Introduction
This is a series of essays that are meant to lay out the models I’ve developed over the course of the last ten years of my practice. “My practice” is a coaching and guided self development technique, and much of its efficacy relies on the model of mind I use to generate prompts and questions. Working with clear premises about the basic capacities of mind allows me to note when someone seems to be operating at less than full capacity, and to launch a targeted investigation into why, so that we can work toward reclaiming capacity and spurring growth. This is especially helpful in cases where the person feels they’re at a natural ceiling, as it gives us kind of second opinion to work with instead of accepting felt limitations as absolute.
While I find the model extremely functional as a framework, I don’t believe it to be the last word on the nature or structure of the mind. True accuracy in this domain would be a tall order. I like to tell people that psychology is 99% observer effect—the mind is an extremely pliable thing, and this fact combined with the fact that it must be its own observer makes it especially inclined to appear to behave in whatever way one happens to believe it will.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to refine theory via application, even in psychology. Applied models of mind can easily generate interface structures that temporarily confirm an incorrect model, but a practice that fails to produce stable and significant experiential and behavioral change must ultimately have its underpinnings revisited. The model that I use now has been developed and clarified by years of application. Its ontological claims are still deeply philosophical in nature—in the limit, they are as much the domain of theology as they are of psychology—but insofar as I have been able to test and develop them practically, I have done so.
While the framework here is meant to provide a reference against which one can check one’s psychological position, as far as I am concerned, the truest metric in life of a person’s mental health and internal alignment is the degree to which they are successfully manifesting their desired state of the world. All purely psychological models of mental health and spiritual advancement are metrics that will not survive their own optimization. Do you believe that psychological health is happiness? Look at the happiest people you know and see whether they are who you want to be. Do you believe that psychological health is integration? Look at the people who spend the majority of their time optimizing for internal integration; are they doing what you want to do? Intelligence? We all know some pretty dysfunctional geniuses. Positivity? Try optimizing for positivity and see how toxic it makes you…etcetera etcetera. It’s easy to pick a simple idea of “goodness” and try to be good; it’s harder and takes more courage, but is infinitely more rewarding, to build a life you want. By our fruits shall we know ourselves.
With my clients and myself, I aim for healthy investment in the world. The framework that I am about to lay forth, however, offers a purely psychological model of what is possible for a human mind, and makes no claims about what counts as a good state of the world beyond the mind. This extremely important for a model of psychology, since it bounds it within its proper domain, but it also makes it potentially vulnerable to misuse as a rubric for obsessive self-evaluation without practical cashout. Bear in mind that no matter what I describe here as health or trauma or anything else that might be interpreted as value-laden, ultimately what matters is whether you are getting what you want, and are fulfilled.