Write into this prompt (saves to your journal)
Your reflections, customizations, and archetype names live in your browser’s localStorage. Nobody else can see them. Clearing your browser data clears them too. They never leave your device unless you explicitly choose “Send to research”.
Your saved customizations get stored as user metadata on the ruthdiaz.world WordPress site. The people with admin access to that site are the site stewards and the website technicians who maintain the site. Honest note: I am still learning what the WordPress.com platform shows admins versus what stays opaque. I will update this disclosure as I learn more, and I will not pretend to know more than I do.
The .village community (grown from the BridgeMakers cooperative) is not a registered legal entity. That means there is no incorporated organization behind this Atlas. The cooperative is a small group of people choosing to build together. As we grow, we will work toward a formal structure with clearer governance and clearer data agreements.
The research side of this work is held by Figure It In LLC, my (Ruth Diaz’s) consulting business, separate from the .village. Submissions go to a Cloudflare server in that container. I am a social scientist working independently. I will do my best, within the ethical standards I was taught and the standards I have come to hold as my own, to protect and guardian your info: no names attached unless you add them yourself; reflections are used in aggregate to improve the model and the Atlas; nothing is sold or shared with third parties; you can ask me to delete your submission at any time and I will.
No tracking pixels. No third-party analytics. No advertising. No selling of any data. No retention of identifying details unless you choose to attach them. The Atlas does not phone home except when you press a Send button.
Reach out: the Discord (linked in the alpha banner above) or directly through ruthdiaz.world/contact. I read everything.
— Ruth Diaz, Psy.D. · Figure It In LLC · the .village
Log what you noticed each day. The spider web maps the body's distribution by Sunday.
DOT · self-tracking
Log what you noticed. The spider web maps the body's distribution by Sunday.
A record of what you journaled, not a reading of your state. Use it to notice your attention, not to grade your body.
Most recent first · click any to rewind · pin to hold.
X / Y / Z · the fear cascade and the flow archetype for each pole.
Nothing is saved on our servers. Your reflections live in this browser tab only — copy, download, or send before you close it.
Browse every emotion in the model; click any to focus the dot.
Something is moving through you right now. The body knew it before any thought arrived. This is a map of that — the cascades we fall into when something hits, the archetypes we collapse into, and the way out that does not require leaving the body behind. Three axes for what we do under pressure: Fight or Flight, Fix or Freeze, Feed or Fuck. Three phases for what to do with what arises: Deepen, Orient, Transform. Drag, zoom, click anything, stay. Your body has been speaking. This page is for learning to listen.
This is a map of what your body does when something hits. The orb is you — your charge, your attention, your felt sense — traveling through the shapes nervous systems take under pressure. Click anything. Watch the orb move. Stay with whatever comes up.
The DOT Model — Deepen, Orient, Transform — is the working name for the pattern. .village is the community that grew up around practicing it (it began as BridgeMakers, a community in social VR). Both live on the same site because they were never separate.
The model was developed by Ruth Diaz, Psy.D. — but it didn’t come from a desk. It first cracked open inside a children’s psychiatric ward where the kids called it the “Compass-ion Model.” It deepened through years inside immersive-VR communities, clinical practice, leadership cohorts, and circles of practitioners who keep cycling it back through real rooms.
I am someone who paints with people. Sometimes the painting feels like it is using me to paint it. The DOT Model is what happened when the people and I all started to paint together at the same time.
— Ruth Diaz
So the model has an author, and it’s co-painted. The bodies that show up to the workshops, the children in the ward, the immersive-VR community members, the council that circles drafts back through real groups — every one of them is a hand on the brush.
The DOT Model is a map, not a doctrine. It points at what bodies do under pressure and what becomes available when you meet the cascade early enough. Test it in your own body and your own field. The X and Y axes — Fight/Flight and Fix/Freeze — have been observed across hundreds of group fields, cultures, and bodies. The Z axis (Feed/Fuck) and the Transform phase are marked WIP — built from real observation, but with thinner volume than the rest. Treat them as invitations to see if your body recognizes the shape.
Every cascade is shaped by power. The same Fight in a body read as white-male lands differently than in a body read as Black-female. The same Freeze in a citizen lands differently than in someone undocumented. The DOT Model holds the body’s response and the field that has already cast a role onto the body before it had a chance to speak. This isn’t decoration. It’s how the map stays useful instead of weaponized.
The same three axes (X — Fight / Flight, Y — Fix / Freeze, Z — Feed / Fuck) carry a second story: who is permitted to use these responses without consequence, and who is positioned to absorb them in silence. The body's response is one layer. The field's permission is the other. Three axes, three privileges. Click any card below to isolate that axis on the model above.
Powerful · Powerless · Helpful · Helpless · Feed · Fuck — plus the Preference → Bias → Hate cascade.
Who gets to be aggressive without consequence; who has to absorb that aggression in silence. Tone-policing, weaponized politeness, and "calm down" land here. The Villain end has the power to push; the Victim end is positioned to receive the push and not push back.
Who is positioned to fix, correct, intervene; whose hands are kept off the situation. The Victor end has the privilege of action — the assumption that their move is the right move. The Vicar end is held in stillness, often by structural factors, not by personal choice.
Both verbs are bivalent. Feed can mean to take in nutrients OR to give them. Fuck can mean to violate OR to give and receive pleasure. Z is direction of energy between bodies; privilege determines whose feeding and fucking gets treated as default-consensual, regardless of whether actual consent was given. Vampire pulls in without asking. Viper pushes out without asking. Container and Contractor are the same energies, in consent.
A BridgeMaker built this six-stage cascade as a teaching handout for the process Ruth runs in workshops. Every DEI moment lives somewhere on this spectrum, from "that's not my crowd" to organized harm. Coming soon as its own journey on the Atlas, with body cues and reflection prompts at every stage. For now, this is the cascade in shorthand:
A grounded research tool that paraphrases with citations. Coming soon.
A grounded research tool, not a chatbot. Trained only on the BridgeMakers blog and (eventually) the book, the FAQ, and the manuals. It paraphrases, but cites every answer back to the source. Useful when you remember Ruth said something specific about a topic and want to find it fast. For Ruth's actual voice, walk a journey or read the source.
When ready Open the corpus →Corpus content will be: BridgeMakers blog posts (43 published) + selected glossary entries from this Atlas. Sensitive personal documents (the Broken Bridges account; unpublished book chapters) are intentionally not in the corpus.
The diversity wheel, the cumulative-harm framing, and Sue's three forms a microaggression takes.
An adaptation of the Wheel of Privilege I built originally as a three-tier cake in VR for the Horizon creator community. Modern reference wheels already place the most marginalized identities at the center and the privileged “default” at the outer ring. What this version adds is direction.
The arrows point inward on purpose. The mission is to reverse the gravitational flow of power and resources — not to lift the marginalized up to the outer ring, but to centre them: to flow attention, resource, and care INWARD toward the core. Position on the wheel is dynamic — a body holds privilege on some axes and lives at the core on others. The intersections compound.
A single micro-aggression is small enough to deny. The accumulation never is. People living in the marginalized rings of multiple identities do not experience separate, deniable bites — they experience the air. Each card on this page is one bite. The whole page is the room.
Micro-aggressions are the surface evidence of deep-structure inequality. They are where structural privilege puts on a human face and makes contact. The work of this model is not to count the bites but to name the structure that breeds them, and to grow the bodies that can change the structure.
Conscious, deliberate hostility. Slurs, symbols, openly hostile statements. The behavior is intentional; what makes it "micro" is the social impunity around it.
Usually unconscious. Comments or behaviors that convey rudeness or a demeaning attitude — often delivered as compliment or curiosity ("you're so articulate," "what happened to you?").
Negates or nullifies the lived reality of a marginalized person ("I don't see color," "everyone struggles," "you're too sensitive"). Attacks the target's capacity to trust their own perception.