THE ZEABA MODEL
V3: The Invisible Force Field Around You
Your environment doesn't just influence you — your nervous system reads it below conscious awareness through neuroception.
What You'll Learn
This page explains V3 — the invisible force field around you that your nervous system reads before you're even aware of it. You'll understand why the same person behaves completely differently in different environments, and how your surroundings shape your biology in real time.
What Is V3?
V3 is the total environmental context — physical, social, and sensory — that your nervous system processes in real-time. Stephen Porges coined the term "neuroception" to describe how your autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and threat without conscious input.
How V3 Works
V3 is not about what you THINK about your environment. It's about what your nervous system DETECTS:
- Facial micro-expressions of people around you (processed in 30ms)
- Vocal prosody — tone, rhythm, pitch (vagal regulation of laryngeal muscles)
- Physical space — open vs. enclosed, familiar vs. novel
- Social hierarchy cues — who has power, who is safe
- Ambient sensory data — lighting, temperature, sound frequencies
The Parent-Child V3 Equation
This is one of the most critical insights of the Zeaba Model:
A parent's chronic V2 state becomes the child's V3.
Children ages 0-6 don't process parental behavior through language or logic. They read the parent's autonomic state directly through neuroception. An anxious parent (chronic sympathetic V2) creates an anxious environment (V3) for the child — regardless of what words are spoken.
This means the child's V1 programs are being encoded in a threat environment, producing negative CTZ values across thousands of engrams during the most critical developmental window.
V3 and Attractor Basins
In chaos theory, an attractor basin is a region of state space that pulls the system toward a particular pattern. Your V3 creates attractor basins:
- A safe home → ventral vagal attractor → positive engram encoding
- A volatile home → sympathetic attractor → negative engram encoding
- A neglectful home → dorsal vagal attractor → deep negative encoding