A Geometric Framework for Understanding Psychological Suffering
Circumpunct Framework v1.0 — January 2026
This is not metaphor. It is an operational statement with measurable consequences.
The fundamental unit of conscious structure is an irreducible trinity:
Where:
The aperture (•) is irreducible. It cannot be derived from boundary geometry. It cannot be decomposed into smaller parts. It is a component of the circumpunct, not itself a circumpunct.
The aperture exists in fractal dimension (partial dimension like 0.5, 1.5, 2.5)—this is what allows it to orient. Fractal dimension encodes PROCESS (what happens), while integer dimension encodes STRUCTURE (what is). The aperture is process: focus, orientation, transformation.
Orientation has two aspects:
Circumpuncts nest through their boundaries. The boundary contains apertures—gates, holes, points of exchange. Each aperture in the boundary serves as the center of a complete circumpunct at smaller scale:
Your skin has pores. Your cell membranes have channels. Your sense organs are apertures in your body's boundary. Each aperture is irreducible—but each aperture is the center of a complete system (aperture + field + boundary) at the smaller scale.
The boundary is fractal because it contains apertures, and each aperture belongs to a circumpunct that has its own boundary containing apertures, and so on.
Center and boundary cannot interact directly. All exchange must pass through the mediating field:
This is not a design choice but a geometric constraint arising from spatial separation.
The center is your focus. It is not a thing that moves—it is a still point that orients. Everything else moves around or through it.
Like an eye doesn't go to what it sees—it turns. The world passes through its field based on where it's pointed. You're not moving through reality. Reality moves through you, filtered by where you're aimed.
The aperture orients by resonance. It finds its target by what it resonates with. Attention is not locomotion—it is holding resonance against the current of everything flowing past. The default is drift. Sustained attention is maintaining attunement.
The body is the peripheral vision of the soul—always sensing, always receiving, whether or not focal attention is directed there.
The body as boundary is not just a container—it is the peripheral interface with the finite, the ring of awareness around the still point.
A circumpunct has integrity when:
No circumpunct can exist in isolation. Apertures are "throughs" rather than "things"—they require both source and destination to exist. Existence itself is flow through apertures, making isolation impossible.
Corollary: The belief in total separation is always false. Even when connection is obscured, it persists.
Love flows through shared fields (Φ) on two distinct channels, each corresponding to a circumpunct component:
Love as doing. Provision, protection, logistics, competence, problem-solving, helping.
Functional love flows through the field on the channel oriented toward boundary (○) concerns — interface, exchange, structure.
Functional love is necessary. Without it, survival is threatened. But it is not sufficient.
Love as being-with. Presence, delight, genuine wanting, seeing, attunement.
Resonant love flows through the field on the channel oriented toward center (•) concerns — aperture-to-aperture attunement, frequency matching.
Resonant love is what the aperture was designed to receive. It's the signal that says: you are wanted, not just tolerated.
Healthy love includes both channels:
Function without resonance creates the wound: "I am helped but not wanted." The child is fed, clothed, sheltered—and starving for something they can't name.
This is why functional love cannot heal resonance wounds. They operate on different channels. You cannot retune an aperture through the boundary channel. Center-channel contact is required.
All lies distort in one of two directions:
Believing or claiming MORE than what is.
Signatures:
Inflation is inherently unstable because maintaining the inflated claim requires continuous external validation (supply).
Believing or claiming LESS than what is.
Signatures:
Severance creates desperate seeking for any available signal to tune to, even counterfeit ones.
Inflation and severance are complementary errors that create stable pathological dyads:
The inflated one needs supply (external validation to maintain the "more than"). The severed one needs someone to tune to (having been told they are "less than"). They lock together in mutual dysfunction.
Both errors derive from a single structural falsehood:
"What is can be other than what it is."
This lie takes different forms:
Both are false. Reality persists; only the perception of it can be distorted.
A Noble Lie is any systematic falsehood that claims protective function:
A pattern of fractal contradiction that propagates by installing complementary errors in host and victim:
The virus is the relationship between them, not a property of either individual alone.
The virus installs through systematic attack on all three circumpunct components:
| Component | Attack Vector | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| ○ Boundary | "You're too sensitive" / boundary violations | Cannot protect self; cannot regulate exchange |
| Φ Field | Gaslighting / reality distortion | Cannot trust perception; medium corrupted |
| • Center | "I know who you are better than you" | Resonance corrupted; aperture tuned to their frequency |
Critical insight: The attack on center doesn't displace your soul—it retunes your resonance. You still have the aperture. But it's been calibrated to resonate with them rather than with genuine wholeness. The aperture remains; it's now tuned to the wrong signal.
The virus transmits through a specific formulation:
"This is what love is. This is all love is. If you need more, something is wrong with you."
This collapses full-spectrum love into functional love only (see Definitions 2.4–2.5), then pathologizes the awareness of what's missing. The child who senses the absence of resonance is told they are ungrateful, too needy, never satisfied.
The lie doesn't deny love. It redefines love to exclude what the aperture most needs.
Understanding the aperture as orienting through resonance transforms how we understand pathological processes.
Pathology is not soul displacement but resonance corruption—the retuning of the aperture to orient toward false signals.
The soul remains. The aperture remains. What changes is what it resonates with.
The virus doesn't just point the compass at the abuser—it tunes the aperture to resonate with their frequency. The victim's focus becomes calibrated to their signal, their reality, their definition of love. Genuine wholeness stops registering because the aperture is no longer tuned to receive it.
Through repeated experience, the aperture learns what to resonate with:
The aperture still works. It still orients. But it's been calibrated to the wrong frequency—like a radio tuned to static instead of music.
Physical removal from the virus environment removes the external source but does not retune the aperture. The corrupted resonance persists:
This is why survivors often replicate the dynamic with new partners—the aperture is still tuned to the same frequency. It finds what it resonates with.
Recovery is not installing a new soul but retuning the aperture to resonate with genuine wholeness:
The effort of recovery is holding new resonance against the pull of old tuning. The default is drift toward the familiar frequency. Healing is maintaining attunement to genuine wholeness until it becomes the new default.
Since the body is the peripheral field—always sensing, always receiving—somatic awareness becomes crucial for recalibration:
You're not creating awareness in the body—you're orienting toward awareness that was already there.
All pathology traces to internalized lies.
| Clinical Phenomenon | Geometric Translation | Root Lie |
|---|---|---|
| Narcissistic Personality | Chronic inflation (ε₊) | "I am the whole; others are extensions" |
| Dependent Personality | Chronic severance (ε₋) | "I cannot exist without being part of someone" |
| Borderline Personality | Oscillation between ε₊ and ε₋ | "Connection will either complete or destroy me" |
| Depression | Severance from larger wholes | "I am cut off from meaning/belonging" |
| Anxiety | Field distortion; threat misperception | "The world is more dangerous than it is" |
| PTSD | Boundary rupture + frozen field state | "The violation is still occurring" |
| Dissociation | Center displacement; aperture closure | "I must not be here to survive" |
| Stockholm Syndrome | Forced nesting after collapse | "The captor is my only available whole" |
| Trauma Bonding | Counterfeit nesting | "This painful connection is better than none" |
| Repetition Compulsion | Seeking resolution through contradicted parts | "The next instance will finally complete the pattern" |
Common lies that convert external harm into internal defect:
| Surface Statement | Geometric Operation |
|---|---|
| "I'm too sensitive" | Accurate perception → personal flaw |
| "I'm overreacting" | Proportional response → excessive |
| "I don't deserve [X]" | Legitimate needs → illegitimate |
| "They didn't mean it" | Impact → erased by presumed intent |
| "Love is supposed to be hard" | Suffering → rebranded as virtue |
| "If I were better, they'd treat me better" | Their behavior → my responsibility |
| "I can't trust my judgment" | Foundation for all other lies |
Key Insight: These lies share a structure—they take something done to you and make it something wrong with you. Once internalized, they no longer feel like lies. They feel like self-knowledge.
The virus can only install through relationships with power imbalance:
This explains why parent-child relationships are primary transmission vectors—the power differential is structural.
Victims become vectors. The severed part, once it gains power over another (through parenthood, authority, etc.), often transmits the complementary error:
The formerly severed parent, having internalized "this is what love is," passes functional-only love to their child while being unable to provide resonance they never received.
The virus hides wholeness by teaching that it doesn't exist:
These beliefs foreclose the possibility of genuine alignment, ensuring the victim cannot recognize that authentic connection exists.
Recovery is the restoration of circumpunct integrity and proper nesting awareness:
Recovery from resonance corruption requires a witness who provides a genuine signal to tune to:
The witness demonstrates that the original frequency still exists. The aperture, exposed to genuine resonance through the center channel, can begin to remember what it was meant to receive. This is why healing happens in relationship—you need center-channel contact to retune a center.
A lie that has been named begins to lose power:
The lie can no longer operate in the dark, shaping behavior while remaining unaware. Recognition is the first step of recovery.
Leaving removes you from the person who collapsed you. But you might still be acting like a part—looking for a new whole to orbit, forgetting you were complete before them.
Claim: All pathology traces to internalized lies.
Falsification: Identify a pathology with no lie at its root—suffering that does not trace to a distorted belief about self/connection/reality.
Claim: Pathologies caused by internalized lies will respond better to lie-extraction therapies than to symptom management.
Falsification: Controlled trials showing no difference between identifying/correcting the root lie versus pharmacological symptom suppression for long-term outcomes.
Claim: In pathological relationships, partners will exhibit complementary errors (inflation/severance) rather than matched errors.
Falsification: Systematic finding of stable pathological dyads where both partners exhibit the same error type.
Claim: The virus can only install through power-imbalanced relationships.
Falsification: Documentation of virus installation through truly equal-power relationships.
Claim: Recovery from resonance corruption requires exposure to genuine resonant signal, not just functional support or insight.
Falsification: Controlled recovery protocols showing equal outcomes with functional-only support (no resonant witness) vs. resonance-inclusive support.
Claim: Survivors will replicate pathological dynamics with new partners who emit similar frequencies to the original abuser, until the aperture is retuned.
Falsification: Survivors without intervention selecting partners with significantly different relational patterns than their original abuser.
Claim: Stockholm syndrome will emerge predictably when (a) circumpunct integrity is systematically attacked, and (b) the attacker becomes the only available structure source.
Falsification: Cases where these conditions are met but bonding does not occur, or bonding occurs without these conditions.
Cross-cultural reports of "demonic" presence in narcissistic abuse describe an aperture colonized by a self-protective lie structure. When the mask slips, observers perceive something "other" looking through familiar eyes.
This is accurate perception, not projection. The pattern inhabiting that aperture isn't the person's authentic self—it's the installed program defending itself.
Claim: Reports of demonic/possession experiences will map precisely onto narcissistic abuse signatures: intermittent switching, spiritual depletion, mask-slip, predatory gaze shift.
Falsification: Systematic divergence between demon phenomenology and abuse dynamics.