The Triple Helix of Emotional Freedom

I want to introduce a framework that has genuinely reshaped how I think about emotional health — not just for clients, but for myself. It comes from the therapist and researcher David Wallin, who describes what he calls the triple helix of emotional freedom: mindfulness, mentalization, and agency. The more I’ve sat with these three, the more convinced I’ve become that he’s onto something close to essential.

Agency is the simplest to explain and the easiest to forget: the sense of always having a choice, especially in relationship. In any relational moment, there are really only a few options — attack, withdraw, or confide and connect. Knowing those options exist, and that you always have at least one path toward connection available to you — even prayer, even when no other person is available — is agency.

Mindfulness is the one most of us have some familiarity with: awareness of your own awareness, your own experience, as it’s happening. Observation decouples automation, as one researcher puts it. The moment you notice what you’re feeling, you create a choice you didn’t have a second earlier.

Mentalization is the one I think deserves more attention than it usually gets. It’s the brain’s capacity to imagine what’s happening inside someone else — what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling. Children begin developing this within their first year of life. And when people get stuck, relationally or emotionally, it’s very often because they’re operating from an inflexible, inaccurate picture of what other people think and feel about them — a picture formed early, from real wounds, that hasn’t updated since.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe is the most important application of all three: every meaningful intervention, every moment of real connection, should arise out of genuinely trying to understand what’s happening inside the other person. Not analyzing them from a distance — mentalizing them, imagining your way into their experience, and letting that imagining shape how you respond. When you do that consistently, deep empathy tends to follow almost on its own, because real empathy is always more than reflecting back what someone said. It’s actually trying to see what they can’t yet see in themselves.

One caution, hard-won: it’s possible to get so focused on understanding someone else that you lose touch with your own body and your own feelings in the process — and when that happens, even good insight can come across as clinical or distant. The antidote is simple, if not always easy: keep coming back to what you’re feeling as you try to understand what they’re feeling. That combination — your own honest presence, plus a genuine attempt to see inside someone else — is where real connection actually happens.