The Five Domains

If the four Capacities describe how life moves through a person, the five Domains describe where. This page maps the five irreducible territories of human experience — why these five, what each one governs, and how they influence one another through cross-domain resonance.

Where Experience Lives

When a person says “I cannot feel anything,” the relevant question is not only which capacity is involved but where the difficulty lives. The body may have gone quiet. Or the emotional register may have shut down. Or the felt sense of connection to others may have collapsed. Same capacity (Open), different territory — and the distinction determines where attention belongs.

A person can be open to ideas and closed to physical sensation. They can be bonded in relationships and severed from meaning. A Capacity alone does not locate the difficulty. A second axis is needed — one that specifies the territory.

Together, Capacities and Domains create the Icosa grid: twenty intersections (four Capacities by five Domains) that map the full terrain of human experience.

Why These Five

These five are not an arbitrary selection from a longer list. They are the five irreducible territories of human experience — none can be fully described as a combination of the others.

Creativity is a natural candidate for domain status, but creativity is not a territory; it is what happens when certain capacities operate within certain domains. A visual artist creating is expressing (Move) through the body (Physical) and feeling (Emotional). A philosopher generating original ideas is expressing (Move) through the mind (Mental). Creativity arises from the intersection of existing capacities and domains.

Sexuality is similarly a composite of Physical (sensation, arousal), Emotional (desire, vulnerability), and Relational (meeting another in the body). The composite mapping is more precise than a unitary “sexuality” dimension because it identifies which territory carries the disruption.

Each of the five Domains passes the independence test. None can be reduced to a combination of the others. Physical cannot be reduced to Emotional; Emotional is not a subset of Mental; Relational is not merely an external outcome of internal health; Spiritual is not a refinement of the Mental or Emotional.

The Five Domains in Detail

Physical: The Body as Territory

The Physical Domain is the body — not the body as medical object, but the body as lived experience: sensation, touch, embodiment, somatic awareness. This is the ground floor of experience where all other domains eventually arrive if they are going to become real.

Absent (under): Bodily presence and signal are reduced or offline. The person has vacated the premises — numb to sensation, disconnected from physicality, not present in the body.

Embodied (centered): The body is inhabited and available as ground. Present, alive, sensing, grounded.

Overtaken (over): Bodily intensity dominates the experiential field. Pain, arousal, panic, or somatic urgency crowds out everything else.

Physical shifts produce disproportionate effects throughout the entire system. A night of lost sleep can destabilize emotional regulation within hours. Restoring regular sleep, adequate nutrition, and physical safety can resolve difficulties that years of other work have not touched — not because the other work was wrong, but because the foundation was missing.

Emotional: The Felt Landscape

The Emotional Domain is the territory of feeling — not thinking about feelings, but the raw experience of affect: warmth, grief, rage, tenderness, the sudden sting of shame, the slow swell of joy.

Numb (under): Emotional signal is muted or inaccessible. The system has disconnected from its own affect, typically as a protective response to past overwhelm.

Felt (centered): Emotional signal is accessible and integrated. Emotions arrive, are noticed, are experienced, and pass. Feeling is present without either suppression or flooding.

Hypersensitive (over): Emotional signal arrives with excessive amplitude. Every stimulus hits with overwhelming force. Feeling is present but without filtering or modulation.

The Emotional Domain sits at the center of the domain architecture — the only domain with three-way connections in the resonance tree (explained below). Destabilization propagates in three directions simultaneously; stabilization radiates just as broadly. This makes the Emotional Domain the first territory where a disturbance becomes visible, even when the root lies elsewhere.

Mental: The Territory of Clarity

The Mental Domain is the territory of cognition — thinking, ideation, belief, narrative, meaning-making, and clarity. When centered (Lucid), it acts as a dampening function across the entire system, reducing the amplitude of cross-domain cascade.

Hazed (under): Cognition is fogged and difficult to organize. The person cannot think clearly, cannot hold a train of thought, cannot make meaning.

Lucid (centered): Cognition is clear, coherent, and usable. Thoughts form and connect. Meaning is available. The mind is a tool that works.

Storming (over): Cognition is overactive, racing, or intrusive. The mind will not stop, cannot quiet, generates content faster than the system can process.

When the Mental Domain reaches Lucid, cross-domain resonance still occurs but at substantially reduced amplitude. This is why cognitive grounding techniques produce effects that extend beyond cognition — they recruit the Mental Domain’s dampening function.

Relational: The Territory of Connection

The Relational Domain is the territory of between — the inner space where the experience of otherness lives. It is not merely “having relationships” but the internal territory where connection resides: the felt sense of being seen, the awareness of another’s subjectivity, the negotiation between self and other.

Self-centric (under): The relational field collapses toward self-only orientation. Structurally unable to hold the other’s experience in view. Not necessarily selfish in the moral sense, but blind to others’ subjectivity.

Mutual (centered): Relational exchange is reciprocal and balanced. Self and others both in awareness. The person can be fully themselves while fully in relationship.

Other-centric (over): Orientation tilts excessively toward others. The person can sense everyone in the room except themselves. Boundaries dissolved, self-abandoning.

A person carries their relational territory everywhere, including into solitude. A hermit still has a Relational Domain, simply in a particular state. An enmeshed partner who cannot spend an evening alone has a Relational Domain in the opposite state. The condition of the internal territory determines relational capacity. The presence or absence of actual relationships is a separate matter.

Spiritual: The Territory of Purpose

The Spiritual Domain is the territory of meaning and spirit: purpose, direction, the sacred, and relation to what one holds as ultimate. Not religion, though it may include religious experience. Not morality, though it may inform moral life.

Empty (under): Meaning and sacred connection are depleted or inaccessible. Life feels flat, purposeless, without direction or larger significance.

Filled (centered): Meaning, direction, and sacred connection are present and grounding. The person has a sense of being part of something, moving toward something, held by something. Purpose is available without being compulsive.

Possessed (over): Meaning or spiritual load dominates identity and behavior. Everything becomes symbolic, every event is a sign, ordinary life is swallowed by transcendence. Purpose becomes compulsion.

Every person has a relationship with meaning, even if that relationship is characterized by its absence. The existential emptiness of severe depression, the meaning-collapse following traumatic loss, the purposelessness that accompanies major life transitions — all are Spiritual Domain phenomena, whether or not the person frames them in spiritual language.

Domain States at a Glance

Domain states are adjectives describing the condition of the territory, not verbs describing an action. A person does not “do” Absent; they are Absent. This grammatical distinction reflects a substantive one. Capacities describe what is happening. Domains describe the condition of the ground on which it happens.

The Developmental Sequence

The five Domains follow a developmental pattern of shifting emphasis across the lifespan — and that pattern has clinical consequences.

Physical is the first territory to become active — the infant’s world is overwhelmingly physical. Emotional develops next as undifferentiated arousal states refine into discrete emotions. Mental develops through childhood as the capacity for symbolic thought matures. Relational becomes central as the child’s world expands beyond primary attachment. Spiritual reaches fullest expression in mid-life and beyond, when questions of purpose and meaning become organizing concerns.

This matters because developmental wounding tends to affect the Domain that was dominant at the time. Neglect during infancy disproportionately impacts the Physical Domain. Emotional invalidation during early childhood strikes the Emotional. Social exclusion during the school years hits the Relational. Each Domain’s window of emphasis is also its window of vulnerability — the period when disruption in that territory leaves the deepest structural mark.

Two Poles: Source and Manifestation

The five Domains form an axis between two poles: Source (Spiritual) and Manifestation (Physical).

In the model’s architecture, life flows from Source toward Manifestation. Purpose becomes relationship, relationship becomes understanding, understanding becomes feeling, feeling becomes embodied presence. The Emotional, Mental, and Relational Domains constitute the middle territories where most of daily experience unfolds.

This yields a foundational principle: stabilize the foundation before building upward. If the Physical Domain is depleted, work aimed at the Mental, Relational, or Spiritual Domains may not hold. Insight without embodiment remains abstract. Connection without physical safety remains tenuous. Purpose without grounded presence becomes inflation.

Cross-Domain Resonance

The five Domains are independent but not isolated. They influence one another through cross-domain resonance, following a tree structure with the Emotional Domain at its hub.

• Physical-to-Emotional: Fast and strong. Sleep deprivation produces emotional volatility within hours.
• Emotional-to-Mental: Medium speed and moderate strength. Emotional flooding colors thinking, though not as rapidly as body-to-emotion.
• Emotional-to-Relational: Fast and strong. Emotional distress disrupts relational capacity almost immediately.
• Mental-to-Spiritual: Slow and weak. Cognitive frameworks can open existential questions, but the connection is indirect and gradual.
• Spiritual-to-Relational: Fast and strong. New purpose rapidly reorganizes a person’s relational world.

Adjacent Domains in the tree resonate faster and stronger than non-adjacent ones. Physical and Spiritual, as the endpoints, show the slowest, weakest mutual resonance. A person with chronic pain does not typically experience meaning-collapse directly; the cascade must pass through the intermediary Domains.

Domain-Capacity Disagreement

The most diagnostically revealing readings come from cases where Domain state and Capacity state point in different directions. When they disagree, the resulting picture reveals the origin of a difficulty that a single-dimension model would misidentify.

Healthy Capacity, Depleted Territory: A person who is Bond Centered (Connecting) but Relationally Self-centric has working machinery in a depleted territory. They do not need to learn how to connect — the Capacity is intact. The territory needs attention. The work is about restoring the relational ground, not teaching the relational skill.

Healthy Territory, Broken Capacity: A person who is Relationally Mutual but Bond Under (Severing) has a fine territory with broken machinery. The Domain is already providing good conditions; the Capacity requires attention. The ground is fertile; the seed is not taking root.

Both Off-Center Together: When both Capacity and Domain are off-center in the same territory, both function and territory need work. Neither alone is sufficient. A person who is Closing in a Numb emotional territory faces a double challenge: the gate is barred and the territory behind it has gone dark. Opening the gate into an empty territory produces a different experience than opening it into a living one. Sequence and strategy must account for both axes.

Understanding which axis carries the primary disruption — whether the function has failed or the territory has — is one of the Icosa model’s most practical contributions. It prevents the common error of teaching skills to someone whose territory is depleted, or enriching territory when the machinery to use it is broken. The Domains tell you where the ground is solid, where it has eroded, and where it has become overwhelming — the essential map for knowing where to stand and where to dig.