Underneath the argument about the dishes, the slammed bedroom door, your partner says you are driving too fast or the silence at the dinner table, one question is running in the body of every person involved: am I safe with you? This guide is about that question — where the answer gets written, and what it costs when the answer was no.

Anger, guilt, shame, and a fierce insistence on handling everything alone look like personality traits. They are not. They are what an attachment system does when it is not sure the bond will hold. A intimate relationship is threatened or your sense of belonging to your tribe or social group is in danger. At the deepest level underneath it all there is a threat toward your role in supporting the survival of the human species. This guide follows that system in five parts: why connection is a survival mechanism, the developmental road that shaped yours, the cycle your inner wounds run in the present, how that cycle compares with other models, and what can actually be changed.

Two relationships carry most of the weight here: your partner, and your child. They are the two places where the attachment system is most fully engaged, and they are connected — the road your child is walking right now is being paved by what happens in your house this year.

Part One: Connection Is a Survival System

Start with the species, not the couple. Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who described evolution by natural selection, argued that living things develop traits keeping them and their young alive (Darwin, 1859). He later made the point that matters most here: emotions evolved for the same reason (Darwin, 1872). Feelings are survival equipment. Fear keeps us from danger; love keeps us near the people who keep us alive.

John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who created attachment theory, showed that our drive to stay close to a trusted person is not clinginess but a survival system, like hunger (Bowlby, 1969/1982). Mary Ainsworth, the developmental psychologist who tested his ideas with real infants, named what it produces: a secure base — the felt sense that someone has you, which lets you rest and also lets you go take risks (Ainsworth et al., 1978).

Follow the chain and the design is visible. Safety makes closeness possible. Closeness makes intimacy possible. Out of that comes the next generation — and a child raised inside a bond like that arrives with a nervous system already built for safety, and passes it on. The love bond is not a private comfort. It is the mechanism by which the species keeps going.

This is measurable. Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist behind polyvagal theory, describes how feeling safe with someone slows the heart, settles the breath, and softens the face and voice — we are built to co-regulate, to calm each other down (Porges, 2011). James Coan found that when people faced the threat of a mild shock while holding a partner’s hand, the brain’s alarm areas quieted (Coan et al., 2006). Julianne Holt-Lunstad, pooling 148 studies, found people with strong social bonds were roughly 50% more likely to be alive at follow-up than isolated people (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Connection is a health variable, not a luxury.

So a threat to the bond is read as a threat to survival. That is why a disagreement about a text message can tighten your chest in four seconds, and why a nine-year-old’s refusal to get in the car can produce a wave of rage entirely out of proportion to a car. Your body is not overreacting to the event in front of it. It is reacting to the oldest possibility there is: losing someone who keeps me safe, or failing someone who depends on me.

What Anger, Guilt, Shame, and Self-Reliance Actually Are

These four are not the problem. They are check engine lights of the human survival engine, four different ways an attachment system reports that something has gone wrong with the bond.

• Anger is protest. It is the reach outward, the demand to be heard, the alarm made audible. Bowlby saw it in separated children long before anyone called it a symptom.
• Guilt is repair-seeking. June Tangney and Ronda Dearing draw the line precisely: guilt says I did something bad, and it keeps a person in the room and moves them toward fixing it (Tangney & Dearing, 2002).
• Shame is collapse. Shame says I am bad. It takes a person out of the room, and it is the reason so many repairs never happen — you cannot apologize from inside a feeling that makes you want to disappear.
• Self-reliance is protection. Bowlby named the pattern compulsive self-reliance — an insistence on managing everything alone that looks like strength from the outside and feels like isolation from the inside (Bowlby, 1973). It is what a person builds when depending on someone turned out to be unsafe.

In most hard moments several of these are stacked. The raised voice is usually anger sitting on shame. The sudden silence is usually shame that swallowed the anger whole. And the person who says “it’s fine, I’ll do it myself” is often the most alarmed of all.

Two Things Worth Knowing About the Equipment

Emotions are not private events. We inherited a culture that treats feelings as things happening inside one isolated person. David Sloan Wilson, Steven Hayes, and Anthony Biglan point out that this is a cultural habit rather than a biological fact — emotions evolved in a social world, as signals between people, and we recognize them in each other because we share them (Wilson et al., 2018). Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist who studies fear in the brain, noted there are nearly as many theories of emotion as theorists, yet nobody has trouble knowing what one is (LeDoux, 1996). Your anger is not only yours. It is information passing between two nervous systems — and a small child reads it long before they can explain it.

The newest part of the brain goes offline first. Elisabeth Murray, Steven Wise, and Kim Graham describe how the granular prefrontal cortex — the outermost, most recently evolved region at the front of the brain — expanded during human evolution, and how that expansion supported new representations of oneself and of other people, including the ability to take another person’s perspective (Murray et al., 2017). That machinery is what lets you imagine your partner’s inner world, or remember that your child is seven. It is the newest and most expensive to run, so it is the first to drop out under threat. Mid-conflict you are not refusing to see the other person’s side — you have temporarily lost the equipment that does it. Slowing down is not a politeness rule. It is how you get that equipment back.

A Quick Note About Risk Before We Continue

Almost everything in this guide is about a particular kind of fear: the alarm that fires because of an old developmental wound rather than because of what is actually in the room. That fear is real — your body is not faking it — but it is reading the present through the past. A sigh becomes abandonment. A closed door becomes rejection. The threat is remembered, not current.

That is not the only kind of fear, and it would be a serious mistake to read this guide as saying anger and fear are problems to be eliminated. They are survival equipment, and most of the time they are doing their job correctly. Healthy fear tells you something genuinely is not safe. Healthy anger tells you a real line has been crossed, or that something you love is being threatened. A person with no access to either is not healed — they are defenseless. Part One made the case that these systems exist because they kept our species alive, and that has not stopped being true.

So the aim here is not to talk yourself out of your alarms. It is to build enough awareness of your own body and enough capacity to settle your nervous system that you can tell the two apart — and then trust the signal when it is real. That is the whole skill: not a quieter alarm, but a more accurate one.

And sometimes the alarm is exactly right. If there is fear for your physical safety, intimidation, threats, control over your money or your movement, or any violence, that is not a cycle and this guide is the wrong tool for it. Abuse is not two people stuck in a pattern — it is one person using power over another, and calling it a cycle can make it harder to leave. Do not try to regulate your way through a situation that is genuinely unsafe. Get help from someone who can help you plan.

Utah Domestic Violence Resources

If you need someone right now: the Utah Domestic Violence Information Line is 1-800-897-LINK (5465), and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. For thoughts of suicide or a mental health crisis, call or text 988. And if you genuinely cannot tell which situation you are in, that uncertainty is not a failure of insight — it is one of the most important things you can bring to a therapist.

Part Two: The Developmental Road

Nobody arrives at adulthood with a random way of handling closeness. It was assembled one stage at a time, out of brain tissue that was still under construction and out of what the people around you did when you needed them. Seven mile markers matter most. Each one names a capacity that was being built, the part of the brain doing the building, what caregivers do that builds or breaks it, and what an underbuilt version looks like in your life now.

The roadmap below shows all seven at a glance. It is worth spending a minute with before reading the detail — most people find one or two markers jump out immediately, and those are usually the ones worth bringing to a therapist.

How the Brain Builds Itself

Two facts make this whole section make sense.

The brain builds back to front. Nitin Gogtay and colleagues scanned the same children repeatedly over years and watched the cortex — the wrinkled outer layer where thinking happens — mature in waves, with the survival and movement areas finishing early and the front of the brain finishing last, well into the twenties (Gogtay et al., 2004). Two processes drive it: myelination, the laying down of insulation around wiring so signals travel faster, and synaptic pruning, the cutting away of connections that do not get used. Pruning is why experience matters so much. The circuits you use survive; the ones you do not use get trimmed.

The alarm comes online long before the brake. The amygdala — a small almond-shaped alarm center deep in the brain — is working at birth. The prefrontal cortex — the area behind your forehead that plans, waits, and calms things down — is barely started. Dylan Gee and colleagues traced how the connection between those two regions matures gradually through childhood and adolescence, which is the physical wiring that lets thinking damp down alarm (Gee et al., 2013). Laurence Steinberg describes the result as a gas pedal installed years before the brakes (Steinberg, 2008).

So a child in distress is not choosing to be unreasonable. The equipment or ability to rationalize within the brain has yet to develop and when it does it’s blue prints are based on what they observe from their caregivers. It is that use of observing parents and other relationships to gather data for one’s internal blue print is the story behind each of the 7 mile markers described below. Parenting is hard, no doubt, but providing a safe environment supporting an emotionally informed blueprint is the single most important thing a parent does.

Below, each of the seven mile markers is laid out the same way: the tier and developmental milestones that should be reached, and the parts of the brain that have to come online to a baseline level for that to happen. Each marker then names what an underbuilt version tends to look like in adulthood — with an intimate partner, and as a parent in your attachment with your own children. Read them less as a diagnosis than as a glimpse of a possible why behind your own experience, and of when it was first written.

Mile 1: Before Birth

Tier: Safety · Building: nervous system organization, stress sensitivity · Regions: brainstem, hypothalamus

The brainstem — the oldest part, sitting where the brain meets the spine, running heartbeat and breathing — is already working before birth, and so is the hypothalamus, the small structure that controls the body’s stress hormones. What gets set here is not a memory. It is a sensitivity level: how easily the alarm will fire for the rest of this person’s life.

What builds it: a pregnancy with reasonable safety and support. What shifts it: sustained maternal stress, violence in the home, poverty, illness. Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist who studies how care changes gene activity, works in epigenetics — how experience turns genes on or off without changing the genes themselves — and showed that early stress physically changes how a nervous system handles stress for life (Meaney, 2001).

As a partner now: going from calm to furious in seconds, and staying revved for an hour after a two-minute disagreement. People often say some version of “I don’t have a middle setting.”

As a parent now: your child’s ordinary noise and chaos genuinely hurts. Not metaphorically — a body with a low alarm threshold registers a whining four-year-old as an emergency, which is why you can be furious before you have decided anything.

Mile 2: Secure Base (Birth–3)

Tier: Safety · Building: Secure Base, Embodied Awareness · Regions: brainstem, amygdala, right-hemisphere attachment networks, ventral vagal system

This is the busiest construction site on the road. Physical regulation climbs fast, but emotional and relational capacity sit near ten percent of adult function for the first three years, so the baby cannot regulate itself and must borrow a nervous system from an adult. Allan Schore describes the right hemisphere, which handles emotion and faces and tone, as being shaped almost entirely through these exchanges (Schore, 2001). Stephen Porges calls the calming branch involved the ventral vagal system — the part of a large nerve that slows the heart and softens the face when you feel safe with someone (Porges, 2011).

What builds it: a caregiver who notices distress, comes, and stays until the body settles. Thousands of times. Not perfectly — reliably.

What breaks it: a caregiver who is absent, frightening, or unpredictable. Jack Shonkoff and colleagues call the result toxic stress — strong, frequent stress without a steady adult to buffer it (Shonkoff et al., 2012). The alarm gets calibrated hot, and the child stops expecting relief to come from people.

As a partner now: needing your partner to calm you down and resenting that you need it. Or the opposite — physically unable to accept comfort, going stiff when someone reaches for you mid-argument.

As a parent now: finding your baby’s crying unbearable rather than simply hard, because nobody ever soothed that sound for you. Or going efficient and flat — feeding and changing competently while staying emotionally somewhere else, which is the version most likely to be praised by other adults.

Mile 3: Inherent Worth and the Body (Ages 2–7)

Tier: Identity Formation · Building: Inherent Worth, Embodied Awareness · Regions: insula, anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex

Two things switch on here. The insula — a region folded inside the brain that tracks what is happening in your own body — begins supporting interoception, the sense of your own insides: hunger, heartbeat, tight chest, the physical feel of an emotion (Craig, 2009). And the medial prefrontal cortex begins building a self-concept — the running idea of who you are. A child is learning to feel their own body and to form an opinion of themselves at the same time, and adults supply the words for both.

What builds it: adults who name feelings out loud (“you look really frustrated”) and who correct behavior without indicting the person. What breaks it: contempt, ridicule, or criticism aimed at identity. Children cannot yet separate what they did from who they are, so what is wrong with you lands on the self (Tangney & Dearing, 2002).

As a partner now: not knowing you are angry until you are already shouting, because the body signal never got labeled. Or hearing any feedback — even gently delivered — as a verdict on your worth.

As a parent now: this is the mile you are standing on with a young child right now, and the difference between “that was not okay” and “what is wrong with you” is the whole mile. It is also where your own history shows up hardest, because a child’s shame face can trigger yours.

Mile 4: Voice (Ages 3–15)

Tier: Expression · Building: Self-Authorship, Authentic Expression · Regions: language areas, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, temporal-parietal junction

Language arrives and changes everything, because a feeling that can be named can be handled instead of just discharged. Around the same time the temporal-parietal junction — a region where several lobes meet that helps you model what someone else is thinking — begins supporting perspective-taking, the ability to hold your view and theirs at once.

Every household also teaches an unspoken rule about anger: anger is dangerous here, anger is not allowed for girls, anger is the only feeling allowed for boys, anger means someone leaves, anger means someone gets hurt. Whatever the rule was, it got learned thoroughly.

What builds it: adults who let a child disagree, state a preference, and be angry without it costing them the relationship. What breaks it: punishment for having an opinion, or a household where one person’s anger took up all the available space.

As a partner now: agreeing to things you do not want and resenting it for weeks. Discovering you were angry only after the door slams. Or leading with anger every time, because anger always felt safer than sadness or fear.

As a parent now: a child who talks back can feel like a threat rather than a developmental milestone. Watch for the moment you shut down your child’s disagreement faster than the situation warrants — that is usually your Mile 4, not theirs.

Mile 5: Resilient Repair (Ages 4–16)

Tier: Expression · Building: Resilient Repair · Regions: orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, basal ganglia

The orbitofrontal cortex — sitting just above the eyes, handling impulse control and social rules — is maturing, along with the anterior cingulate cortex, which notices when something has gone wrong and flags it. The basal ganglia — deep structures that turn repeated actions into automatic habits — are laying down patterns that will run without thought for decades.

Which means this is where conflict behavior becomes habit. Edward Tronick showed that healthy relationships are full of misattunement and that what matters is the repair afterward (Tronick, 1989). A child who watches rupture reliably followed by repair learns that conflict is survivable. A child who watches rupture followed by three days of silence learns that conflict is the beginning of abandonment.

What builds it: adults who come back. Who say some version of “I was harsh with you earlier and I am sorry,” and mean it. Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson describe this as showing up — present and soothing enough that the child’s brain wires for safety (Siegel & Bryson, 2020).

As a partner now: apologizing in a way that collapses into self-hatred rather than repairing anything. Or never apologizing, because admitting fault feels like total defeat. Days of distance after a twenty-minute argument.

As a parent now: this is the most forgiving mile in the whole road, and the most underused. You do not have to avoid losing your temper with your child. You have to go back afterward. Repair after a rupture teaches more than the rupture cost — and a child who never sees an adult apologize learns that adults do not.

Mile 6: Connection and Partnership (Ages 5–18)

Tier: Connection · Building: Mutual Connection, Attuned Togetherness, Secure Partnership · Regions: mirror neuron systems, medial prefrontal cortex, right-hemisphere social networks

Relational capacity climbs steeply here — about a quarter of adult function at age six, over half by ten. Peers arrive, and with them the discovery that other people have insides as complicated as yours. Reciprocity gets practiced: taking turns, tolerating someone else’s mood, being close without performing.

What builds it: being allowed to be a child. Having problems handled by adults rather than handed to you. Friendships that survive disagreements. What breaks it: having to manage your own homework, your own feelings, and sometimes a parent’s feelings. That child becomes extremely competent and extremely alone, and the competence hides the cost.

As a partner now: doing everything in the household and resenting everyone for not helping, while being unable to ask. Feeling humiliated by needing anything. This is compulsive self-reliance in its adult form.

As a parent now: leaning on a child for emotional support, adult-level information, or company in your loneliness — usually without noticing, and usually because it feels like closeness. A child who becomes your confidant loses this mile.

Mile 7: Meaning and Direction (Ages 10–25)

Tier: Meaning and Aliveness · Building: Transcendent Meaning, Meaningful Pursuit · Regions: default mode network, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

The default mode network — a set of connected regions that switch on when you are not focused on a task, and that handle daydreaming, self-reflection, and storytelling about your own life — matures late (Raichle, 2015). So does the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which does planning and holds several ideas at once. Whole-self integration — body, emotion, thinking, relationships, and values working as one system — is the very last thing to arrive, not reaching adult levels until roughly age twenty-five.

What builds it: adults who let a young person question things, who model repair and meaning rather than certainty, and who value the person separately from their achievements.

As a partner now: one unanswered text becoming they are pulling away. One piece of criticism becoming I am failing at everything. Achievement quietly replacing closeness, because being useful is safer than being known.

As a parent now: praising output rather than person, and being genuinely unable to see a teenager’s identity experiments as anything but rejection of you.

Why an Underbuilt Domain Is Not a Character Flaw

When a domain does not get finished, the capacity does not go missing. Something else takes the job. A person whose Mile 3 was thin does not feel nothing — they feel everything as a threat to their worth. Someone whose Mile 5 was thin is not avoiding conflict out of cowardice; their nervous system registers an unresolved argument as danger.

That is what an underdeveloped domain looks like from the inside: not an absence, but an older and cruder system doing a job it was never designed for. And because of pruning and myelination, the same processes that built it the first time are still available.

Three Ways the Road Ends

Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver describe two organized strategies that develop when a caregiver is not reliably available, and Mary Main and Judith Solomon identified a third that appears when the caregiver is the source of the fear itself (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016; Main & Solomon, 1990).

These are strategies your body learned when they were the best available option, not personality types and not diagnoses. And they are not fixed.

Part Three: How the Wound Reads the Present

The road explains how your attachment system got built. This next part explains what it does with a Tuesday evening. The same eight stations run whether the other person is your partner or your six-year-old, and they run in about ninety seconds.

The Wound at the Center

The wound is not one of the stations. It sits in the middle and bends all of them at once: the inner wound from the road above, the core belief it left (“I don’t matter,” “I am too much,” “I am on my own”), and the domain that never got fully built. This is the part that interprets. Two people can receive the same sigh and hear completely different sentences, because the wound is doing the translating.

The Eight Stations

• 1. Trigger. A tone, a sigh, a delay, a correction, a door closing a little too firmly. Small on the surface, and old underneath.
• 2. Body. Heat in the face, chest tightening, heart speeding — or everything going heavy and far away. This happens before you have a thought, and it is where the perspective-taking equipment starts going offline.
• 3. Emotion. Anger or blankness on top. Fear, shame, loneliness, or feeling unimportant underneath. People argue about the top layer and almost never reach the bottom one.
• 4. Story. Your mind supplies an explanation fast: “They don’t care.” “I’m always the problem.” “Here we go again.” The story feels like observation. It is mostly memory.
• 5. The Protective Urge. A hard pull to make the feeling stop. Toward — pursue, explain, press, correct, fix, raise the voice. Or away — go quiet, go cold, leave the room. Both are protection. Neither is chosen.
• 6. Behavior. What the other person actually sees and will remember: the criticism, the volume, the stonewalling, the walking out, the sarcasm.
• 7. Relief, then cost. There is real relief in discharging anger, and real relief in escaping into silence. It lasts a few minutes. Then comes the distance, and the thing you cannot unsay.
• 8. The wound is confirmed. Shame reads the aftermath as evidence. “See — I am too much.” “See — I am alone in this.” The belief at the center gets heavier, and the next trigger will cost less.

The Longing — The Way Out

Underneath the urge is the thing the protest was always about: Am I safe with you? Do I matter? Will you come when I call? Sue Johnson’s entire method rests on getting partners from the surface move to that sentence — from “you never answer me” to “when you go quiet I get scared I’ve lost you” (Johnson, 2019). The second sentence is far harder to say and is the only one that can reach anybody.

Two Cycles, One System

With a partner, both of you are running this at the same time, locked together. Your station six is their station one. Your protective move is their trigger, and theirs is yours. That is why blame never resolves anything — both of you are at station five, doing what your body learned to do, each accidentally proving the other’s core belief. The most useful thing a couple can learn is that the enemy is the cycle, not each other.

With a Child, the Cycle Is Not Mutual

This is the most important paragraph in the guide for parents. Your child cannot regulate you. They cannot see your history, cannot understand that your reaction is about 1987, and cannot step outside the moment to name the pattern. When an adult hits station six, a child does not experience a bad moment — the child experiences the person who is supposed to be safety becoming frightening.

That is precisely how Mile 2 and Mile 3 get written for the next generation. It is also why Mile 5 matters so much: you will reach station six sometimes, and the repair afterward is what decides whether your child learns that conflict ends in abandonment or that it ends in reconnection.

Part Four: Where This Comes From

Sue Johnson and the Negative Cycle

Sue Johnson, the clinical psychologist who founded Emotionally Focused Therapy, spent a career watching couples fight on video and noticed the same argument repeating with different content. Writing with Audrey Brassard, she describes how attachment theory takes a therapist straight to the heart of a couple’s trouble — the task being to restructure the key interactions, the thinking, and the emotional responses that keep partners stuck (Brassard & Johnson, 2016). Her core claim is the one this guide is built on: partners are each other’s primary attachment figures, and when the bond feels threatened both nervous systems go into survival mode at once (Johnson, 2019).

John Gottman and Flooding

John Gottman and Robert Levenson measured what happens in the body during marital conflict and found that physiological arousal — what Gottman later called flooding — predicted which marriages deteriorated (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). A flooded body cannot listen, cannot problem-solve, and cannot access perspective-taking. This is the empirical backbone under the argument for slowing down.

Thich Nhat Hanh and the Pause

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist, arrives at the same place from an entirely different direction. He refused to treat anger as an enemy to defeat or a shameful thing to hide: anger is a form of suffering, and suffering deserves care (Nhat Hanh, 2001). His instruction is to do nothing at first except return to the breath and care for your own anger, and his image is the one clients remember longest — hold your anger the way a mother holds a crying baby. You do not yell at the baby or throw it out of the house. You pick it up and find out what is wrong.

What This Cycle Adds

Part Five: Every Station Is a Target

Slowing down is not about being nicer. Part One described how the perspective-taking equipment at the front of the brain is evolutionarily newest and drops out first under threat (Murray et al., 2017), and Gottman and Levenson showed that a flooded body predicts marital deterioration (Gottman & Levenson, 1992). Put those together and the conclusion is mechanical rather than moral: a flooded body cannot do relationship. When you pause, you are waiting for the equipment to come back online. Gottman’s practical version is that real physiological recovery takes at least twenty minutes — far longer than most people give it.

You do not have to win the whole cycle. You need one place where you can interrupt it, then another.

The Two Pieces That Are Not Stations

The wound at the center is the long work: going back to what happened or never happened, grieving it, and rebuilding the domain that was left underbuilt. It is what keeps the other eight from springing back.

The longing is practiced out loud, with a person. Say the softer thing before it becomes a complaint. Ask directly rather than hinting or protesting. For anyone carrying compulsive self-reliance, this is the hardest move in the guide and the only one that ends the loop rather than pausing it.

An Honest Picture of the Timeline

You will catch it at station eight for a while, then station six, then station five. Catching it at station five is the real win — that is the moment you felt the pull and did something else. Expect to lose the thread when you are tired, sick, hungry, or stretched thin, because a depleted body floods faster. That is not backsliding; it means the answer is often sleep and food rather than insight.

Mapping Your Own Cycle

Work from one specific recent moment — with your partner or with your child — when you are calm, not mid-conflict.

1. The wound at the center — what happened, or never happened, and the belief it left.
2. Trigger — the concrete cue. Not “when they’re being difficult,” but the actual moment.
3. Body — where you felt it first, and how fast.
4. Emotion — on top, and underneath.
5. Story — what you told yourself about them, about you, and what it meant.
6. The Protective Urge — did yours run toward or away?
7. Behavior — your move, as a verb.
8. Relief, then cost — what it gave you, and what it charged.
9. The sentence you said to yourself afterward.
10. Their side — what your move looked like from where they were standing. If it was your child, what did it look like from three feet tall?
11. The longing — what you actually needed, and how you could ask for it out loud.
12. What you will call this cycle, so anyone in the house can name it.

References