Two nervous systems.
One field of tension.
Most relationship advice assumes both people are operating from stable ground — that communication skills, date nights, and boundary-setting can fix what's wrong. But when one or both nervous systems are overloaded, when the relationship itself has become a source of chronic dysregulation, conventional advice doesn't just fail. It adds load.
Bonded Systems Under Load was written for people who already understand their relationship isn't working and are tired of being told to "just communicate better." It's a structural field manual for what happens when two people's nervous systems become locked in patterns that neither person chose and neither person can exit alone.
This book doesn't take sides. It maps the system — the states the relationship cycles through, the gates that determine whether repair is possible, and the honest assessment of what happens when it isn't.
If you've ever felt like your relationship is something that's happening to both of you rather than something either of you is choosing, this is the book that explains why.
What this book offers
Bonded Systems maps the architecture of relationships under stress. Six relational states describe the positions partners cycle through — from stable co-regulation through progressive destabilization to the point where the system locks into patterns that resist all intervention.
The MVSR gate — Minimum Vi
able Stable Relationship — provides the honest assessment most relationship books avoid: the threshold below which continuing the relationship actively impedes recovery for both people. Not as judgment. As structural analysis.
The book includes CRAFT-based engagement strategies that are two to three times more effective than confrontation for reaching a partner who won't engage. It addresses weaponized recovery language — when concepts like "detachment" and "enabling" become instruments of control rather than tools for healing. And it provides one-body protocols for what to do when only one person is willing to change.
This is not a book about saving your relationship. It's a book about seeing it clearly — and making decisions from structural understanding rather than exhaustion.