An open test: does the familiar recur, or the excluded?

Attachment theory and the Shared Field Model agree that relational patterns repeat — and disagree about what repeats. For attachment theory, people re-enter what they know: the early template, carried forward. For this model, people re-encounter what they exclude: recurring situations should disproportionately carry the pole underrepresented in a person’s expressive profile — the autonomy of the conciliator, the dependence of the self-sufficient.

In many lives the two predictions coincide, because early environments install both the template and the exclusion. The informative cases are the ones where they come apart: where the familiar template and the excluded pole differ, which one recurs?

A minimal design: code each participant’s expressive profile on defined polarity dimensions, identifying underexpressed poles. Independently, and blind to that coding, code their recurring relational situations — and a matched set of non-recurring ones — for the polarities those situations demand. Then test the association. Coding the profile first, blind, is what protects the test from retrospective reading: any situation can be interpreted after the fact as carrying some excluded pole, so the pole must be specified before the situations are examined.

If the association fails in the dissociating cases, the model’s central claim is wrong — and the failure itself would be informative. This design is offered openly to any researcher who wants it.

This proposal rests on a structural model of psychological life — the Shared Field Model. The full architecture is here.