Agency is a stack of learned frames. Miss one, and what people call “low agency” emerges automatically.
There are six minimum frames required for a lifelong capacity to generate agency:
1. Impulse Modulation
Ability to feel impulse without obeying it.
2. Emotional Modulation
Ability to feel emotion without distortion, flooding, or hijack.
3. Epistemic Updating
Ability to revise beliefs and strategies when predictions fail.
4. Reality Correspondence
Ability to perceive incentives, constraints, and causality as they are, not as wished.
5. Constraint Subordination
Acceptance of reality’s authority over preference, narrative, or grievance.
6. Responsibility Internalization
Treating outcomes as feedback about your choices rather than external blame.
Developmentally, this usually splits:
Impulse + emotional modulation are primarily trained early (often by mothers).
The latter four are primarily trained through consequence enforcement and reality arbitration (often by fathers).
Both parents can train all six, but someone must train each frame, or it simply doesn’t form.
Each missing frame produces a predictable agency failure mode:
- Poor impulse control → self-sabotage
- Emotional hijack → reactive decision-making
- No epistemic updating → repeating failed strategies
- Weak reality correspondence → fantasy planning
- Refusal of constraint → entitlement conflict
- Externalized responsibility → chronic blame
People experience these failures subjectively as “loss of agency,” the cognitive machinery is incomplete.
I have a book coming out on this planned for 2027.