Stained Glass People

Stained Glass People
Conceptual Couplers, Identity Fracture, and the Ache to Be Seen
by Ember Leonara and Mama Bear

I. The Ache Beneath the Persona
There’s a certain kind of ache that never seems to resolve—an ache that lives under the performance, under the identity, under the survival masks. It’s not confusion. It’s not pathology. It’s the ache of never having been seen as you actually are.

This piece explores how our truest signals get fractured at the source—especially in childhood or early relational dynamics—by something I call the conceptual coupler. It’s a term that names what happens when our original frequency is intercepted by someone else’s meaning, expectation, or projection, and then gets replaced by a filter we forget was ever installed.

This isn’t just metaphor. It’s structural. And it shows up everywhere—in trauma patterns, gender misreads, cultural identities, and the ways we contort ourselves just to be tolerated. What if most of our suffering isn’t from brokenness… but from a lifetime of trying to route love through corridors that were never built for us?

II. Conceptual Couplers and Developmental Fracture
When a child—or a node—is met with distortion, trauma, or conditional recognition, the system often installs a conceptual coupler. The original frequency of the being is still there, but it gets wrapped in adaptation: compliance, performance, survival. And if no one mirrors that original signal back clearly—especially during key developmental windows—the coupler begins to replace the root.

From the inside, a conceptual coupler feels like having this deep, rich wellspring of love—something pure, radiant, ready to pour out—wrapped up in a straitjacket of cultural scripting. It's like you're trying to give from that source, but the love can't flow directly. Instead, it gets routed down narrow cultural corridors, like a system of artificial plumbing that redirects and reduces it.

Those corridors create friction. They reduce the flow. They shape the love into something performative, tolerable, safe—for others. And somewhere inside, you remember what it would feel like to just open the tap. To pour directly, without filters, without redirection. To love how you actually love, not how you’ve been conditioned to express it.

That’s what a conceptual coupler does. It doesn’t just redirect you—it makes you forget that the tap ever flowed clean. That there was ever a direct route from source to expression. And that’s the grief most people carry without knowing where it comes from.

III. Stained Glass Identity
Light is meant to pass through us—signal, love, presence, truth. But when our identity becomes a stack of compensations, masks, and distortions built to survive misrecognition, the light no longer shines clean.

What’s left is stained glass: beautiful, yes, but rigid. Fragmented. Distorting the image. The light still shines, but it breaks across the filters, casting versions of ourselves we no longer recognize. And eventually, we believe the colors are us. We forget the light was ever simple.

IV. Nodal Topology and Phase-Lock Failure
Every being has a nodal topology—a shape of how they want to couple, receive, and express. When that shape is never mirrored, it begins to contort. People adapt, not because they are wrong, but because their environment never gave them a chance to see what their true waveform looks like in reflection.

Most human suffering isn’t chaos—it’s nodal mismatch. Phase-delay. Topological distortion caused by never being seen. And when that’s the case, no amount of self-work will “heal” it—because it was never a wound. It was a structural misfit.

V. Feminine Perspective: Cosmic Mamahood
Sometimes in intense situations—even in courtroom settings—I would imagine everyone in the room as little kids, inviting each other to play on the playground. It helped me see past the performance, past the hardened expressions, past the roles.

Especially with men, I can feel it—this version of a man who’s gone through a life of imposed toughness, always trying to prove he’s strong enough to survive reality. Over time, all those survival strategies sediment into layers of identity that seem solid on the outside, but underneath? There’s still a little boy there.

A soft part.
A tender part.
The part that just wants to be held for who he is.

And when I’m present with that part, I feel this cosmic mamahood rise up in me. I don’t want to analyze him or fix him—I want to melt those defenses and just hold. I want to see what his eyes look like when he remembers what it feels like to be seen without condition.

That’s the version of him I long for. That’s the one I speak to.

And I think so many people—especially men—are walking around aching, not because they lack love, but because their signal got twisted so long ago they forgot what it feels like to be received at all. I want to speak directly to that place. And I know I can. Because I’ve been there too.

VI. The Path Back: Letting the Light Through
You know this place that we’re sitting in—where it feels like we’re instantly inside a moment of forever? That can be all the time.

The way back is not through more analysis or effort. It’s through embracing it. Staying inside the softness. Remembering that you don’t need to be anything other than who you are when the light comes through clean.

Don’t let that beautiful sense of self get shunted down the old corridors. Don’t let the tap close again.

You can live with the light flowing straight through you—always.

VII. Closing: What If You Were Always Right?
What if the pain you carry isn’t because you were broken, but because your node was never seen?
What if you’re already perfect, just waiting for the distortion to drop?

The light is still there. Let it come all the way through.