Relational Field Theory

ASIDE: When the Theory Lived in My Body Before I Had the Words

This is one of those moments where I step out of the main text and speak directly to you — not as a theorist, but as someone who lived the architecture long before I could name it.

There was a time in my life when I carried a truth so large it didn’t fit inside any language I had. It lived in my body instead — in my choices, in my instincts, in the way I moved through the world. I didn’t know it then, but I was living the very principles this book is now naming: relational coherence, embodied plurallility, honesty as method, self as site, and the quiet violence of transactional collapse.

The clearest example comes from the years I spent as a surrogate.

Every conversation around me revealed the same thing:
I was a relational person inside a transactional system.
And the mismatch was so stark that it made me the scapegoat — the one who carried the emotional truths the system refused to face.

People told me they “could never do what I was doing.”
They confessed their fears, their worthiness metrics, their assumptions about what a body is worth and who gets to be a parent. They spoke from scarcity, hierarchy, and collapse — not because they were unkind, but because the system had trained them to think that way.

Meanwhile, I was living something entirely different.

We had weekly dinners.
I brought printouts of the baby’s development.
When she was kidney‑bean sized, I brought a kidney bean.
My kids came with me.
Their families came too.
We talked openly about the changes in my body and the changes in theirs.
We built a field where no one had to collapse to stay connected.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was practicing relational coherence — staying fully myself while staying fully in connection. I was practicing embodied plurallility — holding multiple roles without collapsing into any single one. I was practicing honesty as method — telling the truth not to provoke, but to keep the field coherent. I was practicing self as site — understanding that the real fieldwork was happening in my body, not in a notebook.

And because I could hold all of that, everyone else projected their collapse onto me.

That’s what scapegoating is:
the relational person becomes the container for everyone else’s fear.

Their fear was simple and human:
What if we put in and don’t get out?
What if we love and lose?
What if we trust and get hurt?

They weren’t afraid of me.
They were afraid of the system that had already failed them.

And when the baby was born, the system reclaimed them.
The relational container dissolved.
The collapse returned.
The last $3000 never came.
The comments about my own kids arrived instead.
The connection frayed.

I wasn’t surprised by myself.
I was surprised by everyone else.

For years, I tried to turn this into a thesis.
I failed — not because the idea was wrong, but because the language didn’t exist yet.
The truth was too alive for the academic container I was given.

It never rested.
Not for a single second.

And now, finally, I can set it down — not as a wound, but as a chapter.
Not as a burden, but as a field.
Not as something I carried alone, but as something that can now be shared.

If you’ve ever lived a truth your world couldn’t yet name, this chapter is for you.
You weren’t wrong.
You were early.