The 12 Frameworks
Twelve concept architectures, one thread.
What is the Regulation Thread?
The twelve TEG-Blue frameworks form one integrative arc. They connect what research usually keeps in separate fields — emotional regulation, identity, internal organization, and social systems — into a single architecture, by tracing one mechanism through all of them. This page lays out the whole arc: the twelve frameworks, and the thread that runs through them.
The nervous system is built to complete a cycle. It detects threat, mobilises, responds — and then restores: stress hormones clear, muscles release, the body returns to baseline. The frameworks follow what happens when that return is never learned — when the conditions that teach a developing nervous system how to restore were not there. The capacity exists. But the path back from activation is built through experience, and for many people, in ordinary environments that meet no clinical threshold, that experience never came.
A nervous system that cannot regulate does not stop. It compensates — and the same compensation repeats at every scale. In the individual, cognition stands in for restoration, and identity forms around the activation the body never completed. In relationships, the system recruits others to manage what it cannot settle internally. In groups and institutions, those compensations aggregate into structure: rules, worth hierarchies, perceptual bias, and — where those fail — domination.
This is the thread the frameworks are organized around, carried across all twelve as a single question: is what we call emotional dysregulation in a person and dysfunction in a society the same missing mechanism — restoration never learned — operating at different scales?
The frameworks fall into three arcs. Individual (F1–F3) traces the mechanism inside one nervous system. Collective (F4–F7) follows it into shared rules, hierarchies, and systems. Repair (F8–F12) describes how the return path rebuilds. Each stands on its own. Read together, they are the arc.
The biological architecture. How the nervous system evaluates safety, how it calibrates through development, and how cognition steps in when the return path is missing.
The scaling. How individual patterns become shared rules, how rules produce worth hierarchies, how hierarchies shape perception, and how protection escalates all the way to domination.
Reversal and restoration at every scale. Not by adding another substitute, but by building the original — rebuilding the awareness capacities, understanding variation, repairing generational patterns, holding paradox, and seeing the architecture underneath.
How do the four foundational models relate to the frameworks?
The frameworks explain why. The models provide what — the applied tools that practitioners, researchers, and individuals actually use.
M1 — The Nervous System Language
Emotions as Signals →
What is the nervous system delivering? Sixteen emotions mapped as biological signals.
M2 — Physiological Reorganization
Nervous System States →
Where is the needle, can it move, and what does the person have access to from where they are?
M3 — Biological Restoration
Regulation Capacities →
What happens to the body when the emotional cycle is not allowed to complete — and what would completion require?
M4 — RE, ER, SEA
Awareness Capacities →
What is the current configuration — which capacities had conditions to develop, and which didn't?
Mechanics of Phenomena
The frameworks explain the architecture. These essays show it operating — starting from observable problems, not from the framework. TEG-Blue appears when the explanation calls for it, not before.
Editorial Series
The Mechanics of Phenomena →
Why smart people make bad decisions. Why evidence fails. Why people are different depending on who’s watching. Long-form essays revealing the structure underneath.