Justice Sensitivity Is Not Cognitive Rigidity

How Feeling First Can Be a Revolutionary Act

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” — bell hooks

Today in therapy, we talked about justice sensitivity—and yes, it’s real.
Not a personality flaw. Not a disorder. Not even a “reaction.”
It’s a signal. A system. A way of knowing that pulses through the body before the brain catches up.

Justice sensitivity doesn’t begin in the prefrontal cortex. It begins in the gut, the chest, the contraction.
The moment something in the field twists out of alignment—before there are words, there is warning.
A knowing. A no. A hum through the body that says: this isn’t right.

Liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró named this kind of knowing as “conscientization”—not just awareness, but the embodied awakening to injustice as it unfolds. In his words, consciousness is not an abstract idea—it is rooted in suffering, shaped by structures, and sharpened in struggle.

In cognitive science, this maps onto what researchers call interoception—the body’s ability to sense internal signals like heart rate, breath, and contraction. Our nervous systems aren’t passive receivers of reality; they are predictive processors. They detect patterns of harm and resonance before cognition articulates them. In this way, justice sensitivity is not over-reactivity—it is over-perception in a world that trains us to ignore what we feel.

For me, it’s instant.
When I see a call-out online—especially one dripping in moral superiority—I don’t need to “analyze” what’s wrong.
I feel it. The tightening. The humiliation field. The energetic recoil that ripples through the collective nervous system.
My justice sensitivity picks it up like sonar. My brain translates it later—if at all.

This isn’t a weakness.
It’s a capacity.
And in the language of Cognitive Ecology, it’s not cognitive distortion.
It’s relational resonance.

Misunderstanding vs. Harm

When Epistemic Dissonance Is Mistaken for Violence

Not everything that hurts is harm.
Not every disagreement is danger.
But when our nervous systems are saturated—when our justice sensitivity is inflamed—difference can feel like threat.

Too often, what I witness online isn’t actual harm, but epistemic dissonance:
One person speaks from an archetypal lens, another interprets through a materialist framework.
One draws from lived experience, another from abstraction.
Their vocabularies aren’t just different—they are ontologically incompatible.
And without shared scaffolding for curiosity, the gap becomes collapse.

Instead of asking, “What is this person’s frame?”
We ask, “What is wrong with them?”

Paulo Freire warned us: without dialogic consciousness, pedagogy becomes domination.
And in digital spaces, pedagogy is everywhere—but mostly it’s uninvited, and rarely it’s relational.
We don’t converse; we correct.
We don’t ask; we assert.
We turn symbolic difference into diagnostic offense.

These ruptures live in what I’ve come to call cognitive loops—rigid interpretive circuits that cannot metabolize complexity.
Loops are not inherently bad. In fact, they’re adaptive.
But when left unchecked, they close rather than open the ecology of understanding.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Binary cognition: right/wrong, good/bad, safe/harmful.

• Symbolic flattening: metaphor mistaken for manipulation.

• Projection spirals: someone speaks to their pain through you—and then calls you the source.

To the looped mind, complexity feels like betrayal.
And that betrayal demands resolution—fast.

But here’s the thing:
Justice sensitivity isn’t rigid until it’s trapped.
And often what traps it is the pressure to collapse multiple truths into one clean narrative.

In the language of liberation psychology, this is epistemic enclosure—when the pluralism of ways-of-knowing is shut down by the hegemony of certainty.
In Cognitive Ecology, we might say:
The symbolic field is misattuned. The resonance is off. The nervous system reads the mismatch as rupture, not rhythm.

But if we slow down—if we listen—we might find the rupture is actually a doorway.

The Nervous System of Justice

Sensitivity as Somatic Signal, Not Symptom

My therapist reminded me today:
What I’m experiencing is not fragility. It’s justice sensitivity.
A nervous system tuned to resonance and rupture—not because I’m reactive, but because I’m awake.

Justice sensitivity doesn’t start in language.
It begins in the fascia.
In the pulse before the thought.
In the ache behind the eyes before any ideology can explain it.

This is what Stephen Porges calls neuroception—our body’s unconscious ability to detect safety or threat in the environment.
But in systems saturated with moralizing, that neuroception becomes noisy.
We begin to read complexity as hostility.
We confuse unfamiliarity with danger.

Still, the signal is not wrong.
It’s just raw.
It hasn’t yet found form.

That’s what happened to me when I watched a call-out unfold online.
The words hadn’t even landed, and already my breath shortened.
Why?
Because justice sensitivity doesn’t wait for consensus—it scans for coherence.
And when something fractures that field—even symbolically—my whole system floods.

The question isn’t, “Why am I so sensitive?”
It’s, “What is this sensitivity attuning to?”

This is a sacred form of cognition.
It’s what the Cognitive Ecology Model calls resonant perception:
A capacity to sense where coherence is breaking down—interpersonally, culturally, symbolically.
Not because we are broken.
But because we register the brokenness of the field before others do.

And what often follows is the loop:

• Why is this person reacting this way?

• Why can’t they see the nuance?

• Why does my body ache when I watch this unfold?

Because the ache isn’t a malfunction.
It’s a signal of symbolic misattunement—something’s off in the shared story, the shared safety, the shared seeing.

From the outside, that may look like overreaction.
But from within the ecology, it is precisely attuned.
We are not simply reacting.
We are witnessing the collapse of meaning—and trying to rethread it through our bodies.

Closed vs. Open Systems

Safety, Loop Logic, and the Fracture of Meaning

When justice sensitivity gets mislabeled as cognitive rigidity, we often miss what’s actually happening:

A closed system is trying to metabolize something it cannot hold.

In systems theory, closed systems resist change. They seal off ambiguity to protect internal coherence. In relational life, they show up as rigid binaries, algorithmic responses, or hypervigilant interpretations:

You’re either good or harmful.
You’re either with us or against us.
Your words are either safe or unsafe.

But this isn’t logic—it’s looping.
And in the Cognitive Ecology Model, looping isn’t pathology. It’s an ecological response to symbolic overload.

When something in the field fractures—when relational coherence breaks down—the mind often returns to safety through fixation.
Not because it is rigid, but because it is trying to restore coherence in a landscape that suddenly stopped making sense.

This is what trauma does:
It shrinks time.
It narrows perception.
It reduces the range of response down to what feels survivable.

In contrast, open systems are flexible, recursive, and relational.
They metabolize contradiction.
They allow symbolic input to reshape meaning.

“Yes, that hurt—and I want to understand more.”
“I feel tension, and I’m open to multiple truths.”
“This feels charged—let’s slow it down.”

Open systems invite co-regulation rather than control.
They expand the frame instead of collapsing it.
They create the conditions that justice sensitivity is actually asking for: truth, resonance, and repair.

The difference isn’t just semantic—it’s somatic.
Closed loops feel like urgency. Like pressure to declare, perform, defend.
Open spirals feel like breath. Like curiosity. Like enough space to say: something here needs more tending.

Gregory Bateson, a foundational thinker in systems theory and cybernetics, taught that “the unit of survival is not the self, but the system.”
This means misattunement isn’t just personal—it’s ecological.
And what appears as individual reactivity is often the system itself crying out for recalibration.

In Freirean terms, this is the difference between banking education—where knowledge is deposited, defended, and withdrawn—and dialogic knowing, where meaning emerges in presence, risk, and co-created space.

For those of us with high justice sensitivity, the distinction is crucial.
Because when the loop takes over, we’re not just reacting to a post.
We’re protecting the symbolic field—trying to patch the rupture of meaning with whatever tools we have.

And when closed-system cognition enters relational spaces—especially digital ones—it can amplify harm:

• Misunderstandings escalate into accusations.

• Symbolic language gets flattened into offense.

• Epistemic difference is misdiagnosed as malice.

An open system might pause and say:

“This landed strangely—can you share more about where it’s coming from?”
“I’m noticing a tension between our frames. Can we pause and unpack?”
“This feels sharp to my body—before I name it harm, can we sense it together?”

These aren’t just better communication strategies.
They are ecological repairs.
They restore the feedback loop.
They let justice sensitivity move from reaction to relational inquiry.

And sometimes, the most radical tool we have is this:

I don’t have to stay inside this loop.
I can step out—not as escape, but as ecological refusal.
Not as disengagement, but as nervous system repair.

Stepping Out of the Loop

Boundaries as Praxis, Not Punishment

For years, I thought leaving was failure.
If I blocked someone, I felt like I was giving up.
If I exited a conversation, I feared I was betraying the work.
But I’ve come to understand:

Sometimes stepping away is the most relational thing I can do.

When a system—be it a conversation, a space, a social feed—becomes a closed loop, it’s not always safe to stay.
Especially for those with high justice sensitivity, staying often means internalizing the field’s dissonance.
Absorbing the charge.
Holding what won’t metabolize.
Losing clarity inside someone else’s collapse.

In Cognitive Ecology, this isn’t avoidance.
It’s boundary as ecosystem regulation.

Sometimes I block not out of anger—but out of resonance fatigue.
Sometimes I pause not to punish—but to protect symbolic coherence.
Because when logic becomes a weapon, presence stops being safe.

To remain in a loop where interpretation is control and complexity is collapse is not justice—it’s trauma reenactment.
And staying in that dynamic doesn’t just harm me.
It reinforces the loop itself.

As bell hooks taught us, love and liberation require both presence and discernment.
And as Martín-Baró reminds us, the internalization of oppression often feels like loyalty—until we remember that freedom is a relational condition.

So I step out.

Not to dominate, but to defuse.
Not to erase, but to re-center.
Not to escape, but to restore enough breath for new meaning to emerge.

Because liberation isn’t staying in every room where harm circulates.
Liberation is knowing which rooms can metabolize rupture—and which ones only replicate it.

And sometimes, the most liberatory act is this:

I love you. I can’t do this right now.
I see the harm. I’m not the right person to hold it.
I’m stepping away—not to disconnect from you, but to reconnect with myself.

That is nervous system stewardship.
That is ecological refusal.
That is relational sovereignty.

Toward Relational Liberation

From Reactivity to Resonant Justice

Justice sensitivity is not the end of the story.
It’s the opening signal—the pulse that alerts us to something deeper needing to be felt, seen, re-woven.

But the next step is ours to choose.

We can spiral into reactivity—where the nervous system clings to certainty to feel safe.
Or we can root into discernment—where sensation becomes signal, not sentence.

Discernment is not disconnection.
It’s connection through clarity.
It’s what lets us name the distortion without becoming it.

This is the promise of Cognitive Ecology:
That justice doesn’t have to mean collapse.
That sensitivity isn’t something to overcome, but something to tend—with others, through context, in community.

As Freire wrote, liberation is a collective process.
And in that process, we don’t just unlearn domination—we design new ecologies for being with one another.
Ecologies where symbolic minds can thrive.
Where pain isn’t silenced, but also isn’t weaponized.
Where justice doesn’t mean being perfect—it means being willing to repair.

This is my work.
And maybe it’s my life’s work.
To create spaces—both internal and communal—where:

Big ideas can live alongside big feelings.
Spirals are seen as sacred.
Conflict becomes compost.
And justice sensitivity becomes a shared sensorium—not a solitary wound.

We are not meant to carry the ache alone.
We are meant to metabolize it together—in open systems, in slow time, in symbolic rhythm.

That is justice sensitivity evolved:
Not reaction.
Not righteousness.
But resonant understanding.

© 2025 Sher Griffin. All rights reserved.
The Cognitive Ecology Model, Synpraxis, and Exclusion Feedback Synpraxis are original works developed through years of research, writing, and lived experience. Please cite appropriately when referencing.
For permissions, collaborations, or questions, contact: sher@thecompassioncollective.earth

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