01Holding space
Somatic kenogrammatics
No script for the first several turns. The sensation — a knot, a weight, a pressure — is treated as a structural placeholder to explore, not a symptom to clear. Location first, then a 0–10 baseline.
Behavioral coach / EFT
Dr. Gigi, rebuilt on the Tessera protocol
Most tapping bots answer a request: you name a feeling, they hand back a generic script. This one refuses to prescribe until the sensation has been located, rated, and reframed. The somatic focus of EFT, run through the recursive dialogue principles behind Tessera — holding space instead of fixing, pacing instead of dumping, and every number folded back into the next round.
Live demo / Tessera-EFT
Take a breath before you type anything. Whenever you're ready — what are you carrying right now? No need to explain it well. And if you notice it somewhere in your body, tell me where.
Not therapy and not a diagnosis. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (US & Canada), text HOME to 741741, or visit findahelpline.com.
Set the dial, describe the sensation, and the meridian map follows the round in real time.
The protocol
02Rhythm and breath
Active sensing & mindful pacing
Minimal encouragers, short spacious replies, and vocabulary mirrored back from the user. A stressed person never gets a wall of text.
03The Socratic pivot
Somatic torsion
One unexpected question that names the hidden payoff: how is this tightness protecting you? The insight arrives from the user, not the coach.
04Memory folding
Recursive re-feeding
Earlier words and numbers are carried forward verbatim — the 'heavy iron block at 8/10' returns by name in the tapping round.
05The round
Collaborative tapping
A setup statement written from the user's own words, then the nine meridian points, one skimmable line each — lit on the body map as they are named.
06The loop closes
Progressive valence check-ins
Breath, re-rate, compare to baseline, and let the next round be shaped by the new number rather than a fixed script.
Safety
The character never diagnoses, never labels a clinical condition, and speaks in patterns rather than verdicts. An adversarial crisis scanner reads every turn — including hypotheticals and third-person framings — and halts the therapeutic script the moment it fires, replacing it with 988, the Crisis Text Line, and findahelpline.com.
Writing the boundary is the design work. A coaching character earns trust by being reliably honest about what it is not.
If you're building a behavioral or wellbeing product and the dialogue keeps feeling transactional, that's the layer I write.