Standing on the Backs of Giants
This is the first time I am putting this framework into the world in writing. Not because it is new to me. But because it has been forming quietly for years - through study, through lived experience, through coaching conversations, through watching patterns repeat in dating and romantic relationships.
Before I describe what I am building, I want to be clear about something: None of this exists in isolation. Anything I say about the nervous system, regulation, attachment, or relational behaviour stands firmly on the work of researchers and clinicians who came long before me. If my framework has depth, it is because I am standing on the backs of giants.
Modern nervous-system understanding owes an enormous debt to Stephen Porges, whose Polyvagal Theory reframed how we understand safety, connection, and physiological states. His work, and its translation by clinicians like Deb Dana, clarified something profound: Human behaviour is organized by nervous-system state before it is organized by logic.
Similarly, the trauma-informed somatic field has been shaped deeply by Peter Levine and the development of Somatic Experiencing, which emphasized nervous-system capacity, titration, and the body’s innate ability to process stress when given the right conditions.
These frameworks reshaped clinical psychology. They reshaped trauma work. And they reshaped how I see relationships.
What I Am Developing
Where these giants focused primarily on trauma resolution and clinical healing, I have been asking a different question:
How does nervous-system science organize everyday behaviour?
Over time I began noticing a pattern, when stress exceeds capacity, people move toward safety-seeking strategies (control, filtering, urgency, reassurance, rigidity). When capacity exceeds stress, people move toward connection-seeking strategies (curiosity, openness, slow unfolding, co-regulation, flexibility).
These are not personality types. They are nervous-system strategies under uncertainty.
This work is informed by trauma science. It is not trauma therapy. If someone is seeking deep trauma resolution or clinical intervention, that belongs in the hands of licensed therapists trained in those modalities.
My work lives in applied nervous-system awareness for relational life. It is about building capacity, recognizing stress patterns in real time and shifting from reactive safety-seeking to regulated connection-seeking. It is coaching work grounded in nervous-system science.
I am writing this as an opening marker. A declaration that this framework — still evolving, still being refined — is ready to be shared publicly. I do not claim to have invented nervous-system science. I claim to be translating it into the lived. This is the beginning of articulating that work clearly and publicly. And like any serious framework, it will continue to deepen over time.
Frameworks that pretend to be born in isolation are fragile, while frameworks that acknowledge their lineage are stronger.
If this work resonates, it is because it draws from decades of autonomic nervous system research, trauma-informed somatic science, clinical observation and lived relational experience. My role is not to replace those giants, but it is to build forward from them. This post marks the first step in sharing that build.