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Executive Summary
This paper presents a unified account of embodied self-regulation based on the continuous alignment of three regulatory fields:
- Proprioceptive Field (Form):
The body’s mechanical organization, muscle tone, and postural support structures. - Interoceptive Field (State):
Internal physiological status, autonomic set-point regulation, and affective intensity. - Exteroceptive Field (World):
Interpretation of environmental cues, social signals, and contextual meaning.
Self-awareness, emotional stability, and adaptive behavior depend on the coherence of these three fields. When they align, the individual experiences groundedness, clarity, and capacity for flexible engagement. When they fall out of alignment, distinct dys-coherence patterns emerge, including anxiety, collapse, dissociation, and chronic pain.
This tri-field organization reflects a deeper triality structure found in biological self-maintenance: organisms must simultaneously regulate form, energy, and information. Teleodynamics provides the generative logic: self-regulating systems act to preserve viability by detecting and correcting deviations. Coherence is therefore not static balance, but ongoing error minimization across form, state, and world.
Regulation unfolds across multiple timescales, from millisecond sensorimotor adjustments to lifespan developmental shaping. It is also fundamentally relational: co-regulation through touch, gaze, movement, breath, and vocal prosody calibrates neural circuits that sustain coherence. Trauma is understood as adaptive coherence fixation — a viable survival configuration that later restricts flexibility.
Because meaning depends on state and form, cognitive and narrative interventions are most effective only after proprioceptive and autonomic foundations are stabilized. This yields a reliable therapeutic sequence:
1) Form → 2) State → 3) World → 4) Meaning
This framework integrates medicine, psychology, physiotherapy, trauma therapy, and social neuroscience under a common regulatory principle. It provides clinicians, educators, and systems designers with a coherent basis for restoring individual and collective adaptive capacity.
