Why do we become different people under stress?
The shifts aren’t random — they follow a pattern in the nervous system. Drag across it and watch what changes.
Safe with others. The whole field stays readable.
Empathy full · Emotions open · Repair open
Understand your own shifts
Why the same emotion feels different depending on where your body thinks it is.
Use it with people ↗
Practical tools for reading patterns, boundaries, and repair in real relationships.
Review the science
Which research grounds each part of the map — and where each claim stops.
Move through the Gradient. Watch what changes.
Fluid Gradient: state is moving, and capacity shifts with conditions. Click a position to see what becomes available — perception, tempo, emotion, empathy, and repair.
Connection / Belonging
Safety with others — social engagement and co-regulation are available.
Research on social perception, attachment, and co-regulation grounds this: safety with others keeps face, tone, timing, and shared meaning readable (Porges, Bowlby, Siegel).
From state shifts to relationship patterns
The Gradient connects changes that are often considered separately — while keeping impact, accountability, and boundaries in view.
Hover a claim’s sources to see exactly which research grounds it.
Emotion as information
Feelings can signal body state, need, boundary, impact, or repair — without becoming automatic fact.
Why care is not always enough
Under threat, empathy and repair can narrow even when care is present.
How rupture repeats
A short-term shift can become a familiar pattern of distance, defence, withdrawal, or pressure for certainty.
How protection can become control
Repeated protection may organize around managing, testing, pursuing, avoiding, or overriding another person’s options.
What repair requires
Repair depends on enough capacity for impact, empathy, accountability, boundary, and changed pattern to become available.
What research supports — and where its limits are
TEG-Blue organizes existing research into a visual framework. Established science grounds specific parts of the map; no single source is treated as proof of the whole architecture. Each part is checked separately.
Gradient & autonomic state
Autonomic neuroscience, neuroception, and stress physiology ground the safety–threat axis, mobilisation, inhibition, chronic load, and return.
Perception & cognition
Appraisal research, attention, prediction, cognitive load, and state-shaped perception ground the narrowing or widening of the field.
Awareness & body signals
Interoception and body-awareness research ground the way inner signals become available, muted, narrowed, or difficult to name.
Emotion & action readiness
Affective neuroscience and emotion science ground emotional salience, body signals, urgency, and action readiness.
Relationship & repair
Attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, trauma and developmental research ground proximity, rupture, protection, co-regulation, and repair.
Context & scale
Psychology, social psychology, sociology, and anthropology locate overlapping parts of the map without owning the whole architecture.