Power and Privilege

Best Practices FAQ

The real, hard questions this work gets asked, answered at full depth. These came from a colleague working through an early version of the model, who named with precision where it could be misread, misused, or weaponized against the very people it means to serve.

The questions that follow came to me in a long, courageous email from a colleague who was working through her own response to an early version of the DOT model presentation. I owe her a debt I cannot adequately repay. She named, with precision, the places where the model could be misread, misused, or weaponized against the very populations the model is meant to serve. The original FAQ document collected her questions and my initial responses. This part of the book takes each question and answers it at the depth the question deserves, with the DOT model as it has matured, the companion frameworks of this book, and the years of teaching the model in real rooms with real bodies in them.

I have not paraphrased her questions or my original answers. I have enriched both with what I now know, and with the framing this book has built across the preceding chapters. Where the original answers were exploratory, these are settled. Where the original answers were defensive, these are direct. The point of the FAQ is not to defend the model. The point is to do the work the questions demand.

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Question 1: Does this model conflate conflict and abuse?

A colleague comes out of an early DOT presentation triggered, struggling to stay embodied, watching domestic violence get cited as an example of conflict resolution and noticing that no one in the room has named the difference. She writes me. She asks the question that will reorganize the next decade of my work.

The answer is no, the model does not conflate conflict and abuse, but the answer is more important than the no. The answer requires building a framework for the difference that is itself part of the model.

I think of the gradient as Friction, Microaggression, Abuse. Friction is the natural production of difference between bodies, perspectives, schedules, needs. Friction is not bad; friction is information. A team without any friction is either a team in which no one is bringing their full self or a team that has organized itself around the suppression of difference, which is its own harm. The DOT model’s first job at the level of Friction is to make the friction usable, to keep it in the Red axis cascade where it can produce movement rather than letting it slide unaddressed into the Blue or Gold axes where it sediments.

Microaggression, as Pierce (1970) and Sue (Sue et al. 2007) named, is friction that has been weaponized by identity. The same words spoken across an even ground are friction. Spoken across a power gradient, with the weight of historical pattern behind them, they become identity-targeting and cumulative. The DOT model at the level of Microaggression is the work of the taxonomy in the body, the temporal axis, the practitioner’s response in real time.

Abuse is sustained and intentional weaponization of power against another body. Abuse is not a cascade that escalated; abuse is a relational structure in which one body’s nervous system, autonomy, and access to resources are organized around the dominance of another body. Abuse has features that distinguish it from conflict: pattern, intent maintained even after impact is known, asymmetry of consequences, the weaponization of any tool, including any model, to maintain the asymmetry.

The DOT model in cases of abuse does not function as a conflict tool. It functions as an orientation tool. It helps the body of the person being abused to recognize what their cascade is doing, to distinguish their own catastrophizing from their nervous system’s accurate threat assessment, and to recognize when the cascade is information about real danger. It does not tell them to enter into restorative dialogue with the abuser. It does not tell them to take responsibility for the relational repair. It does not tell them that both parties are at fault. The horizontal line, in the original presentation, was easy to misread as a flat scale of shared responsibility. In abuse, the line tilts. The Slanted Line is not metaphor. It is the structural condition.

What I owe the colleague who asked this question is this: the model has to name the difference between Friction, Microaggression, and Abuse at the beginning, every time, in every room, and the facilitator has to be ready for the bodies in the room who are in any one of the three categories or in all three simultaneously. The model does not conflate. The presentation, when it failed to name the difference, did. The repair is in the naming.

Question 2: How does the opening exercise about early memories of fight/flight/freeze/fawn impact someone with a history of serious child abuse?

A participant in a workshop is asked to recall their first memory of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The exercise is meant to build emotional fluency. It is open-ended. People are invited to start where they are ready. The participant, who has a history of serious child abuse, is not sure whether to engage with the easy memory or the hard one, whether the exercise is asking for the surface or the depth, whether her depth will be welcome in this room or whether her depth will require her to do the additional labor of managing the facilitator’s reaction.

The exercise was designed in collaboration with populations that included children in inpatient psychiatric settings, which means the design includes the assumption that trauma survivors will be in the room. The openness of the exercise is its design feature. It allows the participant to choose her own entry point. Most people, including people with extensive trauma histories, will start with a less intense memory the first time, build emotional fluency around it, and revisit deeper material only when they have the nervous system capacity to do so.

But the exercise carries risk that the design has to acknowledge. For a participant whose autonomic system is organized around the dorsal vagal shutdown that follows years of inescapable harm, even the invitation to remember can land as exposure. The body does not need to be told to remember; the body remembers all the time. The cognitive frame around the memory is what changes, and the cognitive frame is what the workshop is asking the participant to revisit.

The DOT model at this point has to be paired with what I now call the Three Safeties. Embodied safety means the participant has access to grounding practices, can opt out of any exercise, can step out of the room, can speak with the facilitator privately. Relational safety means the facilitator has communicated, in language and in body, that the participant’s pace is the pace, not the workshop’s. Structural safety means the participant has not been required to do this work by an employer or institution that will retaliate against the work the body produces.

When the Three Safeties are in place, the exercise can be a meaningful entry point even for survivors of serious child abuse. When they are not, the exercise can re-enact the original wound by asking the body to expose itself in a room that has not earned the exposure.

What I would tell a facilitator preparing to lead the exercise: start with the assumption that the most wounded body in the room is the body whose needs you are designing for. Name the choice points before you ask the question. Tell the room that the exercise is an invitation, not an assignment. Tell the room that there are bodies in the world for whom the early memory is not a memory but an organizing structure, and that the model does not require the body to revisit the structure on the workshop’s schedule. The body’s schedule is the schedule.

If you are a participant reading this who is wondering whether you should engage with the exercise: the answer is whatever your body, with appropriate support, tells you the answer is. The DOT model has no investment in extracting the depth from you on a timeline. If the depth is not available today, it is not available today, and there is no failure in that.

Question 3: Does it conflate conflict and acts of violence? Does it apply to violence?

The DOT model does not conflate conflict and violence, but it has to be precise about what it offers in the presence of violence and what it does not.

At the micro scale, violence is the embodied expression of an axis cascade that has not been metabolized. The Red axis cascade that runs all the way to Rage or Terror can become physical violence if the body acts the cascade out without intervening practice. The model offers the practice. The model does not offer protection. A person whose partner is in a sustained Rage cascade does not need a model; they need a safety plan, distance, and the institutional supports that allow them to leave.

At the mezzo scale, violence is the way groups and organizations enact harm collectively. The mob that organizes around a scapegoat. The team culture that targets the one who speaks up. The community that closes ranks around the abuser. The DOT model at this scale gives us the language to read the Group Creature’s cascade, to name the mezzo-level dynamics that produce the violence, and to intervene in the field that is producing the harm. The intervention is not always available; sometimes the only intervention is to leave the group.

At the macro scale, violence is structural. It is enacted through policy, through institution, through inherited material conditions that distribute who lives well and who dies early. Genocide is macro violence. Colonization is macro violence. The criminalization of poverty is macro violence. The DOT model at the macro scale does not pretend to resolve these conditions. The model offers a way to read the cascades that the macro conditions produce in bodies, in groups, in movements. The model is useful for organizing because organizing requires bodies that can stay in the cascade long enough to act collectively without burning out. The model is not a substitute for political analysis, material organization, or structural change. It is a tool for the bodies doing the work.

The three justice frameworks I named in Part I become important here. Punitive justice asks who broke the rule and what punishment they deserve. Restorative justice (Zehr 2002) asks who was harmed, what they need, and whose obligation is it to meet that need. Transformative justice (brown 2021; Kaba 2021) asks what conditions made the harm possible and how those conditions can be changed. The DOT model can be used in service of any of the three. In the presence of violence, the model is most useful when paired with the framework appropriate to the scale and to the wishes of those harmed. A model that pretends to neutrality between the frameworks will default to the framework that the institution prefers, which is usually the one that protects the institution.

When the model meets violence, it has to be honest about its limits. It is not a weapon. It is not a defense. It is a way of organizing the body’s experience that, in some contexts, enables a body to survive what it is being asked to survive. That is what it offers. Anything more is overreach.

Question 4: Does this model center those most negatively impacted?

The model centers self, which is not the same as centering others, and the difference is the work.

The model’s first invitation to any body is to come home to itself: to notice the cascade, to feel the body, to find the breath, to orient to where the self is in the field. This is not a politically neutral move. The bodies that have been most negatively impacted are also the bodies whose first move has often been outward, toward managing the affect of the dominant-culture bodies in the room. To bring those bodies home to themselves first is to interrupt the cultural taxation that has trained them to attend to everyone else’s nervous system before their own.

The model centers self in a way that is materially different for differently-positioned bodies. For the dominant-culture body, centering self means doing the work of feeling the cascade it has been allowed to ignore, naming the privilege that has buffered its nervous system from threat, and beginning to feel the cost the buffer has imposed on others. For the marginalized body, centering self means giving the self permission to feel what it has been forced to suppress in order to survive the room. Same instruction. Different work.

The model centers impact over intent. When a harm has occurred, the model asks first what the impact was, in the body of the person harmed, and second what the intent was, in the body of the person who caused it. The order matters. The dominant-culture frame typically reverses it: what did they mean by it, and only then, did anyone get hurt. Reversing the order is a structural intervention. It says, in effect, that the body of the person harmed is the first source of truth about what happened.

The model centers proportional accountability. The labor of repair is not distributed equally between the body that was harmed and the body that caused harm. The body that was harmed is not required to carry the body that caused harm through their learning. The body that caused harm is required to do their own work, with their own resources, without asking the body that was harmed to be their teacher, their forgiver, or their proof of redemption.

The model centers systemic awareness. An individual harm is rarely just an individual harm; it is usually an individual instantiation of a structural pattern. The model gives the body the language to read the individual moment in the context of the structure, which is what allows the response to be proportional to the actual scope of what is happening, not just to the visible moment.

What the model does not do, and should not pretend to do, is center the marginalized body as a category. The model centers the body that is in the room. The category will not catch the specificity of any one body. The body in front of you is the unit of attention, and the work of centering the most negatively impacted is the work of training yourself to read the specific body, not the demographic.

Question 5: Does it invite comparing minor conflicts with significant harm?

The colleague who asked this question gave the example of the coworker who stinks up the office with tuna salad once a week, compared with the lethal harm that makes homicide the leading cause of death for middle-aged Black women. The question is whether a model that scales from the trivial to the lethal flattens the difference.

The honest answer is that any model can flatten the difference if it is used without scale awareness. The DOT model can flatten the difference if the practitioner does not hold the scale lens of micro, mezzo, and macro continuously through the work. The tuna salad coworker is a micro-scale Friction that can be addressed through a private conversation. The lethal violence against Black women is a macro-scale pattern produced by intersecting structural conditions including the under-policing of harm against Black women, the over-policing of Black women themselves, the racialized history of medical care, the wealth gap, the housing gap, the lack of accountability for partner violence in communities the legal system does not adequately serve.

The model holds both, but it does not equate them. The cascade in the body of the person who is annoyed by the tuna salad is real. The cascade in the body of the woman who is being stalked by a former partner is real. The cascades are not the same in stakes, in duration, in the resources required to address them, or in the institutional supports available for response. Holding both as real does not mean holding both as equivalent.

The risk the question names is the risk of the model being used to compare. The compare move is what dominant-culture frameworks often do when confronted with macro-scale harm. They produce an equivalence to a micro-scale annoyance (“Well, I felt uncomfortable when…”), and the equivalence makes the macro-scale harm feel less serious. This is the move the model has to refuse. The model is not an equivalence machine. The model is a precision tool that gives each cascade the specificity it deserves at the scale at which it is operating.

When I am leading a room and someone produces an equivalence move, the response is to name the scale. “That sounds like a real frustration at the micro level. The harm we were just discussing is operating at a different scale. Let’s hold both as real, and let’s not collapse one into the other.” The discipline is in refusing to let the room’s comfort dictate the framing. The discipline is in keeping the macro-scale harm visible as macro-scale, even when the room would rather metabolize it as a series of micro frustrations.

What the model invites, when used well, is precision about scale, proportionality of response, and the refusal to flatten harm into a single category. What the model permits, when used poorly, is the same flattening any framework permits when the practitioner is not attending to scale. The model is not the protection against the flattening. The practitioner is.

Question 6: Does failing to name violence minimize the very real violence that many experience?

Failing to name violence is itself a form of violence, structurally. The institution that refuses to name what is happening to its marginalized members is participating in the harm by maintaining the conditions that allow the harm to continue. The model has to name violence, by name, when violence is present.

The DOT model in its earliest presentations sometimes did not name violence sharply enough. The cascade language, which is precise about what is happening in the body, can sound abstract when applied to bodies that are being concretely harmed. The cascade in the body of a survivor of sustained violence is not a cascade like other cascades. It is the nervous system’s adaptation to a specific, named harm, and the harm has to be named, by name, for the cascade to be addressed in proportion to its actual cause.

When the model meets violence, the practice is to use the body’s language and the political language together. The body language gives the survivor a way to read what their own system is doing. The political language gives the survivor a way to locate the source of the cascade outside of the self. Both are required. Body language alone risks individualizing structural harm. Political language alone risks abstracting the body’s actual experience. Together, they let the survivor say: my nervous system is doing this, because this thing is happening to me, and the thing that is happening to me has a name, and the name has a history, and the history is not my fault.

The model’s job in the presence of violence is to refuse the framing that makes violence ambient. Violence is not weather. Violence is enacted, by bodies and by structures, and the enactment can be named, traced, and resisted. The body’s cascade is a response to the enactment, not a cause of it.

When I teach the model in spaces where violence is present, the language has to be exact. Not “conflict,” when the situation is abuse. Not “miscommunication,” when the situation is gaslighting. Not “tension,” when the situation is harassment. The naming is not the resolution. The naming is the precondition for any response that does not re-enact the violence by minimizing it.

Question 7: Does this model center (or account for) power and privilege as factors in conflict?

The model has to. Earlier versions of the model treated power and privilege as advanced topics, to be addressed once participants had built emotional fluency in the basics. I no longer believe this is the right sequencing for most rooms.

The argument for sequencing was that participants who are new to emotional work can be overwhelmed by power analysis and respond with defensiveness that closes off learning. The argument has empirical support: a dominant-culture participant whose first encounter with the model is also their first encounter with power analysis often goes into Shame, which produces deflection, which produces a worse outcome than starting with the emotional foundation and building the power analysis on top.

The counter-argument, which the colleague’s question raises, is that withholding power analysis until participants are ready risks producing a model that performs neutrality between unequal parties. The neutrality is itself a power move, and it is the move that dominant-culture frameworks typically make. To withhold the power lens is to subsidize the comfort of the dominant-culture participant with the safety of the marginalized participant.

My current synthesis: the power lens has to be present from the first moment, even if it is not the main subject of the first hour. The framing of the model has to acknowledge, at the opening of any session, that the bodies in the room are not in the same nervous system territory, that the same words land differently in different bodies, and that the model’s work depends on holding the difference as a constant. The Slanted Line gets named early. The diversity wheel gets shown early. The categories of micro, mezzo, and macro get introduced early. The emotional fluency work that follows is shaped by the framing that preceded it.

What I do not do is force every participant to do the same level of power analysis at the same time. The dominant-culture participant who is new to the work needs the framing without being asked to perform a level of analysis they have not yet built. The marginalized participant who has been doing this work in their body their whole life needs the framing as confirmation, not as introduction. The room contains both, and the framing has to be legible to both without flattening the difference between what each needs from the rest of the session.

The model does center power and privilege, when it is taught with the framing intact. Without the framing, the model can be misused to suggest a neutrality that is itself the harm.

Question 8: Does the horizontal line create a sense of shared/even responsibility and impact/resources?

In the 2D static representation, yes, and this is a failure of the visual that the model has had to address. The horizontal line drawn on a flat page looks like a balance scale. The eye reads it as equality. The implication of equality is shared responsibility. The implication of shared responsibility, in a context of unequal power, is the displacement of structural harm onto individual bodies.

The model is not actually a static 2D structure. The lemniscate axes I have described in earlier parts of this book are dynamic, three-dimensional, and shaped by the field they are operating in. In a room where the power is even, the axes hold their proportions. In a room where the power is unequal, the axes tilt. The Slanted Line is not a special case; the Slanted Line is the default in any context where the bodies in the room are not in the same structural position.

When I draw the model in a room, I have started drawing it with intentional asymmetry, especially when the conversation is about contexts where the power is structurally unequal. I draw the Red axis at an angle. I show the cascade running longer in one direction than the other. I show the center, the heart, displaced from where the geometry would otherwise put it. The visual makes legible what the words have been saying: this is not a balance scale; this is a field shaped by the actual conditions of the actual bodies in it.

What the colleague’s question identified is that the visual representation of any model has its own power. The clean geometry of a balance scale carries an implicit politics: that the parties are equivalent, that the resolution is symmetric, that the responsibility is shared. That implicit politics is incompatible with the work the model is trying to do in contexts of structural inequality. The visual has to be redrawn, every time, to reflect the actual conditions.

The deeper answer is that the model is not the visual. The model is the practice. The visual is a teaching tool. When the visual fails to teach what the model intends, the visual gets revised. The current generation of teaching materials shows the lemniscate in dynamic motion, tilted by the field, with the center off-balance and recovering. The visual will continue to evolve as the teaching deepens.

Question 9: Does it assume an equal playing field, which is not the case for those most negatively impacted by conflict?

The model does not assume an equal playing field. The model assumes the playing field is whatever the field actually is, and the practice is to read the field accurately before any move is made.

The error the colleague identified, which is a real error in earlier presentations, was that the introductory framing of the model did not name the unevenness of the field with enough specificity for the framing to do its work. When the unevenness is named only in passing, the participants whose nervous systems are organized around the unevenness can hear the model as if it were addressed to a generic body. The generic body is the dominant-culture body. The model that is addressed to a generic body produces solutions that work for the dominant-culture body and that fail, or worse, for everyone else.

The current framing names the unevenness as a structural feature of the work. The first instruction is not “feel your body.” The first instruction is “feel your body in the field you are actually in.” For the participant whose field includes the chronic activation of marginalization, the instruction is permission to feel that activation rather than override it. For the participant whose field includes the comfort of dominant-culture buffering, the instruction is permission to feel what their body has been allowed to ignore, including the cost their comfort has imposed on others.

The framing also names the survival-mode binary. For bodies that are in active survival mode, including bodies under sustained threat, the emotional life often reduces to good or bad, safe or unsafe. The DOT model’s gradient framing is not available to a body in acute survival; it is the work of the body once a baseline of safety is established. Asking a body in active survival to do gradient work is itself a microaggression, because it assumes a nervous system condition the body does not currently have. The framing has to acknowledge that the body’s first task may be survival, and the model is available when survival has been secured.

The work the model does in conditions of structural inequality is the work of giving bodies that have been marginalized a precise language for what is happening in them and around them. The precision is the gift. The model does not pretend that the precision will, by itself, change the structure. The precision allows the body to act in the structure with awareness, to choose responses that match the actual conditions, and to refuse the institutional framings that would otherwise displace the structural problem onto the body’s individual cascade.

Question 10: How does failing to name/center power and privilege reinforce uneven power dynamics and racial/gender/etc. harm?

Failing to name the structure makes the structure invisible, and the invisible structure is the most effective structure. This is one of the foundational insights of liberation psychology (Martín-Baró 1994) and of critical theory more broadly: the conditions that produce harm depend, for their continued operation, on the harm being read as individual rather than structural.

When a model fails to name power and privilege, the model becomes a tool of the structure. The marginalized body that comes to the model for help with the harm being done to it is offered a framework that locates the source of the harm in the marginalized body’s own cascade. The cascade is real; it is also a response. The framework that addresses the response without addressing the cause is the framework that asks the marginalized body to do the work of accommodating the structure that is harming it. This is the institutional version of victim-blaming, and any model that participates in it is itself a microaggression at the macro scale.

The DOT model has to refuse this position by structural design. The naming of power and privilege is not an add-on, an advanced topic, or a chapter for later. It is the framing within which the cascade work makes sense. Without the framing, the cascade work is misread. With the framing, the cascade work becomes a precise tool for navigating actual conditions.

The harm that comes from the absence of the framing is the slow normalization of the structure. The marginalized participant who is taught the model without the framing learns to manage their cascade in ways that make them more compatible with the structure that is harming them. Over time, the management becomes the body’s organizing principle. The body learns to suppress the protective response, to soften the affect, to perform the acceptable version of itself. The harm continues. The participant has learned to bear it more efficiently. The structure has been reinforced by the participant’s own internalization of its terms.

This is the failure mode the colleague was protecting against, and she was right to protect against it. The DOT model in its mature form names the structure. The naming does not change the structure by itself. The naming creates the conditions under which a body can know what is being done to it and choose responses that do not reinforce the doing.

Question 11: Does this model assume best intent from all parties?

No. The model assumes whatever intent is present, and it makes intent legible without making intent the primary subject.

Intent matters less than impact in the question of harm. Whether the perpetrator meant the harm changes some things, including the appropriate framework for response, but it does not change the harm. The body that was hit was hit, regardless of whether the hitter meant to hit. The repair work begins with the impact and only later considers the intent.

The model also does not assume that all intent is good. The taxonomy of microaggressions (Sue et al. 2007) is built on the recognition that intent runs a spectrum from conscious malice (microassault) to unconscious insensitivity (microinsult) to defensive denial (microinvalidation). The model meets each of these on its own terms. The response to a microassault is different from the response to a microinsult, not because the harm is less but because the perpetrator’s nervous system territory is different and the available pathways to repair are different.

When the perpetrator’s intent is to dominate, the model does not pretend it is something else. The Vampire and Viper axes I described in Part I are the cascades that run in bodies that are using other bodies for their own extraction or coercion. These cascades are real, they are observable in the field, and the model does not blur them into the more recoverable cascades of Fix or Fight. When you are in a room with a Vampire cascade running in another body, the work is not relational repair. The work is exit.

The colleague’s question reflects a worry that came up in the original presentation: that the model’s framing of conflict as opportunity for growth could be read as implying that all parties are operating in good faith. The framing of conflict as opportunity is true in the case of Friction. It is not true in the case of Abuse. The model has to make the distinction visible. Conflict at the level of Friction is, often, opportunity. Conflict at the level of Abuse is harm. The framing has to scale.

What the model does assume is that all bodies are running cascades, and that the cascades are legible if you have the practice to read them. The legibility is the gift. It allows you to read whether the body across from you is in a recoverable cascade or in a cascade that is using you. The model is a diagnostic. The diagnosis tells you what kind of room you are in. What you do with the room is then your work.

Question 12: Who benefits in cases where one party intends healing/equity and the other intends dominance? Who is harmed?

The party that intends dominance benefits from the framing of the situation as conflict between equals. The party that intends healing or equity is harmed by the same framing, because it requires them to engage as if the other party were also trying to heal, which exposes them to additional dominance with no protection.

The participant whose story I have permission to share here was misgendered repeatedly by a coworker, after multiple workplace trainings, in a politically tense workplace where escalation to HR could end her career. The bystanders watched and did nothing. The harm was layered: the direct harm of the misgendering, the indirect harm of the bystanders’ silence, the structural harm of the workplace’s failure to translate training into accountability.

The DOT model did not give her a path back to the relational repair fantasy that the workplace’s training material had implied was the default outcome. It gave her a way to read the actual conditions. She named the layers. She recognized that the coworker, who might have been neurodivergent and operating on automatic, was nonetheless responsible for the impact. She recognized that the bystanders were not neutral parties; they were complicit by their silence. She recognized that the workplace was producing the conditions that made the coworker’s pattern survivable for the coworker and unsurvivable for her.

Her response was not what the workplace would have preferred. She did not request a mediated conversation with the coworker. She did not file an HR complaint that the workplace could pretend to address. She named the harm directly, in writing, to her coworkers, including the bystanders. She made the pattern visible. She did not require any one of them to validate her experience for her to act on it. The action was its own validation.

What the model did, in her case, was protect her from the framing that would have served the workplace at her expense. The framing of equal parties needing to find common ground is a framing that dominant-culture institutions love, because it converts structural harm into interpersonal misunderstanding. The DOT model, used well, refuses the conversion. The body knows the difference between conflict and harm. The model gives the body the language to insist on the difference.

The body that intends dominance is rarely confused about what they are doing. They are running a cascade that gives them something: control, attention, the maintenance of an identity that requires the diminishment of others. The body that intends healing has to first protect itself from the dominance cascade, then make decisions about whether engagement is possible. Engagement is not the default. Protection is the default. Engagement is what becomes available when protection is secured.

Question 13: How does privilege play into the assumption of good intent?

Privilege is the cumulative buffering of the nervous system from the consequences of its own actions. The dominant-culture body that has spent a lifetime being given the benefit of the doubt has developed a nervous system that expects to be given the benefit of the doubt. The expectation is itself a form of privilege.

The marginalized body that has been read with suspicion since childhood has developed a nervous system that does not get the benefit of the doubt and does not extend the benefit of the doubt as freely, because the body has learned that the benefit of the doubt is a luxury it cannot afford. When a marginalized body is asked to assume good intent from a dominant-culture body, the body is being asked to extend a courtesy it has not been extended.

The asymmetry compounds. The dominant-culture body’s good intent is assumed by the institution, by the bystanders, by the framing of the interaction. The marginalized body’s intent is interrogated, doubted, requires evidence. The same action read as well-intentioned in one body is read as suspicious in the other. The privileged body that takes the assumption of good intent for granted is taking for granted a structural condition that has been denied to others.

When I am asked, by a dominant-culture participant, to confirm that the model assumes good intent, I name the asymmetry. The model assumes the intent that is actually present, and the practitioner has to read the cascade to know what is actually present. The model also asks the dominant-culture participant to notice that the assumption of their own good intent is itself a privilege, and that extending the same assumption to others, particularly to marginalized others, is not a courtesy but a structural repair.

What the model does not do is extract the work of extending good intent from marginalized bodies who have been given no good intent in return. The asymmetry is structural and the repair is structural. Asking the marginalized body to be more generous in their reading of dominant-culture intent than the dominant-culture body has been in their reading of marginalized intent is itself a microaggression.

The dominant-culture body that wants to be read as well-intentioned has work to do. The work is the cumulative repair of the gap between their stated intent and their historical impact. The work is the building of a track record that earns the benefit of the doubt rather than expecting it as a default. The work is, in the meantime, accepting that the body across from them may not extend the benefit of the doubt and that the lack of extension is not a personal injury but a structural condition that the dominant-culture body’s lineage has earned.

Question 14: Do references to “victim mentality, scarcity mindset, catastrophizing,” etc., uphold victim-blaming culture?

They can, when they are used without specifying what they actually name. The terms have legitimate clinical and emotional content. They also have a long history of being weaponized to dismiss the legitimate responses of marginalized bodies to actual harm. The DOT model has to distinguish between the legitimate content and the weaponized use.

Victim mentality, as a clinical concept, names a specific pattern: an internalized narrative of disempowerment that persists even in conditions where agency is available. Victimization, as a structural concept, names the actual experience of being harmed. The two are different. The first is a possible internal response to long exposure to the second. Pathologizing the first without acknowledging the second is the weaponization.

Scarcity mindset names an internal pattern of organizing one’s behavior around the assumption of insufficient resources. Structural scarcity names the actual material condition of insufficient resources. The first can develop in response to the second. Diagnosing scarcity mindset in a body that is living in structural scarcity, without naming the structural scarcity, is the weaponization. The body’s mindset is not the problem; the body’s mindset is an accurate adaptation to a real condition.

Catastrophizing names the cognitive pattern of treating possible threats as if they were certain. In a clinical context, catastrophizing can be a maladaptive pattern that the body would benefit from interrupting. In a context of actual ongoing threat, including gaslighting, intimate partner violence, or systemic oppression, what is called catastrophizing may be the body’s accurate threat assessment. Telling a body in active danger that it is catastrophizing is itself a danger. The body knows. The body is rarely wrong about its own safety. The diagnostic frame has to attend to the actual conditions before it diagnoses.

The DOT model addresses these terms by always asking the contextual question first. What is the actual condition? Once the actual condition is named, the body’s response can be located on a spectrum from accurate to maladaptive. The body that is in actual danger and responds with high alertness is not catastrophizing; the body is reading the field. The body that is in safe conditions and responds with high alertness has more room to ask what the alertness is in service of. The terms are useful when paired with the contextual question. The terms are corrosive when used without it.

The structural version of this question is: who gets diagnosed with victim mentality, scarcity mindset, and catastrophizing, and who does not. The answer, in dominant-culture institutions, is that the diagnostic gets applied to marginalized bodies more readily and to dominant-culture bodies more reluctantly. The same alertness in a Black woman gets read as paranoia; in a white man, as risk awareness. The same scarcity behavior in a poor person gets read as mindset; in a wealthy person, as prudence. The diagnostic itself is shaped by the structural conditions. The model has to refuse the diagnostic when it is being shaped by those conditions rather than by accurate reading of the body in front of it.

Question 15: What’s the distinction between scarcity mindset and structural/institutional/cultural lack of access to resources?

The distinction is the difference between a pattern in the body and a condition in the world. They interact, but they are not the same.

Structural scarcity is the actual material condition produced by the distribution of resources in the society. Wage gaps. Housing inaccessibility. Underfunded schools. Healthcare deserts. Discriminatory lending. The disparate generational accumulation of wealth and the disparate generational extraction of wealth. These are conditions in the world, measurable, traceable to specific policy decisions, and persistent across the lifetimes of the people who live within them.

Scarcity mindset is the body’s internal response to having lived in structural scarcity. The hoarding behaviors. The difficulty trusting that resources will be available. The reluctance to spend on the self even when resources permit it. The chronic future-orientation toward the next moment of insufficiency. These patterns are real adaptations to real conditions. They are not character flaws; they are nervous system organizations that were once protective and may continue to be protective or may be ready to update.

The interaction runs in both directions. Structural scarcity produces scarcity mindset in the bodies that live under it. Scarcity mindset, when it is treated as if it were the original condition, becomes the basis for blaming marginalized bodies for their material situation. The body is told its mindset is the problem. The mindset, the body is told, is what is keeping it poor. If the body could just change its mindset, the body could escape the structural conditions. This is the bootstrap myth in psychological dress.

The DOT model holds the distinction by always working the scale lens. The body is real, and the body has a mindset, and the mindset is information about the body’s history. The world is also real, and the world has structures, and the structures are information about the conditions the body has been living in. Both are addressed. Neither is collapsed into the other. The mindset work is offered as a resource for bodies that want it, not as a prescription for bodies that have been told their poverty is their fault.

When the mindset work is offered to a body in active structural scarcity, the offer has to be paired with material support. Otherwise the offer is asking the body to change its psychology while the conditions remain unchanged, which is asking the body to bear the cost of the structure with one fewer protective mechanism. The body is not a project for the dominant-culture practitioner to optimize. The body is in a condition, and the condition is the first subject.

Question 16: Does failing to name systemic removal of resources reinforce a “bootstraps” mindset?

Yes, directly. Any framework that addresses the body’s response to structural scarcity without naming the structural scarcity is, by omission, suggesting that the body’s response is the primary site of intervention. The omission is the harm.

The bootstrap mindset is the cultural shorthand for the belief that individual effort is the primary determinant of outcomes, regardless of structural conditions. The belief is mathematically false; outcomes in any society are shaped by structural conditions in ways that no amount of individual effort can overcome for most bodies. The belief is also psychologically corrosive; it tells the body that the conditions it cannot change are its own fault.

The DOT model in its mature form names structural conditions explicitly. The cascade work is offered as a resource for navigating conditions, not as a substitute for changing them. When a participant is working with a cascade that is being produced by structural conditions, the practitioner’s first move is to name the structural condition. The naming is the structural intervention the model can offer within the limits of what a model can do. Beyond the naming, the participant has to be connected to material resources, political analysis, organized community, and the supports that allow structural change to be pursued collectively.

A model that pretends to be apolitical, in conditions where the conditions themselves are political, is participating in the politics. The neutrality is a position. The DOT model has to take the position that names the conditions, even when the naming is uncomfortable for the institution that is hosting the work.

Question 17: How might it feel to someone living with generational poverty or violence to hear a privileged perspective on scarcity mentality?

It feels like contempt dressed as care. It feels like being lectured on how to manage your condition by someone who has never had to live in your condition. It feels like the contemporary version of the moral instruction that the wealthy have been delivering to the poor for as long as there has been wealth and poverty. The body recognizes the contempt even when the words are warm.

There is a particular cruelty in the privileged perspective on scarcity mentality, because the perspective often comes from people who genuinely believe they are helping. The well-meaning trainer who tells the audience that scarcity is in their heads, that abundance is available if they would only believe in it, that their financial situation is a function of their mindset. The trainer has not lived in structural scarcity. The trainer has lived in conditions that allowed their mindset work to compound into outcomes that the audience cannot replicate, because the audience is in different conditions.

The body in generational poverty hears the lecture as confirmation of what the structure has been saying all along: that the failure to escape is the body’s own. The shame the lecture produces is the shame of being lectured by someone who does not know you. The shame compounds the existing structural conditions. The body now has to manage the cascade of the lecture in addition to the cascade of the structure.

When I am leading a session that includes people across material conditions, I have to be honest about the position from which I am speaking. I have material privilege that has shaped my access to the conditions in which this model could develop. The body’s cascade work is real, and the work is more available to bodies that have the material conditions to do it. I do not pretend that mindset is the primary lever in conditions where the body’s mindset is doing its best work with insufficient material support.

What the model can offer, in conditions of generational poverty, is the language for what the body has been doing all along. The body has been carrying enormous loads with great skill. The cascade work names the skill, recognizes the load, and offers, where useful, additional tools. The model does not lecture. The model accompanies.

Question 18: What if a victim of domestic violence were to take this model literally and leave resources their partner controls?

This is the question that keeps me up at night, and it is the question that any practitioner of any model that touches on conflict has to answer with care. The DOT model is not a prescription for action. It is a resource for orientation. The distinction is the difference between a body that uses the model to clarify what is happening and a body that uses the model as if it were a directive.

A victim of domestic violence is in a structural condition: the partner controls resources, the legal system may or may not provide reliable protection, the social network may or may not include people who can take the victim in, the children’s safety may or may not depend on staying in proximity to the abuser, the financial future may or may not survive the leaving. These are real conditions. They are not in the victim’s head. They are in the material world, and they have to be addressed before any model can be useful.

The DOT model does not tell the victim to leave. The DOT model gives the victim a way to read what their nervous system is doing, to distinguish between the cascade that is being produced by the abuse and the cascade that is being produced by the prospect of leaving, and to understand that both cascades are information about their actual conditions, not character flaws. The model also gives the victim a way to recognize that the framing the abuser may be using (“you are catastrophizing,” “you are creating drama,” “we just need to communicate better”) is itself an abuse tactic, and that their nervous system’s accurate reading of danger is reliable evidence even when the abuser denies it.

What the model insists on, when it meets a victim of domestic violence, is the priority of safety. Safety is the precondition for any other work. Safety includes material resources, including the resources the partner controls, and the model does not require the victim to give those resources up in service of any abstract growth. The growth, if it comes, comes after the safety is secured. The order is non-negotiable.

The role of the practitioner in this case is to be honest about the limits of what the model offers, to be connected to actual resources (shelters, legal aid, financial advocacy, safety planning networks), and to refuse the framing that would require the victim to do the cascade work as a substitute for the structural support they actually need. The model is one resource among many. Treating it as the primary resource in conditions of active violence is malpractice.

The victim of domestic violence who encounters this model deserves to encounter it as a tool for clarifying what is happening to them, not as a curriculum that asks them to grow their way out of the harm. The harm is not in their nervous system. The harm is in the partner’s behavior, in the system’s failure to protect them, in the conditions that make leaving costly. The model has to know its place.

Question 19: What is the difference between victim mentality and being victimized?

Victim mentality is an internal pattern. Being victimized is an external event. The two interact, and they are not the same.

Being victimized is what happens when another body or system enacts harm against you. The harm is real, the event is locatable in time, the consequences are material. A person who has been victimized has been harmed. The harm is not their fault. The harm is not their characterization. The harm is a fact in the world.

Victim mentality, when the term is used clinically, names a pattern in the body of organizing the self around victimhood as identity. The pattern can develop after repeated victimization, especially when the victimization has not been adequately addressed, when the body has had no opportunity to discharge the cascade, when the structural conditions continue. The pattern can also develop in bodies that have not been substantially victimized but that have organized themselves around grievance for reasons that have to do with their own psychological development.

The two are often confused in dominant-culture discourse in ways that benefit the structures that produce victimization. The marginalized body that names its victimization is accused of victim mentality. The dominant-culture body that produces victimization is rarely accused of anything. The accusation of victim mentality becomes a tool of structural protection, deployed to delegitimize the testimony of bodies whose testimony threatens the structure.

The DOT model holds the distinction by attending to the actual conditions. The body that says “I was victimized” is, in most cases, telling the truth about an event. The body’s nervous system response to the event is information about the event and about the body’s history. The response is not the same thing as a mentality. The response is a cascade, and the cascade can be metabolized, with support, into a body that holds the event as part of its history without being organized around it as primary identity.

The work is the metabolization, and the metabolization is not on a timeline that anyone outside the body can dictate. A body that has been victimized has the right to take whatever time the metabolization takes. The body that is rushed through the metabolization is being harmed again. The body that is told to “move on” is being asked to bypass the work that would allow movement to be real rather than performed.

The DOT model’s contribution is the language for the metabolization. The cascade is named. The body learns to recognize what is its own and what was deposited by the event. Over time, with support, the body can find a relationship with the event that is neither denial nor identification. The event is part of the history. The history is part of the body. The body is not the event.

Question 20: Does the model equate responsibility/accountability for internal processes with accountability for harmful behavior?

No, and this distinction is one of the most important the model has to maintain.

Internal accountability is the work of taking responsibility for one’s own cascade, one’s own patterns, one’s own contribution to the field. It is the work of noticing when one is in a Fix cascade, naming it, choosing whether to act from it or to wait until a more useful cascade becomes available. Internal accountability is the work of the self with the self.

Behavioral accountability is the work of taking responsibility for the impact of one’s actions on other bodies. It is the work of noticing when one has caused harm, naming it, making the repair the harmed body indicates is needed, and changing the behavior so the harm does not recur. Behavioral accountability is the work of the self with the other.

The two are related but they are not the same. A body can do excellent internal work and still cause harm if the body has not done the behavioral work. A body can perform the behavioral work without doing the internal work, in which case the behavior change tends not to hold because the pattern that produced the harm has not been addressed. The mature practice involves both, in proportion to the situation.

The model does not require the harmed body to do internal accountability for the harm caused to them. The harmed body has their own internal work, which is the work of metabolizing what happened to them. That work is not the same as taking responsibility for what was done to them. The harmed body is not at fault for the cascade that the harm produced in them. The cascade is their nervous system’s accurate response to an external event.

The model requires the body that caused harm to do both their internal work and their behavioral work. The internal work tells them what produced the harm in their cascade. The behavioral work changes the action. Without both, the same harm tends to recur, possibly toward a different person, with the same underlying pattern.

The structural version of this distinction matters too. Institutions often demand internal accountability from marginalized members (“manage your reaction,” “process your feelings about what happened”) without demanding behavioral accountability from the members who caused the harm. The asymmetry is itself a microaggression. The model has to refuse it.

Question 21: Could discussing catastrophizing increase confusion for someone gaslit or unaware of their danger?

Yes, directly, if the discussion is conducted without attention to the actual conditions of the body in front of you.

Catastrophizing is, in its clinical sense, the cognitive pattern of treating possible threats as if they were certain. The pattern can be maladaptive when the threats are unlikely. The pattern is accurate threat assessment when the threats are real.

A body that has been gaslit has been told, repeatedly, that its accurate threat assessment is catastrophizing. The gaslighting works by getting the body to mistrust its own reading of reality. If a workshop or model then echoes the gaslighter’s framing, the workshop becomes an extension of the abuse. The body that came to the workshop hoping for clarity is given confirmation of the gaslighter’s frame.

The DOT model holds this risk by always asking what the body is responding to before asking whether the response is proportional. The cascade does not arise from nowhere. The cascade arises from input. The input may be in the room or in the body’s history or in the structural conditions or in the relational dynamics that the body is currently navigating. If the input is real, the cascade is information. If the input has been distorted by gaslighting, the body’s job is not to dampen its cascade; the body’s job is to recover the accurate reading.

When I am working with a body that has been gaslit, the language is not “you might be catastrophizing.” The language is “your body is responding to something. Let’s slow down and notice what your body is responding to. Your body’s reading is the data we are going to work with first.” The frame trusts the body. The frame puts the burden of proof on the framings that have been disputing the body’s reading, not on the body.

This is one of the places where the cost of imprecise teaching of the model becomes high. A facilitator who introduces catastrophizing as a maladaptive pattern without distinguishing it from accurate threat assessment, in a room that includes gaslighted bodies, is producing harm. The clarification is the discipline. The clarification has to be present every time, in every room, because the gaslighted body is in every room and the room does not know which body is which.

Question 22: Does the model minimize abuse, exploitation, domination?

When the model is used without the framing, yes, it can. When the model is used with the framing intact, no, it does not.

The cascade language can sound abstract when applied to bodies that are being concretely abused, exploited, or dominated. The cascade is precise about the body. The cascade does not, by itself, name the structural conditions that are producing the cascade. Without the structural naming, the cascade work can be heard as if the body’s pattern were the issue, rather than the conditions producing the pattern.

The framing names the conditions. Abuse is named as abuse. Exploitation is named as exploitation. Domination is named as domination. The cascade work is offered as a resource for navigating these conditions, not as a substitute for changing them. The body’s pattern is information about the body. The conditions are information about the world. Both are subjects of the work.

When the model meets abuse, the model’s first move is to refuse the framing of two parties in conflict. The abuser and the abused are not in conflict. The abuser is in a sustained pattern of harm. The abused is in a sustained position of being harmed. The cascade work in the abused body is the work of clarifying what is happening and protecting the self. The cascade work in the abuser body, if it happens at all, is a separate process that has to be conducted in conditions that do not require the abused body to participate.

When the model meets exploitation, the work is similar. The exploiter is benefiting from the exploited body’s labor in ways the exploited body cannot fully refuse without losing access to material survival. The cascade in the exploited body is the body’s accurate response to extraction. The model’s job is to name the extraction, not to optimize the body’s tolerance for it.

When the model meets domination, the work is structural. The dominator and the dominated are not in a relationship that the cascade work can adjust by itself. The cascade work can clarify, can support resistance, can help the dominated body maintain its capacity to act, can prevent the dominated body from being slowly converted into the role the dominator requires. The structural change is a separate project, and the model is one resource for the bodies doing that project, not the substitute for it.

The model minimizes when it pretends that the cascade work is sufficient. The model does not minimize when it knows its place: as a tool for the body, in the conditions, with awareness of the limits of what a model can do.

Question 23: How does this model apply to macro-level violence (e.g., genocide, colonization)?

The model applies in the way that any tool for individual and group consciousness can apply at macro scale: as one resource among many, with no pretense that the resource will, by itself, change the macro conditions.

Genocide and colonization are macro-scale violences. They are enacted by structures, sustained by ideologies, materialized through specific actors with specific power, and survived, when they are survived, by populations whose survival depends on a combination of individual courage, organized resistance, international intervention, and the slow attrition of the structures themselves. None of this is in the DOT model. The DOT model addresses the cascades in the bodies that are living through these conditions, that are organizing to resist them, that are recovering from them across generations.

What the model offers in conditions of macro violence is the language for what the inherited charge feels like in the body (Menakem 2017). The body that grew up in a colonized population carries the macro condition in its nervous system before the body has any conscious history with the colonization. The body carries it in posture, in startle response, in the cascade patterns the body inherited from caregivers who carried the cascade patterns from their caregivers. The model gives the body language for this charge, and the language is a precondition for the body’s capacity to act in its own present rather than only in the inherited past.

The model also offers language for the cascades that organize collective action. Movements have cascades. The Group Creature of a movement runs through Fight, Freeze, Fix, and the other axes in its own collective rhythm. The movement that recognizes its cascade can choose its actions with more precision. The movement that cannot recognize its cascade is acted by the cascade, often into patterns that defeat the movement’s own aims.

What the model does not offer is the analysis of the macro conditions themselves. That analysis belongs to political theory, to history, to material analysis, to the testimonies of those who have lived through and resisted the conditions. The DOT model sits alongside these analyses. It does not replace them.

When the model is deployed at macro scale without political analysis, the model becomes a tool for the maintenance of the macro conditions, because the model’s language can be used to individualize structural harm. This is the worst possible use of the model, and it is the use that is most attractive to institutions that want to appear to address macro conditions without actually changing them. The discipline of the practitioner is to refuse this deployment, to insist that the model be paired with the political analysis, and to know that the body work is one piece of a much larger struggle.

Question 24: Would this model apply to acts of oppression versus resistance (e.g., Russia/Ukraine, Palestine/Israel)?

The model can be used to read the cascades in the bodies and movements involved in any conflict, including conflicts of asymmetric power. The use of the model does not, however, neutralize the asymmetry. Oppression and resistance are not symmetric activities. They are not two sides of the same cascade. They are structurally different and the model has to hold the difference.

When a colonized population resists colonization, the resistance is the cascade of bodies acting on behalf of their own survival and the survival of their people. The cascade can run Fight, Freeze, Fix, and across the axes; the cascade is doing the work of survival under conditions where survival has been threatened. The cascade is not equivalent to the cascade of the colonizer, who is acting on behalf of an extraction or a domination that the colonized population did not consent to.

The model does not pretend equivalence between oppressor and oppressed. The framing of “both sides have a cascade, both sides have valid emotions” is a framing that the dominant-culture discourse loves, because it appears to be balanced and is actually a structural protection of the oppressor. The DOT model has to refuse the framing. The cascades are not equivalent in their causes, their consequences, or their moral standing.

What the model can offer is precision about what the cascade in any one body is doing, and what choices are available to that body within the conditions it is in. The colonized body’s cascade is information about the body’s actual conditions and about the body’s capacity to act. The colonizer body’s cascade is information about how the colonizer is metabolizing their own complicity, which is a different question from what they should do, which is stop the colonization.

In specific conflicts, the model can be deployed with care. The bodies of organizers, of fighters, of those who have lost loved ones, of those who are surviving on the ground, of those in the diaspora, of those who are bystanders to atrocity, all have cascades. The model can help any of these bodies read what their body is doing and choose their actions with more clarity. The model does not adjudicate the political question of which side is right. The political question is adjudicated by the conditions, by the histories, by the testimonies of those who are living it.

What I will not do, when teaching the model, is pretend that political neutrality is available. The model is most useful to people who are committed to the survival, dignity, and self-determination of all bodies. The model is least useful, and most likely to be misused, in the hands of those who are committed to the domination of one body by another. The model itself does not prevent the misuse. The framing, the practitioner’s discipline, and the political analysis that accompanies the model are what prevent it.

Question 25: Does accountability for acts of dominance/violence play a part in transformation?

Yes. Transformation in the DOT model is the third phase, after Deepen and Orient, and at the level of behavior, transformation requires accountability. Without accountability, what looks like transformation is performance, and the performance does not change the underlying pattern.

Accountability has a structure. It begins with the recognition that harm occurred, in the form the harmed party indicated rather than the form the harming party prefers. It continues with the work of understanding what produced the harm, in the harming party’s own cascade and in the structural conditions that enabled the cascade to become action. It includes the repair, in the form the harmed party indicates, which may or may not include relationship continuation. It includes the behavioral change, sustained over time, that demonstrates the pattern has actually shifted.

The model’s transformation phase is the Aha, which is the body event before the mind event. The Aha is the moment when the body knows that something has changed. The body knows before the mind knows. The mind catches up by naming what the body has felt. Without the Aha, what passes for transformation is intellectual repackaging of the same pattern in new language. The body has not changed. The pattern will recur.

When the body that caused harm experiences the Aha, the body is now in possession of new information. The information is not enough by itself. The information has to be paired with the behavioral work that translates the new information into changed action. Action is the demonstration. Action over time is the proof.

Institutions can do transformation work too, and the structure is similar. Institutional Aha is the moment when the institution recognizes that its pattern has produced harm in a way it can no longer deny. The institutional behavioral work is the policy change, the structural change, the redistribution of power, the sustained shift in practice. Without the behavioral work, the institutional Aha is a press release. The release does not change the conditions.

Accountability for acts of dominance and violence is the specific case of transformation work where the harm has been severe and the patterns have been sustained. The accountability is more demanding because the patterns have had longer to settle and the structures protecting the patterns have had longer to entrench. The model does not provide a shortcut. The model provides language. The work itself is the work.

Question 26: Does the model assume those who commit violence will be self-reflective and hold themselves accountable?

No. The model is realistic about the conditions under which self-reflection and accountability happen, and the conditions are not the default condition of those who commit violence.

Most people who commit violence have organized their nervous systems around not feeling what their actions have done to others. The organization is what allows the violence to continue. To feel what the violence has done would be to interrupt the cascade that produces the violence, and the cascade is producing something the body needs (control, status, the maintenance of an identity, the extraction of resources or attention). Without external pressure, the body has no incentive to do the work that would disrupt its own cascade.

External pressure can come from many sources. Consequences from the legal system, when the legal system is willing to address the violence. Consequences from the community, when the community is willing to organize accountability outside legal channels. Consequences from the relationship, when the harmed party is in a position to extract consequences. Consequences from the body itself, when the cost of the cascade has accumulated to the point that the body’s own survival requires change.

The DOT model does not assume any of these pressures will arrive. The model is therefore not a strategy for accountability of those who commit violence. The model is a resource for the bodies that are doing the accountability work, including the bodies that are organizing the external pressure, the bodies that are surviving the violence, the bodies that are deciding how to engage with the body that committed the violence.

In the rare case where the body that committed violence is genuinely doing the work, the model can support that work. The work involves the cascade work I described in earlier chapters, paired with sustained behavioral change, paired with the willingness to accept consequences that the harmed party defines. The work is slow. The work is not glamorous. The work is not redeemed by the harmed party’s forgiveness, which the harmed party may or may not extend on whatever timeline they choose.

What I tell practitioners: do not build a practice that depends on the abuser doing their own work. The abuser may not do it. The model has to serve the harmed parties first. The model has to be available to the abuser only when the abuser has demonstrated, by behavior over time, that they are actually doing the work. Anything less is the practitioner being used by the abuser to perform redemption while continuing the pattern.

Question 27: How could someone committed to dominating others misuse this model to avoid accountability?

In every way that any framework can be misused, and in a few specific to the model’s vocabulary.

The cascade language can be deployed defensively. “I was in a Freeze cascade, I couldn’t help my behavior.” The defense uses the model’s recognition that cascades are involuntary in their onset to disclaim responsibility for the behavior that the cascade produced. The defense is fraudulent. The cascade may be involuntary in its onset. The behavior is not. The body that has the model also has the practice of choosing whether to act from the cascade or wait for a different cascade. The choice is the accountability. The cascade does not absolve.

The archetype language can be deployed strategically. “I am playing the Victim role here; you are playing the Villain.” The deployment uses the model’s archetypes to invert the actual dynamic, casting the abuser as the harmed party and the harmed party as the harm-doer. This is a sophisticated version of DARVO, the deny-attack-reverse-victim-offender pattern that abusers commonly use. The model’s vocabulary does not protect against this pattern. The vocabulary can be borrowed by anyone. The protection has to come from the practitioner’s discipline in reading the actual conditions, not the verbal performance.

The healing language can be deployed extractively. “I am on my healing journey; you need to be patient with me.” The deployment uses the language of growth and learning to extract continued access from the harmed party while delivering no actual change. The harmed party is told that their unwillingness to wait for the abuser’s healing is itself a failure of grace. This is one of the most common misuses of any framework that includes the language of growth.

The Group Creature language can be deployed by leaders to consolidate power. “We need to be one body together. Your individual concerns are disrupting the field.” The deployment uses the model’s recognition that groups have collective dynamics to suppress the legitimate dissent of group members. The body that names harm is positioned as the problem in the field, rather than as the body that is doing the field a service by naming what is happening in it.

The practitioner’s discipline is to recognize these moves when they happen and to refuse them. The model does not protect against its own misuse. The model is a tool. The tool’s effects depend on who is holding it and what they are using it for. Facilitator certification, peer accountability, ongoing supervision, and clear ethical norms are the structures that make the model resistant to weaponization. None of these are the model itself; they are the conditions of the model’s responsible use.

Question 28: How would organizations using this model and led by narcissistic leaders reinforce oppressive practices/culture?

The same way they reinforce oppressive practices with any other framework. The framework is recruited to perform the work the leader does not actually want done.

A narcissistic leader will use the cascade language to diagnose the cascades of others while remaining undiagnosable themselves. The other members of the organization are in their Freeze, their Fix, their Feed; the leader is in healthy regulation, observing the others. The diagnosis is unidirectional. The leader’s own cascade is invisible, by design.

A narcissistic leader will use the archetype language to assign roles. The dissenter is in the Villain archetype, the loyalists are in the Victor archetype, the leader is in whatever role the moment requires. The roles get reassigned as the leader’s needs shift. The members find themselves recast without consultation, and the recasting becomes a tool of control.

A narcissistic leader will use the language of psychological safety to require performances of safety that are not actually safe. The members are told that this is a psychologically safe environment, and the assertion of safety becomes the proof of safety, even when bodies in the organization are demonstrating, through their cascades, that the environment is not safe. The members who name the gap are accused of failing to receive the safety that has been offered.

A narcissistic leader will use the language of restoration and repair to require the harmed parties to participate in healing circles that center the leader’s growth at the expense of the harmed parties’ truth. The healing circle becomes a structure for the laundering of the leader’s behavior. The harmed parties are required to perform forgiveness or to be marked as obstacles to organizational growth.

The protections against this pattern are structural. External facilitators who are not employed by the organization. Independent feedback mechanisms that cannot be filtered through the leader. Norms that explicitly protect dissent and protect the bodies that name harm. Accountability structures that constrain the leader’s behavior, not just the behavior of those below. Without these structures, no framework, including the DOT model, can survive a narcissistic leader’s deployment of it.

When an organization is led by a narcissist, the most honest counsel I can give to members is: leave if you can, organize if you cannot, and do not give the leader your nervous system as a tool for the leader’s continued occupation of the position. The cascade language can be useful for understanding what the organization is doing to you, but the cascade work cannot fix what the leader is producing. The leader is the production. Removing the leader, or removing yourself, are the available paths.

Question 29: Might this model put someone dominated, abused, or gaslit in more danger?

It might, if it is misapplied, and the misapplication is the responsibility of the practitioner and the conditions of the work, not the body that came to the work seeking help.

The risks are specific. A facilitator who introduces the model in a room that includes actively endangered bodies, without trauma-informed framing, without grounding practices, without explicit permission to opt out, can produce destabilization that the body cannot afford. A facilitator who treats the body’s cascade as the primary site of intervention, without naming the conditions producing the cascade, can suggest that the body’s job is to manage its own response to ongoing harm. A facilitator who frames neutrality between abuser and abused can invite the abused body into a process that re-enacts the abuse. A facilitator who pushes the body toward action that the body’s actual safety conditions do not support can put the body in worse danger than the body was already in.

The discipline of the practitioner is to know the limits of what the model can offer in the presence of active danger. The model is most useful when paired with safety planning, with material resources, with legal advocacy where appropriate, with community support, with the structural conditions that allow the body to recover. The model is least useful when deployed as a substitute for these conditions. A workshop is not a shelter. A cascade map is not a restraining order. A facilitator is not a domestic violence advocate, unless the facilitator is also actually a domestic violence advocate, and even then the roles have to be held separately.

What I tell facilitators: assume that the most endangered body in the room is the body you are designing for. Build the framing for that body. Build the choice points for that body. Build the resource list for that body. Build the practice of checking in privately with that body, of being honest with that body about what the model can and cannot do, of being connected to the actual resources that body might need.

What I tell participants: the model is a resource, not a directive. The model is in service of your safety, not in tension with it. If anything in this work conflicts with your body’s read of what you need to do to stay safe, your body wins. The model does not override your body’s intelligence about your conditions. The model is an offering, and you have the right to take what serves and leave what does not.

The model in the hands of a careful practitioner, in conditions that include trauma-informed framing and access to actual support, can be useful even for bodies in active danger. The model in the hands of an unprepared practitioner, in conditions that do not include these supports, can produce harm. The responsibility is on the conditions, not on the body that came hoping for help.

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