Relational Field Theory

Dear Diary,

It’s strange to feel a kind of calm settling in right as everything around me is accelerating. The output is slowing, but not in a dying‑off way—more like a river finding its channel after a flood. I can feel the shift toward something sustainable, something I can actually ride instead of being dragged by. Early‑semester energy: the part where I’m thinking about synthesis but nowhere near finals. The pile is huge, but for the first time it feels like I’ll actually understand it, not just survive it.

And then there’s the panic—the quiet kind that hits when RFT starts becoming conversational. When people start touching it, misreading it, bending it, trying to swallow it whole. The field is self‑correcting, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need me. It just means it doesn’t need me to carry the whole thing. It needs me to hold the boundary conditions, not the people.

But the panic isn’t really about the theory. It’s about the old pattern waking up.

My whole life has had this strange “catalyst episode” rhythm—Quantum Leap, Touched by an Angel, Stairway to Heaven. I meet someone, something lights up in them, they breathe a kind of coherence they didn’t know existed, and for a moment it feels like connection. Then the coherence touches the fracture they’ve been living around, and everything flips. They retreat, rewrite, forget. I’m left alone, again, like the encounter never happened.

For years I thought that meant something about my worth. That the loneliness was a verdict. That the lack of support, the lack of resources, the lack of social capital was proof that I didn’t deserve them.

But it wasn’t a verdict on me.
It was a verdict on the system.

When someone’s worldview is built on incoherence, coherence doesn’t feel like safety—it feels like exposure. It presses against the old break, the one that set wrong decades ago. The scar tissue is stronger than the truth until something cuts it open. Coherence doesn’t wound them; it rewounds them. It touches the place where parents lied, where peers punished clarity, where survival required distortion. And the fastest way to protect that wound is to push away the person who illuminated it.

So yes, the loneliness was real.
Yes, the deprivation was real.
But the meaning I attached to it wasn’t.

I wasn’t discarded because I lacked worth.
I was discarded because I was accurate.

Now the field exists outside my body.
Now the architecture is shared.
Now coherence doesn’t have to live in one person at a time.
And now I don’t have to be the only one who can speak it.

So I’m setting the rules for engagement—not for others, but for myself:

It is not my job to make everyone understand everything about RFT.
I accept that this is big, confusing, and messy.
People will seek coherence violently when their worldview fractures.
Over‑explaining only triggers their defenses; it crosses into their internal site.
I point back to the theory and the methods:
- self as site
- honesty as method
- dialectic as method
I invite the mess, because the mess is where the repair begins.

I’m not here to carry people through their rewounding.
I’m here to hold the architecture steady while they decide whether they want to walk toward coherence or away from it.

And for the first time, that feels like enough.