Our Practices

We orient to relationships as living systems that evolve through cycles of disruption, understanding, and reorganization over time. We call this process the Catalyst Spiral.

The Catalyst Spiral describes how our relationships move from dissonance to resonance — not by avoiding challenge, but by working with it consciously.

Phase 1: Dissonance accumulates

In any relationship, differences in needs, perspectives, capacity, or timing naturally arise.

Most of the time, these differences remain in the background. But as stress accumulates, dissonance can begin to carry enough charge to disrupt habitual patterns.

This charge signals that the relationship is approaching a threshold.

Phase 2: A catalyst emerges

When dissonance reaches sufficient intensity, it becomes a catalyst — an event, interaction, or realization that interrupts “business as usual.”

A catalyst reveals that our current way of relating can no longer support what’s emerging. It doesn’t provide answers. It signals the need for an update in our relational process.

3. Attunement creates shared understanding

Rather than reacting or rushing to fix things, the Catalyst Spiral moves first into attunement.

Attunement is the process of slowing down to sense and understand what’s actually happening between us:

• What each of us is experiencing

• How our relationships is currently unfolding — its structures and patterns

• Where our felt sense of meaning, capacity, or regulation are misaligned

Attunement creates a shared perspective — a coherent understanding of the situation as it is.

Phase 4: Calibration changes the pattern

We can’t create lasting change with shared understanding alone. The next phase is calibration.

Calibration is the process of co-designing structural changes to our relationship:

• Agreements

• Boundaries

• Pacing

• Roles

• How we interpret our experiences

• Ways of responding

These changes alter the conditions that produced the original dissonance, allowing our relationship to function differently going forward.

Phase 5: Integration turns insight into habit

The new perspective and structural changes are then applied repeatedly in lived experience.

Over time, this integration:

• Reduces friction

• Stabilizes trust

• Lowers the cost of connection

• And reshapes habitual patterns

What once required effort gradually becomes natural.

Phase 6: Resonance stabilizes

As shared perspective and shared experience come into alignment, our relationship enters a state of resonance.

Resonance is the felt sense of coherence between how we understand the relationship and how it actually unfolds. It doesn’t mean the absence of difference or tension — it means those differences are held without strain.

The relationship rests in resonance until the next catalyst arises.

A living spiral, not a one-time fix

The Catalyst Spiral isn’t a linear path or a final solution.

Life continues to change. New conditions arise. New dissonances form. Each catalyst invites the spiral to turn again — allowing our relationships to evolve rather than fracture.

In one sentence

The Catalyst Spiral is how relationships move from dissonance to resonance by using disruption as a doorway into shared understanding, structural change, and lived integration over time.