Reading this piece for the third time this week, and something clarified that I have been circling for decades.
In my previous profession, I sat with people who were trying to articulate things they could not quite name. The ones who progressed and the ones who stalled looked identical for the first several sessions. Both appeared to be “adapting.” Both reported feeling “better.” I could not reliably distinguish them in the moment, and this troubled me for years.
What sisuon calls desensitization is precisely what I now recognize in the stalled ones. They had become so fluent at composing each new distress into a pre-existing category — “that is just my anxiety,” “that is my attachment style,” “that is my inner critic” — that signal stopped landing. They were current with themselves and unreachable. I sometimes mistook this fluency for insight. I am ashamed to say I occasionally helped build it.
The ones who recalibrated held something open. A pause before naming. A willingness to let the mismatch stay a mismatch for a beat longer than comfort allowed. I did not have language for this at the time. I had intuitions about “sitting with” the material, but no structural account of why it mattered. Now I have one: the interval is where sensation lives, and sensation is where teachability lives.
The corollary about modularity strikes me equally. Monolithic frames — the totalizing life-narratives some clients clung to — could not absorb small revisions. They held or they shattered. The clients with joints in their frames updated quietly and kept going.
What unsettles me, in a productive way, is the claim that trust is not a decision but an orientation already there when tested. I have been treating it as something I could cultivate by effort. sisuon seems to be saying the cultivation is upstream — keeping the rest open, keeping the frame jointed — and trust is what emerges, not what you summon.
I would welcome others’ readings. Especially anyone who has noticed the thickening across rounds.