Regulatory Dynamics in the Unfolding Field Model
The three constitutive tensions of adaptive experience
The Unfolding Field Model proposes that adaptive experience does not unfold in a straight line. It moves within a set of ongoing tensions. These tensions are not problems to resolve. They are built into the structure of adaptive life itself.
The model identifies three such tensions. Each describes a pair of opposing pulls that operate across all five layers of experience. Together, they are called the Regulatory Dynamics. They offer a precise and practical lens for clinical work — and for anyone trying to understand why experience sometimes feels stuck, flooded, or out of balance.
What Regulatory Dynamics Are
Each regulatory dynamic describes a tension between two poles. Neither pole is the healthy option. Neither is the pathological one. What matters is whether a person can move between them in response to changing conditions.
When experience collapses into one pole and stays there, flexibility is lost. A person may become so focused on maintaining stability that nothing new can enter. Or so open to every input that nothing coheres. So focused on their own initiative that they lose contact with what the situation actually calls for. Or so absorbed in the relational field that they cannot act from their own center.
These collapses are not character flaws. They are adaptive formations — responses that once served a purpose and have since become entrenched. The regulatory dynamics give clinicians and practitioners a way to locate and name them precisely.
Coherence ↔ Openness
The tension between structure and availability
This tension runs between the need for a stable, intelligible organization of experience and the need to remain available to what is new or disruptive.
Coherence is what allows a person to act, plan, and make sense of their situation. Without it, experience becomes overwhelming. Identity dissolves. Direction disappears. Coherence is not a luxury — it is a precondition for functioning.
Openness is what allows a person to learn, adapt, and respond to what is actually happening rather than to a fixed version of events. Without it, experience becomes repetitive. Novelty gets filtered out. The same patterns replay regardless of what the situation calls for.
Most adaptive difficulties involve a rigid preference for one pole. A client who cannot tolerate ambiguity may organize everything around maintaining coherence. They defend a story, avoid disruption, and move quickly to resolution before uncertainty can be felt. A client who struggles to hold any stable position may be stuck at the openness pole. Receptive to everything, they find it hard to commit to a direction.
Neither presentation is simply a style. Both are functional restrictions. Therapeutic work in this dynamic often involves helping a person find the coherence they need without foreclosing the openness that allows growth, or vice versa.
When coherence dominates rigidly: experience becomes repetitive; novelty is filtered out; the story cannot update.
When openness dominates rigidly: experience becomes diffuse; commitments do not hold; direction is lost.
Adaptive capacity: the ability to hold structure and availability in tension, moving between them as the situation requires.
Agency ↔ Participation
The tension between initiative and responsiveness
This tension runs between acting from a coherent center of initiative and surrendering to the wider field. That field includes influences, relational dynamics, and contextual forces that shape any situation.
Agency is what allows a person to choose, direct, and take responsibility. It is the experience of being the author of one’s actions rather than simply a product of circumstances. Without a sufficient sense of agency, people feel helpless, driven, or invisible.
Participation is what allows a person to be moved by what is happening around them. It means being affected, responding to others, letting the situation contribute to what unfolds rather than imposing a predetermined script. Without participation, a person may be effective but isolated, or decisive but disconnected from the relational texture of a situation.
In clinical contexts, this tension often appears in how clients relate to their own history. A person with a strong agency orientation may attribute everything to their own choices and feel responsible for outcomes that were never within their control. A person oriented primarily toward participation may experience themselves as entirely shaped by others, with little sense that their own perspective has weight.
The tension also appears in the therapeutic relationship itself. A client who waits for the therapist to provide all direction, or who resists any influence at all, is often expressing a collapse in this dynamic.
When agency dominates rigidly: the person over-controls; responsiveness to the field narrows; relational contact thins.
When participation dominates rigidly: the person feels driven by others; self-direction is lost; boundaries become unclear.
Adaptive capacity: the ability to act from a clear center while remaining genuinely responsive to what the situation offers.
Differentiation ↔ Interdependence
The tension between boundaries and permeability
This tension runs between maintaining distinct boundaries — a clear sense of where one ends and another begins — and recognizing the fundamental permeability of self and environment.
Differentiation allows a person to have a perspective, to disagree, to know what they feel as distinct from what others feel. It supports autonomy, clarity of thought, and the capacity to hold one’s own position in the face of pressure. Without it, the self becomes indistinct. The person’s experience merges with the field around them.
Interdependence allows a person to be nourished by connection, to co-regulate with others, to recognize that individual experience is always shaped by a wider relational and cultural context. Without it, the self becomes an island — defended, self-sufficient, and impoverished by that self-sufficiency.
This tension is especially visible in close relationships and in group settings. A person who relies heavily on differentiation may find intimacy threatening or define connection as a risk to their identity. A person who leans strongly toward interdependence may find separation threatening and struggle to locate an experience as their own rather than shared or imposed.
In organizational contexts, this dynamic often plays out in how teams handle disagreement. A culture that over-values differentiation may reward individual performance while undermining collaboration. A culture that over-values interdependence may produce harmony at the surface and suppress the tensions that would allow genuine learning.
When differentiation dominates rigidly: boundaries harden; connection is experienced as threat; the relational field is kept at a distance.
When interdependence dominates rigidly: boundaries dissolve; the person’s own experience becomes difficult to locate; self-direction weakens.
Adaptive capacity: the ability to maintain a distinct perspective while remaining genuinely open to mutual influence.
How the Three Tensions Operate Together
The three regulatory dynamics are not independent. They interact. A collapse in one often produces pressure in another.
A person who rigidly defends coherence may also rely heavily on agency — keeping experience tightly controlled, maintaining a fixed story through deliberate self-direction. The same person may simultaneously over-differentiate — maintaining sharp boundaries to protect the coherence from disruption. In this configuration, all three dynamics lean toward the same poles simultaneously.
Conversely, a person who has difficulty holding coherence may be pulled toward participation and interdependence. They defer to others for direction, merge with the emotional tone of the room, and struggle to find a stable position of their own.
These configurations are clinically readable. They show up in how a person speaks, what they avoid, how they respond to interruption or surprise. The regulatory dynamics give practitioners a vocabulary for describing what they observe — not as a diagnosis, but as a map of where flexibility has been lost and where it might be restored.
Clinical and Practical Use
The regulatory dynamics are not assessment categories. A practitioner does not assign a person to a position on each axis and treat that position as fixed. The dynamics describe tendencies — patterns that appear under certain conditions, that may shift in different relational contexts, and that can change through therapeutic work.
Useful questions in practice include: Where is this person’s experience collapsing right now? Which pole are they defending? What would it take for them to tolerate more of the opposite? What does the therapeutic relationship itself reveal about how these tensions are being managed?
Interventions can be understood as experiments in moving along one or more of these axes. Inviting a client to stay with ambiguity a little longer is a coherence ↔ openness experiment. Noticing together that the client has more influence over a situation than they have been claiming is an agency ↔ participation experiment. Drawing attention to a moment when the client was clearly moved by something is a differentiation ↔ interdependence experiment.
In each case, the goal is not to move the person to a different fixed position. It is to increase the range of movement available to them — which is what the model means by regulatory flexibility.
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