Researchers, trainers, and careful facilitators. use the canonical definitions that control the rest of the document.
These are the canonical definitions for CRM . Later sections explain, justify, apply, and test the model, but the working terms below control what the model means.
Core Constructs
CRM begins when an incoming reality signal creates pressure on a factual model, a meaning frame, or both. The model then asks what warrants the report, what the person can receive or do now, and who is responsible for the needed response. An arriving signal is evidence to examine, not reality delivered without interpretation.
- Construct | Exact definition | Field question
- Incoming reality signal | An event, result, testimony, diagnosis, repeated pattern, absence, discovery, or failure that presses the current understanding. | What happened, or what signal arrived?
- Factual model | A person's or group's working expectation about how reality functions in this case. | What did I expect would happen?
- Meaning frame | The identity, value, duty, faith-claim, hope, loyalty, mission, or life narrative that gives the event meaning. | What does this seem to threaten or say about the meaning frame I am using?
- Prediction error | A mismatch between a specified expectation and the available evidence, whether recognized by the person or not. | What expectation failed, and what establishes the mismatch?
- Meaning gap | Pressure on identity, duty, hope, loyalty, faith, or another meaning-bearing commitment. Pressure alone does not show that the commitment is false. | What is at stake, and which part should change or remain?
- Source trust | A disciplined judgment about the channel that carried the signal: access, competence, honesty, method, incentives, records, and exposure to correction. | How was this signal produced, carried, and checked?
- Capacity | The receiver's present, history-shaped embodied and relational ability to process pressure truthfully without preventable harm, coercion, collapse, or forced closure. | Is there enough safety, support, sleep, attention, time, and practical scaffold to handle this now?
- Agency | The person's power to understand, deliberate, and respond through actual embodied capacities, supports, and constraints. The AG field records a proposed warranted response. | Who can act, under what authority, and with what help?
- Resonance quality | Whether understanding and action become more truthful, distortion remains protected, or the situation remains unresolved. | What evidence supports that judgment beyond immediate relief?
Terminology rule. CRM uses meaning frame, not story, as the canonical term. A meaning frame may include a life narrative, but it can also be a belief, vow, duty, loyalty, theology, hope, institutional mission, identity, or sacred trust. The term protects the seriousness of the belief under pressure: the question is not whether a person has invented a fiction, but whether the meaning they are living by can remain in truthful contact with reality.
Evidence Rules
Each construct needs different evidence. The model becomes vague when a feeling, interpretation, or label is allowed to count as evidence for everything at once.
- Construct | Counts as evidence | Does not count by itself
- Prediction error | A named expectation plus a concrete mismatch: measurement, result, record, observation, testimony, repeated pattern, or failed prediction. | Feeling upset, feeling surprised, disliking an outcome, or having a vague sense that something is wrong.
- Meaning gap | A named threatened meaning frame: identity, faith, duty, vocation, loyalty, hope, safety, justice, trust, or purpose under pressure. | Mere confusion, emotion, disagreement, or discomfort without a meaning-level stake.
- Source trust | Traceable channel, firsthand access, method, competence, corroboration, records, incentives, accountability, and openness to correction. | Confidence, charisma, group loyalty, repetition, institutional status, virality, or AI fluency.
- Capacity | Safety, sleep, embodied stability, time, support, freedom from coercion, clinical stability, and absence of immediate danger. | Moral worth, spiritual maturity, intelligence, sincerity, or whether the signal is true.
- Agency | A concrete next step matched to evidence and capacity: verify, wait, document, protect, lament, confess, repent, repair, refer, or correct. | Urgency, pressure to resolve, analysis, private concern, or performative language.
- Truthful resonance | Improved reality-contact, preserved, corrected, or deepened meaning-contact, better fruit over time, and a responsible next action. | Calm, certainty, group agreement, relief, spiritual language, or reduced distress alone.
Interaction Rules
The constructs interact in a specific order. The order is not mechanical, but it prevents common collapses.
- Name before explain. Begin with the incoming signal before interpreting its meaning.
- Separate the two axes. Prediction error asks what expectation failed. Meaning gap asks what meaning frame is under pressure.
- Weight the channel. A signal is handled according to source trust before it is allowed to control interpretation.
- Check capacity before depth. Low capacity changes timing, support, and safety needs; it does not change truth itself.
- Move toward agency. The process is incomplete until it identifies a truthful action, even if that action is to wait, verify, stabilize, or seek qualified help.
- Review over time. A breach profile is a snapshot. Later evidence, sleep, counsel, protection, repentance, or fruit may change the profile.
Minimal formula. A CRM case is not just I feel pressure. It is: this signal pressed this expectation and/or this meaning frame, through this source, in this capacity state, requiring this truthful next action and this review point.
Common Failure Modes
The model is designed to expose these failures, but it can also be misused in ways that reproduce them.
- Failure mode | What goes wrong | Correction
- Mood-as-truth | Relief, peace, certainty, or distress is treated as the measure of truth. | Test reality-contact, meaning-contact, action, and fruit over time.
- Fact-meaning collapse | A fact problem is treated as a meaning problem, or a meaning problem is treated as a fact problem. | Score prediction error and meaning gap separately.
- Source laundering | A weak signal gains authority through repetition, status, spiritual language, AI fluency, or institutional protection. | Trace the channel and require appropriate verification.
- Capacity denial | A person is pushed into interpretation while unsafe, exhausted, coerced, traumatized, or clinically unstable. | Stabilize, protect, refer, or wait before deep interpretation.
- Agency bypass | The conversation becomes insight without action. | End with one truthful next step and a review point.
- False precision | The breach profile is treated as a validated score or verdict. | Treat notation as a field summary, not proof.
- Spiritual or moral bypass | Peace, forgiveness, loyalty, mission, or kindness is used to avoid truth, lament, protection, repentance, or repair. | Restore the order: safety, evidence, lament, repentance, protection, repair.
Related research
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