The Architecture of Integration: How Your Coherence Score Actually Works

The Number Beyond an Average

You get a number between 0 and 100. It lands you in a band: Thriving, Steady, Struggling, Overwhelmed, Crisis. That band shapes your Centering Plan, frames your profile, and tells your therapist something about where the structural work needs to go. But what’s actually happening inside that number?

Most personality scores are averages. Sum the parts, divide, report. Coherence works differently, a five-layer geometric computation that weighs how your 20 personality centers (each a specific intersection of a processing Capacity and an experiential Domain) coordinate as a system. The measure concerns how the whole thing holds together, not how each center performs in isolation.

Across five computational studies examining more than 10,000 personality profiles each, the internal machinery of that score has now been taken apart, tested layer by layer, and put back together. What emerged is a picture of integration that’s more specific, more layered, and more clinically useful than a single number would suggest. The Coherence score is doing five different things at once. Understanding what those things are changes how you read the number, and what you do about it.

Five Layers, Five Different Questions

Layer	Weight	What It Measures
Centered State Proportion	0.30	How many of your 20 centers are in balanced state
Hot Core Health	0.25	Health of the 6 most structurally central positions
Gateway Activation	0.20	How many of 9 gateway centers are functioning
Capacity Balance	0.15	Even distribution across your four processing modes
Domain Evenness	0.10	Even distribution across your five experiential territories

The Icosa model maps personality onto a 4x5 structure. Four Capacities, Open (how you receive experience), Focus (how you attend to it), Bond (how you connect with it), Move (how you express it), cross five Domains: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Relational, and Spiritual. Each intersection is a Harmony, a specific center with its own name. Empathy sits where Open meets Emotional. Agency lives where Move crosses Mental. Belonging is Bond x Relational. Twenty centers total, arranged in a structure called the Icosaglyph.

Coherence reads that structure through five distinct computational layers. Each one asks a different question about how the system is working:

Capacity flow asks: are your four processing modes balanced? Open can flood (too much pouring in) or close (shutting everything out). Focus can fixate or dissociate. Bond can fuse or sever. Move can explode or freeze. This layer measures how close each Capacity is to its centered state (Receiving, Attending, Connecting, Expressing) and averages across the four.

Domain condition asks something separate: what shape are your experiential territories in? Your Emotional Domain can be Numb or Hypersensitive. Your Mental Domain can be Hazed or Storming. Your Physical Domain can be Absent or Overtaken. Smooth processing can run through a damaged Domain (Focus attending clearly in a Mental Domain that’s Storming) and the formula captures both facts independently.

Gateway flow adds a topological question: are the system’s structural control points open? Nine of the 20 centers function as Gateways, centers whose state unlocks or constrains large sections of the system. The Body Gate (Open x Physical, the center called Sensitivity) serves as the escape route for 10 different Traps. The Choice Gate (Focus x Mental, called Acuity) unlocks another 10. Their aggregate status is its own layer.

Structural integrity measures the healing power that flows from centered Gateways, how much active self-repair Capacity the system has available. When a Gateway reaches fully open status, it goes beyond merely ceasing to block things: it actively contributes to the system’s ability to correct itself.

Variance penalty captures distribution: are your scores scattered unevenly across the 20 centers, or relatively consistent? A profile with five brilliant centers and fifteen weak ones gets penalized more than one with modest but even scores, because integration requires consistency across the system, not concentrated pockets of strength.

A principal component analysis across 10,169 profiles confirmed that these layers aren’t redundant repackaging of the same signal. Five effective dimensions emerged from the six formula components, accounting for 96.7% of total variance. Five of the six layers carry independent information. One pair (likely the two Gateway-derived terms) shares enough overlap to function as a single dimension. But the rest occupy separate structural territory. Capacity flow and Domain condition, despite sharing the same underlying 20-center geometry, track different things in practice. The variance penalty captures a distributional property distinct from either.

This means two people with a Coherence of 62 might have almost nothing in common structurally. One has strong Capacity flow (all four processing modes running smoothly) but their Gateways are stuck. The other has mediocre flow everywhere but two Gateways wide open. Same number on the report. Completely different profiles underneath. And completely different paths forward.

The Dominant Signal: Breadth Over Peaks

Of the five layers, one dominates. Structural integrity (the distribution of centered functioning across all 20 Harmonies) correlated with Coherence at r = .81 across 10,169 profiles. That’s 66% of the variance. Two-thirds of what determines your Coherence score traces back to a single question: how broadly is the good stuff distributed?

The key question is not how high your best scores are, or whether you’ve cleared every Trap, but how much of the grid is working.

The lived experience of this distinction is immediately recognizable. Someone with high structural integrity wakes up and can feel their body, read their emotions, think clearly, connect with people, and orient toward what matters, not perfectly in every Domain, but reasonably across the board. The day has a stable foundation. Someone with low structural integrity might be brilliant at work and numb everywhere else. Thoughts racing, body forgotten, relationships on autopilot. The strengths are real, but they’re islands. And the Coherence formula picks that up because it’s designed to read the whole topology, not just the high points.

Consider a profile that comes back at 48, Struggling band. The Icosaglyph shows six Harmonies near their centered targets, clustered in the Mental and Spiritual columns: Acuity, Identity, Curiosity, Vision, Surrender, Devotion. The mind and the sense of meaning are functioning. But the Physical and Emotional columns are dim, Sensitivity under-activated, Presence absent, Embrace shut down, Vitality frozen. Three Gateways are closed: Body Gate, Feeling Gate, Vitality Gate.

Looking at those six centered Harmonies, it would be easy to conclude things are going all right in a lot of areas. But the formula is reading the shape of the whole grid, and what it sees is concentration, not integration. Strengths in one region can’t compensate for shutdown in another when it comes to overall integration. A system with broadly distributed moderate functioning consistently outperforms one with concentrated excellence and widespread deficits, because integration requires consistency across the full architecture, not isolated pockets of strength.

The Leverage Points: Nine Centers That Punch Above Their Weight

Gateway flow (the aggregate status of the nine Gateways) accounted for 49% of Coherence variance. Nearly half of your integration score comes down to how these nine centers are doing.

That’s a smaller share than structural integrity’s 66%, and the gap is telling. The Gateways are nine of the twenty Harmonies, so they’re already part of structural integrity. But the 17-percentage-point difference means the other eleven centers matter too. Passion, Curiosity, Devotion, Surrender, the non-Gateway Harmonies contribute real variance to the score. The Gateways carry disproportionate weight, but they don’t carry all of it. Personality integration cannot be reduced to Gateway status alone.

What makes Gateways special is their structural position. Each one sits at an intersection that serves as the escape route for specific Traps, self-reinforcing feedback loops where a center gets locked into a dysfunctional cycle. The Body Gate unlocks escape from Cognitive Paralysis, Emotional Blindness, Emotional Dissociation, Rumination, Somatic Neglect, and five others. The Choice Gate unlocks Somatic Hypervigilance, Spiritual Overwhelm, Intellectual Closure, Codependence, and six more. When a Gateway is closed, every Trap that routes through it resists disruption, regardless of how much insight you gain about the pattern, regardless of how motivated you are to change.

The Gateway bonus (a specific term in the formula that rewards Gateways reaching fully open status) correlated independently with Coherence at r = .41, accounting for about 17% of the score’s variance. That contribution is structurally independent of the other dimensions. Improving your Capacity flow won’t automatically push a Gateway across the threshold. Stabilizing your Domain conditions won’t either. The Gateway bonus tracks a discrete structural event (a threshold crossing) and that event has to be targeted specifically.

Clinically, this often looks like the difference between “I can sort of feel my emotions now” and the moment when the Discernment Gate (Focus x Emotional) actually opens and you can tell the difference between anxiety and excitement in your body without having to think about it. The continuous improvement was real. But the threshold crossing changes what’s possible.

Where the Traps Pile Up

If the formula’s internal architecture explains what Coherence measures, the relationship between Coherence and Traps explains what it means in practice.

Across the full sample, Coherence and Trap count showed a strong negative monotonic association: rs = -.61, with 37% of shared variance. More than a third of what separates someone in the Thriving band from someone in the Crisis band comes down to how many self-reinforcing dysfunction loops are active in their profile.

And the Traps don’t scatter randomly across Coherence levels. They pile up. Drop from Thriving to Steady and you might pick up a couple. Drop into Struggling territory and you’re carrying a network of them. By the time you’re in the Overwhelmed or Crisis range, you’re dealing with dense, interconnected Trap clusters where one feeds another.

This maps to the experience of trying to work on one thing (say, the anxiety that keeps you scanning every room you walk into) only to find it connects to something else. The numbness in your body. The difficulty making decisions. The way you lose yourself in other people’s needs. The Icosa architecture explains why: the Gateways that serve as escape routes are shared. If the Body Gate is closed, ten different Traps resist disruption simultaneously. It doesn’t matter how much you understand about the rumination or how clearly you see the emotional dissociation. The structural exit is blocked.

To see what this looks like in a specific profile: someone scores 36 on Coherence, landing in the Overwhelmed band. Their Icosaglyph shows 14 active Traps across three of the four Capacity rows. The Body Gate and Choice Gate are both closed. A Basin called Affective Shutdown is holding Empathy, Discernment, Embrace, and Passion in underactivation, four centers simultaneously suppressed, creating a stable low-energy configuration that resists change. The Centering Plan computed for this profile doesn’t start with the most distressing symptom. It starts with the Body Gate, because opening it creates escape routes for the largest cluster of Traps. Only after that structural shift does the path move to the Choice Gate and then to the specific trapped centers.

That sequencing isn’t arbitrary. It’s computed from the geometry of where this person is stuck. And it connects to findings from the broader Icosa research program: Basin count alone explains 41% of Coherence variance (rs = -.64), confirming that these stable attractor states (the structural inertia that keeps the system stuck) are among the strongest determinants of overall integration.

The Bands Are Real, But They’re Not the Whole Story

Band	Range	Label	Clinical Meaning
5	80–100	Thriving	Strong integration across all dimensions
4	65–79	Steady	Good overall balance with minor areas for growth
3	44–64	Struggling	Mixed pattern: some strengths, some vulnerabilities
2	30–43	Overwhelmed	Significant imbalances requiring attention
1	0–29	Crisis	Severe disintegration across multiple dimensions

A natural question: when the score ticks from 43 to 45, crossing from Overwhelmed into Struggling, does that boundary mean anything? Or is it just a line drawn on a ruler?

The threshold analysis tested this directly. Grid completion (the simple proportion of your 20 centers meeting health criteria) correlated with Coherence at r = .48, sharing 23% of the variance. Gateway bonus correlated at r = .41, sharing 17%. Both medium effects. Both confirming that the band boundaries at 30, 44, 65, and 80 correspond to genuine shifts in how much of the personality system is working and how many Gateways are actively contributing healing power.

But look at the other side of those numbers. Grid completion shares 23% of variance with Coherence, which means 77% of what makes up the score has nothing to do with a simple tally of healthy centers. It’s the relational structure (how your Capacity rows balance, whether your Domain columns are stable, whether your Gateways are generating healing power) that accounts for most of the score. You can count how many players are healthy and available. That matters. But the team’s actual performance depends on whether the right players are in the right positions and whether they’re coordinating.

The band thresholds show medium-range sensitivity, not fragile, but not arbitrary either. They sit at points where the structural story shifts, but they’re not razor-sharp phase transitions. A Coherence of 43 and a Coherence of 45 are structurally similar, even though they fall in different bands. The bands are clinically useful categories, not bright lines in nature.

What the bands reliably do is separate profiles by structural complexity. A Crisis-band profile represents a qualitatively different structural landscape, not merely a lower number, with dense Trap networks, closed Gateways, and active Basins creating inertia against change. A Steady-band profile has a different kind of work ahead: fewer Traps, more open Gateways, but perhaps a Fault Line or two that creates vulnerability under specific stress. The band tells you what kind of terrain you’re working in.

What Coherence Doesn’t Capture

The convergent validity analysis revealed something unexpected. Resonance (a measure of how harmoniously your five Domains operate with each other) correlated with Coherence at r = -.22. Small, and in the wrong direction. Higher Coherence was weakly associated with lower inter-Domain Harmony.

The apparent paradox dissolves once you consider what Harmony actually means here. Resonance measures whether your Domains are moving in similar patterns. But healthy integration might actually require them to move differently. Your Emotional Domain might need to be quiet while your Mental Domain is active. Your Physical Domain might need high engagement during a workout while your Relational Domain is on standby. Lockstep isn’t health, differentiation is. It’s the difference between an orchestra where every instrument plays the same note and one where each section plays its own part in a structured arrangement.

Equally important: the correlation between Coherence and clinical urgency was just rs = -.22, accounting for only 5% of shared variance. Coherence captures how structurally disorganized your system is. Urgency captures something more like proximity to tipping points, whether a Fault Line is activated, whether a specific Basin is concentrating dysfunction in load-bearing centers, whether one more perturbation could cascade.

A person can be chronically tangled (low Coherence, many Traps, a system that’s been stuck for years) without being in acute danger. The Traps are painful and limiting, but stable. And decent overall Coherence can coexist with one activated Fault Line that makes the whole structure fragile. The Eruption Line or the Foundation Line, when active, can turn a Struggling-band profile into something that needs immediate attention, even though the Coherence number looks moderate.

These null and weak results are findings, not failures. They define the boundaries of what Coherence responsibly claims to measure. It functions as an integration metric, not a severity index. It captures structural organization, not acute risk. The model treats these as complementary signals, both matter, and conflating them would misallocate clinical attention.

When the Score Seems Stuck

This is where the five-dimensional structure changes something practical. If you’ve taken an Icosa assessment and your Coherence hasn’t moved between assessments, the flat number can feel discouraging. But the five layers underneath might tell a different story.

Say your Capacity flow has improved, Open is receiving more easily, Focus is holding attention better. Your Emotional Domain has shifted from Numb toward Felt. You can feel the difference in your daily life. But your Coherence is still 58. What’s happening?

The improvement has been concentrated on two of five dimensions (Capacity means and Domain means) while the Gateway dimension hasn’t shifted. The Choice Gate is still partially open. The Feeling Gate is still closed. The Gateway bonus is near zero. You’ve been getting better along two channels, and the other three haven’t been addressed.

That’s a structural bottleneck, not a failure. And knowing which dimension is the bottleneck changes what to do next. Instead of more general coping work (which would push Capacity flow higher on a dimension that’s already approaching its ceiling) the next phase targets the specific conditions that would move a Gateway from partial to fully open.

For the Choice Gate (Focus x Mental, the Acuity Harmony) that might mean working on the intersection of sustained attention and mental clarity in a specific, concentrated way. Not “thinking more clearly” in a general sense, but bringing that particular center into the state where it unlocks escape routes for Traps like Cognitive Paralysis and Rumination. The Centering Path would identify exactly which Gateway to target and in what order, based on which threshold crossing would produce the largest Coherence gain given the current profile.

This connects to findings from the Icosa paths research: Centering Path efficiency (t = 148.13) measures how effectively these computed sequences improve Coherence. The paths work because they target the structural bottleneck (the specific dimension holding the composite in place) rather than distributing effort across areas that have already reached adequate levels.

Three Profiles, Three Different Architectures

Profile A: The Concentrated Performer. Coherence 51, Struggling band. Strong Move Capacity: Vitality, Passion, Agency, and Voice all near centered. Solid Mental Domain. But Open Capacity is closing across the board, and the Emotional Domain is Numb. Body Gate closed, Feeling Gate closed. Six active Traps, four routing through the Body Gate. The structural integrity is low because centered functioning is concentrated in the action-and-thinking centers while the receiving-and-feeling centers are dark. The Centering Plan starts with the Body Gate, not because the body is the presenting complaint, but because opening it creates escape routes for the largest Trap cluster and begins distributing centered functioning into the Physical Domain, which is where structural integrity needs to grow.

Profile B: The Gateway Bottleneck. Coherence 64, top of Struggling, just below Steady. Capacity flow is adequate across all four rows. Domain conditions are fair. Variance penalty is low, scores are reasonably distributed. But the Feeling Gate (Bond x Emotional, the center called Embrace) and the Belonging Gate (Bond x Relational, called Belonging) are both partially closed. Gateway bonus is minimal. This profile’s Coherence is constrained almost entirely by the Gateway dimension. Two Gateways are close to the open threshold but haven’t crossed it. If either one opens, the Gateway bonus contribution jumps, and Coherence crosses into Steady territory, not through incremental improvement across the board, but through a targeted structural event on a single dimension.

Profile C: The Broad but Fragile. Coherence 71, Steady band. Fifteen of 20 centers near centered. Most Gateways open. But the Foundation Line and the Feeling Line are both active Fault Lines, and a Basin called Guarded Scanning is holding Empathy, Intimacy, Discernment, and Acuity in a pattern where the emotional centers are underactive while the analytical centers overcompensate. The Coherence number looks solid. The urgency flags don’t. This profile illustrates why Coherence and urgency are partially independent, the structural organization is good, but specific vulnerabilities create cascade risk that the integration score alone doesn’t fully encode. Research from the states family confirms this pattern: hot cores (r = .57) are the centers whose deviations most reduce Coherence, and in this profile, the hot cores sit right along the active Fault Lines.

The Rhythm of Real Change

Read together, these findings point to a sequencing pattern that maps to how change actually happens. Early work targets the stuck points, the closed Gateways holding Trap loops in place. That’s the acute phase, and it can produce noticeable Coherence shifts because Gateway flow accounts for 49% of the variance. A sharp jump when a Gateway opens.

The sustained phase is wider. Once the gates are open, the work expands across Domains. The Centering Path might move from the Body Gate to Embrace (Bond x Emotional), then to Agency (Move x Mental), broadening the base of healthy centers rather than hammering at a single control point. Structural integrity climbs as centered functioning distributes. A steadier climb as Domain-wide health accumulates.

Adjacent-band transitions (moving from Struggling to Steady, for instance) are the most common shifts during therapeutic work, and they represent real structural reorganization, not just a score ticking upward. Each Trap that releases, each Gateway that opens, changes the landscape for the remaining Traps. The system isn’t static. It reorganizes as constraints lift, and the Coherence formula tracks that reorganization through all five of its layers simultaneously.

The score reflects that progression. The band thresholds sit at points where the structural story shifts. And the five-dimensional architecture means that the same upward movement can be driven by different structural events at different phases of the work, Gateway opening early, distributed centering later, variance reduction as the profile evens out.

What Becomes Possible

These findings mean that the number on the report isn’t lying, and it isn’t hiding the complexity either. When it says 58, that’s a real integration measure, not an average of how you’re doing in different areas, but a geometric read of how your whole system coordinates. And when it places you in the Struggling band, that placement corresponds to a specific structural reality: a certain density of self-reinforcing loops, a certain number of closed Gateways, a certain distribution of functioning across the twenty centers that make up your personality architecture. The score is reading structure, not just severity.

That structure is also the path forward. The five dimensions underneath the composite score mean that when you’re stuck at 58, you’re not stuck everywhere, you’re stuck on one or two specific channels while the others have room to move. Maybe your Capacity flow is solid but your Gateways haven’t opened. Maybe your Domain conditions are improving but the base of centered functioning hasn’t broadened. The dimensional architecture makes the bottleneck visible, and visibility makes it targetable. Your Centering Plan isn’t generic advice about emotional regulation or stress management, it’s a computed sequence that identifies which structural dimension needs to shift next, which Gateway unlocks the largest cluster of Traps, which center sits at the intersection of multiple leverage points.

The research confirms what many people sense intuitively: change doesn’t happen all at once, and it doesn’t happen in a straight line. Gateways open suddenly. Basins destabilize and reorganize. Fault Lines flare and resolve. The Coherence score tracks that structural rhythm through all five of its layers simultaneously, and the band transitions mark real reorganizations of your system’s architecture, not arbitrary lines on a ruler. When you cross from Overwhelmed into Struggling, something genuine has shifted in how your personality holds together. The terrain ahead is different. The work that’s now possible wasn’t possible before. And the score you’re reading has five independent dimensions behind it, each one carrying information about where the next structural gain is waiting.