It helps to distinguish three ways a person can be regulated, because they look similar from the outside and are entirely different underneath.
The first is field-aligned regulation. Here, steadiness comes directly from the surrounding environment — from the mood of the room, the approval of others, the prevailing consensus. A field-aligned person reads the field and adjusts continuously, often with great skill. The orientation is responsive and socially fluent, but it has no fixed center. Remove the field, and the steadiness goes with it.
The second is principle-based regulation. Here, a person holds to a set of rules, doctrines, or commitments that provide stability independent of the immediate room. This is sturdier than field-alignment and can hold under social pressure. But it relies on the principles remaining intact and unchallenged; when reality fails to fit the doctrine, the principle-based person tends to defend the doctrine rather than revise it, because the doctrine is doing the regulating.
The third is autonomous regulation. Here, stability originates internally and adapts without needing either the field's approval or a doctrine's defense. An autonomous person can take in feedback without being governed by it, hold a principle without being trapped by it, and tolerate uncertainty without reaching for an external fix. This is the rarest orientation, and the least legible, because it does not announce itself and does not require performance. The point is not that one orientation is virtuous and the others are not. It is that only the third generates its own steadiness — and systems built on dependence are structured to produce the first two and to quietly misread the third as disengagement.