Holey Theory: A Coherence–Entropy Framework for Trauma, Constraint, and Alignment in Self-Organizing

Holey Theory addresses a persistent explanatory gap in trauma science: the inability of symptom-based, pathology-centered, or single-domain models to account for the cross-domain persistence of dysregulation across biological, neural, relational, and temporal systems. Existing frameworks often localize trauma within the individual (e.g., as diagnosis, cognition, or neurobiology), optimize isolated outcomes, or lack a unifying causal grammar capable of explaining why improvements in one domain frequently fail to generalize, or even coincide with deterioration elsewhere. Holey Theory introduces a non-agentic, field-level ordering constraint, the Universal Ordering Principle (UOP), and formalizes alignment as a continuous scalar relationship between self-organizing systems and this constraint. Trauma is reframed as lawful, adaptive misalignment imposed by constraint, while healing is defined as emergent re-organization following sufficient constraint reduction, evidenced by convergent reductions in energetic cost and increases in multi-domain coherence. The theory is explicitly non-diagnostic, non-moral, and non-teleological, and is designed to be empirically legible, falsifiable, and applicable across domains without collapsing into reductionism or metaphysics.