Essays

Relationships, family systems, and patterns

A direction to look in →

Foundations
Confabulation · Truth · Utility

The Story

The unconscious decides, the conscious explains. On why introspection lies, where truth actually lives, and the second question that still works when truth is out of reach.

Mitochondria · Cognition · Lineage

The Engine, Not the Blueprint

She carries the engine. He shops for shields and fuel. The story we tell about reproduction has been running on borrowed power for ten thousand years.

Information · Survival · Mechanics

The Log File

What survives in DNA is not what was chosen. It is what was not eliminated. Two channels, two timescales, one filter that has been running for hundreds of millions of years.

Energy · Game Theory · Behavior

The Strategies That Remained

Nobody chose them. They survived because the alternatives didn't. The behavioral patterns of men and women as energy-allocation strategies, optimized for two different survival games.

Biology · Culture · Naming

How We Got Here

Three channels carry information through time. She owns one. He built another. The naming system tracks neither honestly.

Attachment & Family Systems
Attachment · Encounter · Becoming

The Curriculum

Your partner isn't your problem. They're your teacher. The nervous-system science behind anxious and avoidant attachment, why standard couples therapy makes it worse, and what actually works.

Defense · Structure · Self

The Closed Loop

A narcissist isn't someone with a bigger story. They're someone for whom defending the story has become more urgent than updating it. On the structure underneath the symptoms.

Defense · Pairing · Collapse

The Mirror Breaks

Avoidants and narcissists pair because their defenses interlock. The arrangement is stable — until the avoidant grows. On what happens when the mirror starts perceiving on its own.

Anxious · Narcissist · Bond

The Hook

The anxious nervous system carries one belief — if I love harder, they'll love back. The narcissistic structure is the partner precisely engineered to keep that belief set forever. On the trauma bond as a mechanism, not a metaphor.

Narcissist · Narcissist · Collision

The Duel

Two structures, both demanding the mirror, neither willing to be one. Why these pairings burn so brightly and end so badly. On what happens when two stories meet that cannot share a room.

Avoidant · Avoidant · Distance

The Agreement

Two people who agreed, mostly without saying so, not to ask too much. On the avoidant–avoidant pairing — what it looks like, why it lasts, and the specific kind of loneliness it produces.

Anxious · Anxious · Amplification

The Echo

Two anxious systems facing each other amplify the signal instead of attenuating it. Every micro-shift reads as evidence. On what happens when both partners are scanning the same sky for storms — and the rare repair available when both speak the language.

Secure · Anxious · Repair

The Steady One

How earned security actually develops. The secure partner does not perform reassurance — they just stay the same shape, week after week, until the anxious nervous system starts to believe it.

Secure · Avoidant · Approach

The Slow Yes

The harder repair. A secure partner can offer the conditions for an avoidant to soften, but cannot do the work for them. On what it takes to be allowed close to a structure built to keep everyone out, and what the avoidant has to learn to give.

Systems · Roles · Patterns

The Narcissistic Family System

How the roles we learned at home follow us to work — and what it takes to see the system clearly.

Culture & the Modern World
Competition · Script · Cover

The Costume of Solidarity

Female intrasexual competition rarely arrives looking like competition. It arrives looking like kindness.

Curiosity · Belonging · Compassion

The Incurious Generation

Why is every article low key making fun of a generation.

Dopamine · Intimacy · Presence

The Attention Recession

Why the real crisis isn't sexlessness — it's that nobody is paying attention to anyone anymore.

Abundance · Atrophy · The Quiet After

Her Abundance

The self-defeating architecture of a life modern women build to never need anyone.

Longing · Performance · Retreat

The Courtyard

A thousand years of men performing for each other instead of walking up the stairs.

Agency · Masculinity · The Room

Go Talk to Her

The self-inflicted catastrophe of choosing theory over action.

Presence · Consciousness · The Unnamed

The Open Line

What technology cannot replicate, and what we lost the vocabulary to name.

Chosen · Not · Negotiated

What It Could Be

Serial monogamy is a sequence of cohabitation and sex treaties, each at the same floor. On the chosen bond — what the body has been reaching for all along, why the surrounding industry is structurally aligned against it, and how therapy treats the symptoms of the treaty while calling the management growth.

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