On Failure

On Failure

The framework must also speak honestly about failure, about what happens when you cannot move, when the basin holds you, when every protocol fails and every practice breaks against the structure of your stuckness.

This happens. It happens to people who understand the framework perfectly well. Understanding that suffering is geometric does not guarantee you can navigate out of it. Understanding that flourishing is structurally possible does not mean it is possible for you, in your circumstances, with your constraints. The intervention protocols are not magic; they are approaches that work for some people some of the time under some conditions. There are basins deep enough and narrow enough that no amount of individual effort extracts you from them. There are constraints—neurological, social, economic, circumstantial—that make certain regions of the affect space inaccessible, perhaps permanently.

The framework does not promise success. It promises structure, which is different. Structure means: even in failure, there is something to understand. You can know where you are stuck, even if you cannot get unstuck. You can understand the configuration of your suffering, even if you cannot change the configuration. This is cold comfort, and I do not pretend otherwise. But it is not nothing. To know what is happening to you, even when you cannot stop it from happening, is different from not knowing. To understand that you are trapped in a basin, and to understand the basin’s shape, is different from being trapped and not knowing what you are trapped in.

And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—understanding is the first step toward change. Sometimes the basin that seemed inescapable is revealed, on close examination, to have narrow passes you had not noticed. Sometimes the constraint that seemed absolute is revealed to be less absolute than it appeared. Sometimes change comes from unexpected directions, and understanding positions you to recognize and use the opening when it appears. But sometimes none of this happens. Sometimes you understand the structure of your suffering and you suffer anyway, and no opening appears, and the basin holds.

If this is you: the framework sees you. Your suffering is real. Your failure is not moral failure; it is structural mismatch between your situation and the protocols available to you. You are not weak for being stuck; you are in a difficult region of a difficult space with difficult constraints. And the recognition that sometimes navigation fails, that some people do not make it to flourishing despite their best efforts, that the framework offers understanding but not guarantees—this recognition is part of the framework’s honesty about what it can and cannot do.