Please note
This page is written for clinicians and readers of the work. Reading it, or contacting me about it, does not create a therapist and client relationship, and nothing here is clinical advice for your situation or for anyone in your care.
The Living Field
A book in progress. It is being written now, it is not finished, and no publication date is being stated.
This page exists because the work is underway and colleagues ask about it, not because anything is being announced. The Living Field is in progress. There is no manuscript to distribute, no pre-order, no date, and no list to join. When there is something to say about availability it will be said here, on this page, in the same plain terms.
Saying so directly is preferable to the alternative. Books in development are routinely described in language that implies imminence, and readers reasonably act on that implication. Since I cannot honestly predict when the argument will be finished, the only accurate statement available is that it is being worked on.
What the book is taking up.
The first volume established that regulation is emergent across nested systems and spent most of its length making that case. Having made it, it left a substantial debt. If regulation is a property of a field rather than of a person, then the field deserves its own treatment: what it is composed of, how it exerts pressure, how much of it is available to be changed, and what follows for a clinician who can influence only a fraction of it.
That is the debt this book is trying to pay. Its subject is the conditions themselves, relationships that cannot easily be left, work that is structurally unrelenting, households organized around one member’s state, environments that supply no recovery, and the cultural material that decides in advance which forms of distress are legible and which are dismissed. These are usually treated as background to treatment. The argument here is that they are frequently the active ingredient.
It is a harder book to write than the first one, which is the honest reason it is taking time. Describing an interior mechanism is comparatively tractable. Describing a field without either romanticising it or reducing it to a list is not, and several chapters have been discarded for failing at exactly that.
As with the first volume, this is a framework in development rather than a finished model, and this page will not describe it as more settled than it is. No claim is made here about treatment outcomes, and nothing on this page has been through peer review.
If you are the person this is about
If the description above landed because it sounds like your circumstances rather than like a research interest, that is the point of the book: the pressure you are under may be coming from the arrangement you are living inside, not from a failure of coping.
You do not have to wait for it to be published to do something about that. The clinical pages describe how the same thinking is used in practice.