Why Don't They Just _____ ? InTensions: Diagnostic Architecture for When Change Becomes Psychologically Possible

Why Don't They Just____? InTensions: A Diagnostic Architecture for When Change Becomes Psychologically Possible" answers that question. For forty years across neuropsychological assessment, executive function consultation, neurodiversity support, and applied psychology, I have observed a persistent paradox. Capable people with insight, motivation, and skill nonetheless become unable to access their own capacities consistently across life's domains. Existing models of behavior change, from dual-process cognition to perseverance research to Positive Psychology's person-environment fit, explain much about when and why change occurs, but they do not specify when the prerequisites for change become structurally inaccessible. The InTensions Architecture addresses this gap. Through systematic analysis of what 100+ psychological theories explain about change, and critically, what they do not explain, combined with mapping of 50+ interventions and documentation of patterns across thousands of applied cases, this framework provides a diagnostic layer for when evidence-based interventions become psychologically accessible and when upstream conditions must be addressed first. The framework explains stuckness as executive and regulatory capacity depletion, not motivational failure. The name itself reflects this: people caught in tensions despite having clear intentions, unable to resolve structural trade-offs through willpower or insight alone. InTensions does not compete with existing approaches. It supplies the structural layer beneath them, specifying the belief-tension-context conditions that govern access to the psychological capacities all interventions require.