The KOI Effect: When Insight Slips Before You Can Catch It
The KOI Effect is what I call that moment when something important is just about to surface—an idea, a memory, a knowing—and then vanishes the second you try to speak it. Like seeing a koi fish just below the water’s surface: it glides past you, unmistakable and alive, but the moment you reach for it, it’s gone.
This doesn’t just happen in therapy. It happens in conversations—when you're looking at someone and the thought is right there, you’re about to name it, and the moment it’s your turn to speak… it’s gone. It happens in art: you’re walking toward the canvas or the notebook, and the thing that felt clear before now won’t come through. It happens when something is still pre-conscious—on its way from the invisible to the visible.
That’s what the KOI Effect really marks: the liminal space between the unconscious and conscious. You’re in the passageway—mid-transfer—and reaching too quickly collapses the signal. The image, the insight, or the idea disappears not because it isn’t real, but because it isn’t ready to be handled directly.
In those moments, I've learned not to push. Instead, I stay still. I describe what was forming. I speak around it. I trust that if I hold the space loosely enough, the signal will return. Sometimes not as it was, but in a form I can meet.
This is part of the language I use in NIDO OPS 2.4. Because moments like these—when something starts to rise and then disappears—often stir a deep instinct to rush toward certainty. That urgency usually signals a younger part of the psyche—the part that learned to split things into good or bad, safe or unsafe, in order to survive.
When nuance enters a space governed by black-and-white thinking, it often meets resistance. That’s because binary thinking isn’t just a habit—it’s protective. It’s the shape trauma takes in the mind. So when you bring nuance into that space—when you suggest that something can be both true and unfolding—you’re disrupting the trauma arc. You’re inviting new neurology. And the system may shut down at first, because it doesn’t yet know that this kind of presence is safe.
To track emergence—of thought, of art, of connection—you have to know how to be with nuance and uncertainty. You have to be willing to sit beside the koi without pushing for a resolution of outcome. To let it teach you the rhythm of patience, the timing of revelation, the resilience behind not rushing what isn’t fully known.
If you’re curious about what happens after something starts to emerge—when your nervous system begins processing what’s just been made visible—you might resonate with this next piece: