Retain

Keep the operation and the authority entirely with the person, with support absent or peripheral.

After realizing you seriously hurt a close friend, you sit down to draft an apology and feel the pull of every available assist: an AI to polish the wording, a mutual friend to deliver the message, a script from an article. Each layer of help would make the words smoother, and each would make the apology less yours.

RETAIN is one of six relationship modes between you and any support: this one keeps both the operation and the authority entirely with you, support absent or peripheral at most. It is the right bond when the doing is itself the point, when consent, accountability, presence, or repair only counts if it visibly comes from you. The cue is noticing that outsourcing any part would hollow the result: a delegated apology is not an apology. The operation: deliberately mark the work as yours alone, do the reflection and the delivery in your own words and person, and confine any support to the periphery, at most a trusted friend privately flagging where your draft sounds defensive, with no power to send or soften anything on your behalf. What changes is that the other person receives you, not a production, and whatever repair happens is real. The boundary: RETAIN is a choice, not a virtue; keeping mechanical work like calculation or record-keeping in this mode out of stubbornness just wastes the capacity this mode exists to protect.