Illustration of the dynamical friction framework. The magenta points describe the points of the host in the vicinity of a perturber (depicted as a blue dot in the enlarged sub-plot). Different coloured lines show a small sub-sample of integrated orbits, both backwards and forwards in time. The dashed circle shows the distance from the perturber where the t_far is reached. The acceleration field difference caused by unperturbed (x₀) and perturbed (x₁) points gives the dynamical friction. In the enlarged image, we connect the corresponding points with a grey line.