Most relationship assessments are flat. They produce a label. Anxious-avoidant. Pursuer-distancer. Type 4. The Inner Compass descends. Five layers down through nervous system, narrative, and identity. At the bottom is the original developmental need that fires the whole sequence. The descent has a name: MAPSS. Mind → Attribution → Perspective → Sentiment → Story.
Each layer is grounded in a separate body of research. The integration is what's proprietary. The layers are not.
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Layer 1 · Mind
Where perception begins.The brain and nervous system do not passively register events. They are actively primed to scan for specific patterns. Addicted to certainty. Seeking confirmation of what they already believe. The trigger is as much about what your brain is looking for as what externally occurs.
Karl Friston's predictive processing model (2010, refined throughout the 2020s) describes the nervous system as a prediction machine, scanning for confirmation of what it already believes about threat and safety. Daniel Kahneman's System 1 (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) is the cognitive economy that makes the scan run in milliseconds. The reaction you experience as instinct is the output of a model that was calibrated before you could name it.
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Layer 2 · Attribution
The meaning the brain assigns.And the secondary emotion that fires with it.
What couples fight about is rarely what's actually underneath. Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapy (Hold Me Tight, 2008; The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, 2012) demonstrates that the secondary emotion (anger, contempt, defensiveness, withdrawal) is the visible layer of a protective stack with primary attachment emotion underneath. Christensen and Heavey's demand-withdraw research (1990s onward, with three decades of replication) anchors the interactional pattern this layer produces. The Attribution layer surfaces both the meaning the brain wrote and the reactive emotion that fires with it.
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Layer 3 · Perspective
Identity organized around protective roles.
Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems model (Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995; IFS Skills Training Manual, 2018) maps the protector, manager, firefighter, and exile structure that activates under perceived threat. Each protector earned its job in development. The fight in the room is not between two people. It is between two protectors meeting each other, both running ancient code. The Perspective layer names the hardened vantage point so it can stop being identity and start being information.
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Layer 4 · Sentiment
The primary emotion underneath the protector.And the autonomic state holding it.
Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory (The Polyvagal Theory, 2011) maps three nervous system states: ventral vagal (safe and social), sympathetic (mobilized for fight or flight), and dorsal vagal (collapsed, frozen, shut down). The Sentiment layer pairs the primary affect (fear, grief, shame, helplessness) with the autonomic substrate that holds it. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score (2014) supplies the longitudinal evidence that this layer runs the show whether the conscious mind acknowledges it or not.
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Layer 5 · Story
The original developmental conclusion.The thing that wrote everything above it.
Laurence Heller's NeuroAffective Relational Model (Healing Developmental Trauma, 2012) identifies five core organizing needs that wound early in development: Connection, Attunement, Trust, Autonomy, and Love & Sexuality. Bowlby and Ainsworth's attachment research (1960s–70s), extended through Mikulincer and Shaver's adult attachment work (Attachment in Adulthood, 2007), supplies the relational template the wounding gets organized around. Dan McAdams' narrative identity research (The Stories We Live By, 1993) names the chapter-writing function the mind runs on top. The Story layer reaches the source code.
The quantitative instruments
- The Couple Satisfaction Index (Funk and Rogge, Journal of Family Psychology, 2007). A 16-item relationship satisfaction measure used in clinical research worldwide. Outperforms older instruments on precision and discrimination at the low and high ends of the satisfaction distribution.
- The Differentiation of Self Inventory-Revised (Skowron and Schmitt, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 2003). Measures four subscales of Murray Bowen's differentiation construct: Emotional Reactivity, I-Position, Emotional Cutoff, and Fusion with Others. Produces the demand-withdraw read.
- A custom-developed NARM survival style measure. Maps to Heller's five core needs and produces the Love-Sexuality, Trust, Autonomy, Attunement, and Connection scores that anchor the soundboard.
What the assessment produces
A symptom checklist produces a label. The Inner Compass produces a clinical descent and a matched intervention path. For each MAPSS layer the report names the body cue, the protective part, the developmental anchor, and a specific re-authoring move. For couples, two descents converge into a single map of the cycle, with mirror-and-mission moves for each partner at each layer.
The output is not a diagnosis. It is a map of the nervous system that built the strategies, the strategies that built the patterns, and the patterns that show up in the relationship.
The work is naming the architecture clearly enough that what was running automatically can become something the person chooses.
Frameworks integrated: Friston predictive processing · Kahneman dual-process cognition · Johnson EFT · Christensen demand-withdraw · Schwartz IFS · Porges polyvagal · van der Kolk somatic trauma · Heller NARM · Bowlby-Ainsworth-Mikulincer-Shaver attachment · McAdams narrative identity · Bowen differentiation · Funk-Rogge CSI · Skowron-Schmitt DSI-R.
