The Identity Stabilization Hypothesis: Recursive Identity Stabilization Encoding as a Clinical Model of Enacted Identity Updatin

RISE Clinical Process ArchitecturePredictive-processing and active-inference accounts increasingly conceptualize selfhood and narrative identity as components of generative models through which individuals anticipate, interpret, and act upon their environments. These approaches provide powerful theoretical accounts of how expectations organize perception and action, but they do not by themselves constitute a granular clinical procedure for producing and stabilizing identity-level change. Recursive Identity Stabilization Encoding (RISE) is proposed as a clinical process architecture addressing this translational problem. RISE conceptualizes identity change as a recursive interaction among affect, symbolic representation, meaning, narrative organization, behavioral enactment, and consequential feedback. Within this architecture, an Affectively Weighted Symbolic Prior (AWSP) organizes threat-relevant expectations that become expressed through context-sensitive Identity Positions. These positions constrain the narratives and behavioral policies experienced as coherent, safe, or available to the individual. RISE proposes that therapeutic revision becomes stable when an alternative Identity Position is enacted while the existing prediction is affectively active and when the resulting behaviour generates consequential experiential feedback capable of informing subsequent model revision. The central empirical prediction—the Identity Stabilization Hypothesis—is that identity revision will be less likely to stabilize when symbolic or narrative reinterpretation occurs without consequential behavioral enactment and feedback providing experiential evidence consistent with the updated identity model. RISE therefore distinguishes identity reinterpretation from identity stabilization and generates testable predictions concerning the conditions under which therapeutic identity change persists, generalizes, or returns to previous configurations.