The Four Capacities

The Icosa model is built on four fundamental processes that every human being performs continuously. This page introduces those four Capacities — what they do, how they fail, and why understanding their sequence changes everything about how we read personality.

Four Processes, Not Four Types

Most personality models describe what a person is. Trait systems assign coordinates. Type systems assign labels. The Icosa model asks a different question: How is life moving through this person, and where has it become blocked or distorted?

That shift — from trait to process, from noun to verb — changes everything. The four Capacities are four fundamental processes every human being performs to take in, make sense of, hold onto, and act upon experience. They form a circuit, a sequential flow that life travels through continuously.

The circuit is cyclical. Move’s expression creates new experience in the world, and that new experience enters again through Open. When the loop runs freely, a person is engaged with life. When it stalls at any point, that engagement breaks down — and the nature of the breakdown depends on where in the circuit the flow stopped.

Three States Per Capacity

Each Capacity operates in one of three states: Under, Centered, or Over. These are not personality labels. They describe what the system is actively doing right now.

Under means the energy flowing through a Capacity has fallen below the threshold of its current container. The function is suppressed. Flow is blocked.

Centered means energy matches the container — not a static point but a dynamic range within which the system functions well. Centered is not stillness; it is flow.

Over means the energy flowing through a Capacity has exceeded the container’s limits. The function is overwhelmed. Flow is distorted.

The Four Capacities in Detail

Open — The Capacity for Receiving

Open governs permeability — how much of reality a person allows in. Sensation, feeling, ideas, people, meaning: everything that enters the system comes through the Open gate. Before anything can be felt, understood, held, or expressed, it must first be received.

Receiving (centered): Experience enters at a rate and intensity the person can process. A difficult truth can be received without collapse. Another person’s pain can be felt without drowning. The gate opens and closes according to what the moment requires.

Closing (under): The gate is barred. Input cannot enter. A person who was flooded with unmanageable feeling at age eight builds a gate to keep feeling out, and at forty-two that gate is still firmly shut — not because the world is still dangerous, but because the architecture has outlasted the threat. Closing is not calm. A centered person can sit with intensity because their container is large enough. A Closing person is not receiving at all.

Flooding (over): The gate is not just open — it is gone. Everything gets in. Such a person absorbs the mood of every room, feels every slight with precision, takes in bad news as if it were happening in their own body. Flooding is not sensitivity. A sensitive, centered person receives deeply and processes what is received. A Flooding person receives more than can be processed.

Focus — The Capacity for Attending

If Open is the gate that lets experience in, Focus is the lens that makes experience visible. Without Focus, experience enters through the Open gate and lands in an unlit room — present but unseen.

Attending (centered): Attention can concentrate without rigidity, direct itself where needed, and redirect when circumstances change. The result is clear perception — seeing what is actually occurring, not what is expected, feared, or wished for.

Dissociating (under): Attention diffuses, floats, and cannot hold a target. Awareness skips from stimulus to stimulus without landing. In milder forms it looks like distractibility or spaciness. In more severe forms, awareness leaves the scene entirely.

Fixating (over): Attention locks onto a target and cannot release. A worry, a person, a perceived threat — attention bolts in one direction and will not redirect. Fixating is not depth. Depth is voluntary; fixation is compulsive.

Bond — The Capacity for Connecting

If Open lets experience in and Focus makes it visible, Bond is what holds it. This Capacity takes what has been received and witnessed and incorporates it into the fabric of the self. Without Bond, experience is water through a colander.

Connecting (centered): Attachment is secure — not so loose that everything falls away, not so tight that self and other collapse into an undifferentiated mass. Connections form and persist without consuming the person who holds them.

Severing (under): Attachment links are weak or absent. The person may feel fragmented, as though different parts of their life belong to different people. Insights land and evaporate. Relationships begin but do not take root.

Fusing (over): The distinction between self and not-self collapses. Others’ emotions are adopted as one’s own, not through empathy (an Open function) but through identification (a Bond function). Centered Bond says “I feel you, and I feel me.” Fusing says “I feel you. Where am I?”

Move — The Capacity for Expressing

Move is where the circuit completes and, because it is cyclical, where it begins again. Move governs what goes out: how a person expresses, acts, decides, speaks, and makes their mark on the world.

Expressing (centered): Output is fluid and coherent. What comes out matches what is inside. Expression serves the moment instead of overwhelming or withholding from it.

Freezing (under): Expression is inhibited, action is locked. The person knows what they feel, sees it with clarity, holds it as deeply their own — and cannot do a single thing about it. Freezing and Closing are distinct processes. Closing blocks at the gate (nothing gets in). Freezing blocks at the outlet (everything gets in, nothing comes out).

Exploding (over): Expression discharges without regulation. Energy blasts outward without coherence — an avalanche when a hand on the shoulder was needed. Exploding is not passion. A passionate, centered person expresses forcefully and coherently. An Exploding person expresses beyond what the moment can hold.

Capacity States at a Glance

All twelve states are deliberately named as verbs. A person is not “closed” (a fixed adjective); they are Closing (an ongoing action). This verb form implies both agency and temporality: what is being done can be done differently, and what is happening now may change.

How Each Capacity Expresses Across the Grid

Each Capacity takes on a different character depending on which Domain it operates in. Reading across a row shows the same process in five different territories — the same engine running on different fuel.

Common Misconceptions

“Open” does not mean extraverted. Open describes how permeable a person is to experience — how much gets through the gate. A quiet introvert who takes in the whole room with acute sensitivity has a highly centered Open Capacity. A gregarious extrovert who performs warmth while receiving nothing has Open Under.

Capacities are not traits or types. They are processes that operate independently. A person can be Flooding in one Capacity and Freezing in another simultaneously — overwhelmed with incoming experience that has no outlet.

Under is not “too little capacity,” and Over is not “too much.” Under and Over describe energy level relative to container size. Think of an audio speaker: a 1-inch speaker distorts at moderate volume; a 12-inch speaker handles the same volume cleanly. Same signal, different container, different result.

The Circuit in Practice

Understanding how blockage at one point shapes everything downstream is the circuit model’s central practical contribution.

Upstream blockage starves the system. If Open is Under, everything downstream is starved. Attempting to work on expression (Move) when reception (Open) is blocked is like trying to increase the output of a pipe with no input.

Downstream blockage floods the system. If Move is Under, everything upstream floods. The accumulated, unreleased energy has to go somewhere — explaining why some Freezing individuals eventually Explode.

Mid-circuit disconnection breaks the thread. If Bond is Under, the circuit breaks between reception and expression. A person can receive and witness experience but cannot hold what has been received. What is expressed bears no relation to what was received — not from dishonesty but because the integrative link is severed.

The circuit model explains why some interventions fail despite being well-targeted. A therapist working on emotional expression (Move in the Emotional Domain) with a client who is Closing across the board is working downstream of a blockage. The expression work cannot succeed because the reception work has not been done. The circuit must be addressed in sequence: restore the input before demanding the output.

Knowing where a person’s circuit is blocked — and which Capacity carries the primary disruption — is the first step toward knowing what kind of movement will actually help. The Capacities do not tell you what a person is. They tell you what is happening, where the flow has stopped, and which direction to face.