About FSRT

Functional Systems Regulation Theory (FSRT) is a systems-based framework for understanding regulation, distress, and healing.

It begins with a simple premise:
nervous systems do not regulate in isolation.

Human experience emerges within nested biological, relational, cultural, and environmental systems. When these systems are coherent, regulation becomes possible. When they are fractured, distress is often mislabeled as individual pathology.

FSRT offers a way of seeing what is happening beneath symptoms.

What FSRT Is -

FSRT is not a technique, protocol, or diagnosis.

It is a theoretical orientation that integrates:

  • Nervous system science

  • Developmental trauma theory

  • Systems thinking

  • Relational and environmental context

  • Psychedelic-informed integration perspectives

Rather than asking “What is wrong with this person?”
FSRT asks:

What systems is this nervous system embedded within, and how are they shaping regulation?

A Shift in Where Responsibility Lives

Most modern mental health models locate regulation as an individual task:
something to learn, practice, or fix.

FSRT recognizes regulation as emergent.

Stability, collapse, and healing arise from:

  • Early attachment environments

  • Ongoing relational dynamics

  • Institutional and cultural demands

  • Access to safety, rhythm, and support

From this view, many symptoms are not failures, but adaptive responses to conditions that have not changed.

Core Principles of FSRT

Functional Systems Regulation Theory begins from a simple but often overlooked reality:
human beings exist within systems, and those systems exist within other systems.

No level of experience: biological, psychological, relational, or cultural, can be understood in isolation. Regulation emerges from how these layers interact.

Nervous systems stabilize through relationship before they ever stabilize alone. Co-regulation precedes self-regulation, developmentally and continuously. From this view, distress is not evidence of personal failure but information, a signal that one or more systems carrying the nervous system are under strain.

FSRT recognizes that insight, skills, and effort have limits. When environments remain dysregulating, no amount of individual strategy can fully compensate. Healing does not occur because a person tries harder; it occurs when the systems shaping their experience reorganize.

Why FSRT Matters

FSRT emerged from clinical work, lived experience, and sustained observation of where prevailing models reach their limits.

It offers language for experiences many people recognize but struggle to name:

  • Why insight alone often fails to resolve distress

  • Why regulation collapses despite “doing everything right”

  • Why healing accelerates in supportive relational and communal contexts

  • Why psychedelic experiences require structure, containment, and integration rather than intensity alone

By relocating distress within systems rather than individuals, FSRT helps explain patterns that otherwise appear contradictory or discouraging.

FSRT does not replace existing modalities.
It re-contextualizes them.

How FSRT Is Used

FSRT functions as an orienting lens rather than a prescriptive model.

It can inform:

  • Psychotherapy and trauma treatment

  • Psychedelic-assisted therapy and integration

  • Group and community-based healing spaces

  • Educational, organizational, and institutional design

  • Personal meaning-making and developmental orientation

The question FSRT keeps in view is not What technique should be applied?
but What systems are shaping this experience, and how are they organized?

Closing Orientation

FSRT is an invitation to stop asking nervous systems to adapt endlessly to environments that remain unchanged, and instead begin examining—and redesigning—the systems we ask people to live inside.

Founder's Orientation

FSRT was developed by Alan Romano, a clinician whose work sits at the intersection of trauma treatment, systems theory, and psychedelic-informed care.

The framework did not emerge from theory alone. It arose from sustained clinical practice, direct observation of where existing models break down, and lived experience inside systems that asked nervous systems to adapt without changing the conditions surrounding them.

Across years of work with complex trauma, mood disorders, psychosis, substance use, and altered states of consciousness, a pattern became increasingly clear:
regulation could not be understood, or restored, at the level of the individual alone.

FSRT reflects a refusal to reduce human distress to personal failure, poor coping, or insufficient insight. It challenges the quiet assumption that people must regulate themselves inside environments that remain dysregulating, extractive, or incoherent.

This work is not positioned as a replacement for existing modalities. It is an orientation that asks a prior question:
Where has responsibility been placed, and where does it actually belong?

FSRT remains intentionally unfinished. It is a living framework shaped by ongoing clinical practice, dialogue, and observation. Designed to evolve as our understanding of the symbiotic nature of systems, nervous system regulation, and healing deepens. 

All in our walk towards wholeness. El Camino Sagrado