- Apply the same scrutiny to your own conclusions.
A method that can expose everyone else's assumptions but cannot revise its own is another mechanism for protecting certainty.
This one governs the others.
Why I Talk About These Things
Why I Write About These ThingsIn progress
Connecting technology systems, religious systems, family systems, nervous systems, institutions, and belief systems.
Why It MattersIn progress
The cost of getting mechanisms wrong.
Foundations
Personal pieces that establish the lived context behind the work.
What My ACE Score ExplainedIn progress
Twenty Years of Ministry Didn't Heal MeIn progress
The Strategies That Saved MeIn progress
Scanning, fixing, performing, and other adaptive strategies.
When the Body Finally Said NoIn progress
Why I Pressure Test BeliefsIn progress
Models & Mechanisms
The canonical explanations. Each model has its own page in Ideas.
Attachment in MotionIn progress
Umbrella model for understanding attachment, regulation, identity, borrowed safety, and what happens under pressure.
Borrowed SafetyIn progress
How people use relationships, achievement, certainty, institutions, substances, roles, and other external sources to regulate internal states.
The ReachIn progress
The motion toward something outside ourselves when the system needs stability.
The Regulatory Access GapIn progress
Why interventions that work for one person may remain functionally inaccessible to another even when both understand what they are supposed to do.
ContainmentIn progress
How systems can successfully reduce instability while leaving the condition generating it largely intact.
Fastest Stability PrincipleIn progress
The tendency of systems under pressure to reuse the fastest available route to perceived stability at the lowest perceived cost.
Self-Sourced AttachmentIn progress
Definition in progress.
Containment LoopIn progress
Definition in progress.
Dyadic CollapseIn progress
Definition in progress.
Identity PatternsIn progress
Definition in progress.
Applied Essays
The architecture used against specific subjects: religion, healing systems, self help, achievement, leadership, organizations, technology, AI, culture, and more.
Applied essays will appear here as they are published. Use the topic filters below to browse everything by subject.
Current Thinking
Not every idea begins finished. Some pieces are exploratory, responsive, or simply me thinking in public. Those live on Substack.
All Essays
No essays match those filters yet.