Coexist
Twenty-five questions. The other person isn't on trial.
There's a lot online about how to identify the other person — identify, label, confront, retreat. Useful, for a while. Past that while, identifying becomes a posture: the better you get at analyzing them, the harder it gets to put yourself in the frame.
None of these twenty-five questions ask what they did. Each one asks about your reaction — does the body move first or the mind, is the impulse to disappear or to speak, are you on familiar terms with anger or not.
The frame borrows three anchors — Pete Walker's four trauma responses, Linehan's DBT, and Porges's polyvagal theory. Not diagnosis, not a scale — a small instrument that takes you, not the other person, as the subject. It isn't measuring who you resemble; it's measuring which button you pressed.
Real books, not vibes: Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013) · Marsha Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual (1993 / 2015) · Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory (2011).
You finish with a card, drawn from a deck of twenty-one — with fourteen hidden ones underneath, so almost no two results land the same. Take it tomorrow and the card will probably change. That, too, is something it's saying. The recognition, the moment it lands, is truer than the result.
“I open the fridge for a bottle of water. The second shelf is empty. It’s been empty about eleven days. Over those eleven days — roughly what state were you in?”
- Kept meaning to buy something to fill it — never did
- Already know what goes there; just haven’t moved
- Left it empty on purpose. Empty beats full
- Didn’t notice it was empty until you just asked
- Bought one sparkling water last week just to sit there — gone now
- Realized no one had been to my place in eleven days
Notice what it didn’t ask. Not “are you lonely” — it asked about a shelf. Twenty-five turns like this; the one that makes you stop is the answer.
Sister: Coexist · Tank (共处·鱼缸版) — the same question, but the test object is a tank of fish.