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title: "Formal Model Specification"
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# Formal Model Specification
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 whether the signal is trustworthy, whether the receiver has capacity, and what truthful action is available.
- 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 | The strain between the incoming signal and the factual model that expected something else. | What expectation failed?
- Meaning gap | The strain between the incoming signal and the meaning frame that gave meaning, identity, hope, duty, or trust its shape. | What meaning no longer fits easily?
- 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 truthful response presently available to the receiver, scaled to current evidence, embodied and relational capacity, supports, and constraints. | What can be done truthfully now, and what support would make that action possible?
- Resonance quality | The kind of pressure reduction produced by the response: truthful, false, or unresolved. | Did relief come through reality-contact and truthful action, or through avoidance?
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, 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.