ABOUT | unfoldingfield.com

I am Robert. I am Dutch, currently living in Lisbon. I am 57 years old.

I have autistic traits, which means I process information differently from most people. I think in systems and patterns. I need things to be coherent before I can move. I find most social environments cognitively expensive, and most bureaucratic ones close to unbearable. I am most alive when I am building something — a model, a piece of music, a framework — and following it wherever it goes.

I did not come to this work through a conventional route. I did not study psychology at university or train as a therapist in the standard way. What I did was spend a very long time paying close attention — to music, to nature, to the I Ching, to how experience actually works when you look at it carefully rather than categorizing it quickly.

I find most frameworks too rigid and most categories too clean. Experience is messier and more interesting than that.

How the UFM came to exist

For most of my life I noticed a gap between the frameworks people use to describe human experience and what experience actually feels like from the inside. Personality typologies tell you what type you are. Diagnostic systems tell you what is wrong. Cognitive models tell you how to think differently. All of these have their uses. But none of them seemed to capture the thing I was most interested in: how experience actually unfolds, moment to moment, between a person and the world they are embedded in.

The Unfolding Field Model grew out of that question. It is a phenomenological process model — which means it tries to describe how experience emerges and changes, rather than classifying what kind of person you are or diagnosing what is wrong with you. It draws on process philosophy, embodied cognition, field theory, and contemplative traditions. It was built slowly, revised many times, and tested primarily on the most available subject: myself.

Version 4.4 is the current reference version. It describes five interconnected layers through which experience unfolds, four modes of awareness, three regulatory tensions, and two complementary centers of awareness. It is not a simple model. But it is a precise one — and precision, for me, is a form of respect for the complexity of what it is trying to describe.

What I actually do

I am not a practicing therapist. I do not run a clinic or a coaching business. What I do is think, build, and make things available.

Over the years I have worked in music — playing, improvising, mixing. I spent time in ecological gardens studying wild plants. I built 3D content and taught artists how to think about their work as a business. I created guided meditations and self-hypnosis audio. I studied third-wave therapeutic approaches. Each of these left something behind — a way of seeing, a set of questions, a pattern I later recognized in something else.

The UFM is the most sustained thing I have made. It is also the most personal — not because it is autobiographical, but because it was built from the inside. The layers I describe are layers I have lived in. The tensions I name are tensions I navigate. The modes of experience I map are modes I move between — or get stuck in.

The model was built from the inside. That is its limitation and its strength.

Autism through OUFM

Within OUFM, autism can be understood as a distinct organization of ground, permeability, and adaptive cycling rather than a simple deficit. The core question is how Layer 2 stability, Layer 3 contact, and Layer 4 consolidation shape sensory processing, social effort, and the ability to remain in direct contact with experience.

Autistic systems may show different thresholds for permeability, different filtering of salient input, and stronger reliance on structure, repetition, or predictability. When ground is thin, social performance monitoring can replace direct contact, making interaction costly and increasing the risk of masking, overload, or shutdown.

This also means that autistic traits are not only challenges but potentially forms of adapted range: depth, precision, pattern recognition, and sustained focus can become strengths when the environment supports them. In OUFM terms, the aim is not normalization but conditions that thicken ground, reduce unnecessary mediation, and allow legitimate presence on the person’s own terms.

Who this is for

The UFM is available to anyone who finds it useful. The reference document is written for practitioners — therapists, coaches, and researchers who want a structurally precise framework they can use in their work. The blog posts and audio materials are written for a broader audience: anyone who is curious about how experience works and wants a language for it that is neither clinical nor self-help.

I am particularly interested in contact with people who work at the edges of standard frameworks — who find that existing models do not quite capture what they are seeing in their clients, or in themselves. If the UFM offers something useful there, that is enough.

I am also open to conversation. Not networking — real conversation. If something here raises a question, or connects with something you are working on, you are welcome to reach out.

Robert

unfoldingfield.com | Unfolding Field Model v4.4