A placeholder plate — this library's own emotion-school illustrations are still being made
Placeholder plate · a school's own art belongs here

Recursive Repatterning

There are no fixed biological fingerprints for emotions. We still have to make meaning — so here are the ways people have done it, as grammars.

A free, open library of the schools of emotion — Plutchik's wheel, NVC's needs, DBT's skills, attachment theory's bonds, and more. Each school kept in its own voice, none of them mistaken for the truth underneath; every file open and forkable.

Read · for those with a taste for the research

The sources behind the schools

Each school held to its own literature — Plutchik, Rosenberg, Linehan, Barrett, and more — with an honest evidence tier for every claim, and a courses library that keeps teaching as the schools grow.
Draw · for the curious and the stuck

Draw from the schools

Cast a reading across one school or several, and hold what comes up as a mirror, never a diagnosis. You're what Tolkien called a sub-creator: a maker of meaning you enter with your judgment intact, never a verdict you obey.
Contribute · for keepers of the commons

Add to the open library

Every school is public-domain or CC-BY-SA JSON anyone can correct, translate, or extend. Climb in by the gentlest route.

The short version

A working interface, not a discovery

There are no fixed biological fingerprints for emotions, and we still have to make meaning — so every school here is a working interface. Plutchik's wheel, NVC's needs, DBT's skills, attachment theory's bonds: the constructionist account sits underneath all of them, and that is precisely why the interfaces matter. A map being constructed is not the same as a map being wrong.

Each school is presented faithfully, in its own terms — an NVC section sounds like NVC, not like us editorializing about it. And the hard floor everywhere: a feeling-name is a mirror, never a diagnosis, and never something to obey. Read the full creed →