Not all fractures are loud.
Some take the form of a silent dissonance—persistent, hard to name.
Over the course of a long-term relationship, I repeatedly found myself facing a precise sensation: the impression of a person who appeared coherent, empathic, capable of understanding—but only intermittently.
In certain situations, empathy was present, genuine. In many others, it seemed to vanish altogether. Not randomly, but selectively.
What unsettled me was not a lack of empathy in general, but the way it appeared and disappeared depending on the situation.
Over time, that gap between what was expressed and what surfaced in certain moments became impossible to overlook.
A Revealing Event
At a certain point, an event occurred that altered my perception entirely.
An acquaintance—a person who had always been available and to whom, objectively, we owed a great deal—passed away. When I learned about it, I called my partner to tell her. The response was simple, direct:
“I understand that you’re hurting, but honestly, I don’t care.”
The sentence itself mattered less than what it did to the picture I had in my head.
Something I had taken for granted simply stopped holding together.
In that moment, I realized I wasn’t dealing with a passing emotional reaction.
Whatever I was seeing had deeper roots than I had assumed.
Suspending Judgment
My reaction was not to label or condemn.
Knowing the family and personal context in which she had grown up, I initially considered the possibility of unresolved experiences from childhood or adolescence. I looked for an explanation, not for blame.
That suspension of judgment mattered.
It allowed me to avoid reducing the experience to a moral verdict and to remain, instead, in a position of observation.
From Relationship to Question
At a certain point, however, the question stopped being relational.
It was no longer:
“Why does she react this way?”
It became instead:
What allows a consciousness to develop?
And how does it structure itself?
Why do some minds seem able to look at themselves, while others never quite do?
What allows dissonance to be absorbed in some cases, instead of immediately pushed away?
What had begun as an interpersonal friction was turning into a structural question.
Confusion and Lucidity
Emotionally, I was confused.
Cognitively, paradoxically, I was becoming more lucid.
I began to focus less on behaviors and more on mechanisms: what enables a mind to reflect on itself without collapsing or becoming rigid. The search for emotional reassurance slowly gave way to a search for conceptual models.
Observing the Mind (Including My Own)
I am neurodivergent, and questions about how minds work have been with me for as long as I can remember—long before any formal diagnosis, which came much later in my life. Observing mental processes, my own and those of others, has always been a constant.
I tend to think in systems.
It’s simply how my mind organizes things.
When a concept makes sense to me, I instinctively try to see whether it holds beyond the situation that first brought it to my attention—whether it can move across contexts without losing coherence.
Reflexivity as a Discriminant
By observing myself and the people around me, I began to notice a recurring difference: reflexivity is not evenly distributed.
Some individuals function, react, adapt.
But they never quite observe themselves.
Others, instead, are able to build an internal model of who they are, to question it, and to revise it.
Not as a moral quality, but as a structural capacity.
In the language of the RCM, this capacity is referred to as reflexive coherence.
From Intuition to Schema
At the beginning, there wasn’t even a name for it.
Just a sense that consciousness couldn’t be reduced to an on–off switch, but unfolded as something gradual and layered.
As time went on, I began shifting the concept of consciousness toward the domain of complex systems and information. What felt missing wasn’t another psychological explanation, but a way of talking about these differences that could be tested, questioned, and—if necessary—proved wrong.
From there, something more structured slowly took form—not to explain a single situation, but to account for a recurring pattern I kept running into.
A structural necessity for the development and expansion of consciousness.
Apparent Coherence and Integration
Over time, a crucial point became clear: a mind can appear coherent without being genuinely reflexive.
A form of coherence can be functional without being integrative.
It can maintain stability, adapt to context, even appear empathic—without ever including dissonance within its own model.
In such cases, what is preserved is not understanding, but equilibrium.
What I Was Really Seeking
I wasn’t trying to explain the other.
I wasn’t trying to “be right.”
I was looking for understanding—first of all of myself—and for a possibility of inner expansion.
I was trying to preserve the capacity to understand without turning it into a defensive reflex or a simplification.
What the RCM Is (and Is Not)
The Reflexive Coherence Model does not present itself as a closed theory.
It does not claim to provide definitive answers, nor to label individuals, behaviors, or pathologies.
The model wasn’t conceived to account for individual behaviors, but to describe the broader conditions under which self-reflection can emerge—or quietly break down.
It is an open laboratory: an evolving attempt to describe when and how consciousness expands, and when it instead rigidifies in order to preserve only an apparent coherence.
An Invitation to Observation
This article is not a conclusion, but an invitation.
To observe oneself.
To notice the difference between functioning and reflecting.
Between reacting and integrating.
Perhaps consciousness is not something one possesses.
Perhaps it is something one practices.