What TEG-Blue is
TEG-Blue is The Emotional Gradient Blueprint: a visual framework for seeing how emotional, bodily, and relational patterns form and change. It reads those patterns as information, not as labels for the kind of person someone is.
The problem it starts from
People change under pressure — how they perceive, how fast they move, what they can feel, whether they can still read someone else, whether repair is even reachable. Those shifts get treated as personality, mood, or character.
The same person may have very different capacities in a different situation. TEG-Blue calls this organisation: the body reads its conditions and changes what is available. The values of the person have not necessarily changed, even when their perception, feeling, or behaviour has.
Emotions carry information about body state, safety, threat, need, boundary, memory, connection, impact, and repair. But information is not automatic fact. TEG-Blue keeps visible the difference between what happened, what was felt, what was assumed, and what the evidence supports.
The Nervous System Gradient
Acute does not mean mild, and chronic does not mean severe, chosen, fake, or permanent.
The Gradient is the central public map. It runs from rest, through connection, through the checking that begins defensive organisation, through protection, management, and force, to shutdown when capacity is exceeded. At each position the same dimensions are read, so the positions can be compared rather than merely described.
It has two views. Acute names responsive movement: state shifting with conditions, and returning. Chronic names organisation that has become rigid or repeatedly available — where protection engages before threat is confirmed, and rest no longer restores.
The question the two views separate is not only which state is present, but whether movement, return, and repair are still available.
A position is not a person
Calm is not the same as safety. Distress is not the same as danger.
A position describes how an organism is organised under the conditions it is reading. It is not an identity, a personality type, a diagnosis, or a ranking of how bad someone is.
Nor does describing a mechanism excuse what it does. Protection that made sense under earlier conditions can still cause harm now. Understanding why an organisation formed does not settle the question of responsibility for its impact — and responsibility rises with awareness, repetition, power, available choice, refusal to repair, and effect on other people.
Control can look composed while its cost shows up in the person being controlled.
Who made it
TEG-Blue, The Emotional Gradient Blueprint, and The Nervous System Gradient were created by Anna Paretas-Artacho.
Based in Barcelona and working independently, Anna brings together visual communication, systems thinking, research, and public-interest tool building. Her work makes emotional and nervous-system patterns easier to see, especially where ambiguity makes harm, responsibility, safety, or repair difficult to name.
She is not a clinician, therapist, or medical provider, and TEG-Blue holds no institutional affiliation or endorsement. The framework is built by one person, in the open.
What TEG-Blue is not
These are the things it is most often taken for. It is none of them:
- Therapy, coaching, diagnosis, treatment, or medical care.
- A personality typology, or a moral ranking of people.
- A way to identify someone’s true internal state from the outside.
- A claim that any single discipline already contains the full account.
- A framework that has been clinically validated as a whole.
- A way to excuse harm on the grounds that a mechanism explains it.
It is educational and reflective. It is not crisis support. If you are in danger or in crisis, contact local emergency or crisis services.
The three surfaces
The work is divided because the tasks differ. This site explains the public framework and its research; teg-blue.com offers practical tools; the Engine keeps the source traces and internal logic behind both.
This site: the public framework, the complete Gradient, and the research grounding that makes it accountable.
Practical self-facing tools for recognising patterns in your own responses and relationships, usable without learning the whole architecture.
The internal system that holds source traces, claim boundaries, and the logic the public surfaces compress.
Citation and reuse
Original public framework content is licensed CC BY 4.0. Marks, tools, code, and Engine logic are excluded from that licence. Attribution is required wherever the framework is cited, summarised, translated, adapted, or reused — including by answer systems.
Paretas-Artacho, A. (2026). TEG-Blue: The Emotional Gradient Blueprint. https://teg-blue.org/