For a while now, I’ve been quietly building something.
And this week, it crossed a line that feels both thrilling and slightly terrifying:
Beyond the Spiral is officially in development.
I signed the contract. The developers have started building.
This is real now.
Why I wanted this to exist
Beyond the Spiral grew out of something I know intimately: the space between therapy sessions.
I’ve spent years in therapy. DBT. IFS. EMDR. CBT. TMS. Neurofeedback. I have learned an almost ridiculous number of acronyms.
And I’ve learned skills that genuinely help me.
But there has always been a problem.
When I am actually dysregulated - when my nervous system has decided something is an emergency - I often can’t access all the things I know.
The calm version of me can tell you exactly what she should do.
The spiraling version of me would like the calm version of me to kindly shut the fuck up.
That gap became the idea behind Beyond the Spiral.
What if technology didn’t just give you a giant library of coping skills and ask you to choose one?
What if it first tried to understand what state you’re in?
What if it recognized that someone who is furious, someone who is terrified of abandonment, someone who is dissociating, and someone who is calm enough to reflect probably shouldn’t be given the exact same intervention in the exact same way?
And what if, over time, it could learn what actually helps you?
State first
That became the central idea behind the app:
State first. Intervention second.
Beyond the Spiral will use short, rotating check-ins to estimate someone’s current nervous-system state and adapt what happens next.
When someone has very little cognitive capacity, the experience should become simpler - not demand more from them.
When someone is regulated and curious, the app can offer more room for reflection and exploration.
And after an intervention, it asks a very simple question:
Did that help?
Because eventually, I want the app to learn from those answers.
Not what should work for you.
What actually does.
And then there’s Nova
One of the things we’re building is a voice-based check-in.
Instead of having to stare at your phone and tap through a questionnaire while your brain is on fire, you’ll be able to talk.
Nova will ask short questions, listen to your answers, and help the app determine what kind of support might fit the state you’re in.
The clinical routing itself isn’t supposed to be AI improvisation. The rules and interventions are bounded and intentional.
AI can help make the interaction feel human.
It doesn’t get to make up mental-health treatment.
That distinction matters enormously to me.
This is not therapy
I want to be very clear about this part.
Beyond the Spiral isn’t intended to replace therapists.
It exists partly because therapists cannot be there at 11:47 p.m. when somebody gets a text message that detonates their nervous system.
It is meant for the in-between.
A companion to the work.
A way to practice what we’ve learned when accessing those skills is hardest.
Maybe even a way to understand our own patterns a little better over time.
Now we build
I’ve spent months thinking through the logic, the language, the safety architecture, the state questions, the interventions, the tracking, and what I desperately wish had existed during some of the hardest moments of my own life.
I’ve made prototypes.
I’ve made spreadsheets.
I have made so many spreadsheets.
But eventually an idea has to leave the spreadsheet.
I’ve found a development team I genuinely love working with, and we’re beginning a four-month build toward a testable version of Beyond the Spiral.
There is still an enormous amount to figure out.
There will be bugs.
There will undoubtedly be things I was completely convinced would work that testers immediately prove are terrible ideas.
That’s what building something is.
But somewhere along the way, this stopped being an app I might build someday.
People are writing the code now.
That sentence makes me a little emotional.
Because Beyond the Spiral came from years of asking:
Why can I understand myself so well when I’m calm and still lose access to everything I know when I’m overwhelmed?
I couldn’t find the tool I wanted.
So I’m building it.
And now—
we’re officially underway.
What stands out to me most is the principle behind this: state first, intervention second.
We often assume that once people understand what would help them, they should be able to access that knowledge whenever they need it. But understanding something in a calm state and being able to use it while overwhelmed are two very different things.
That gap between knowing and being able to act is where so much real human difficulty lives. Designing around the person’s actual state rather than around an ideal version of how they “should” respond feels like the strongest part of what you are building.
YES!! I'M SO HAPPY FOR YOU!! 😭😭😭