It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

No one has actually asked me this question before, but I wish they would.

I began writing this article as a joke in my website’s FAQ for clients. It quickly became something else, but I endeavored to stay true to my task of describing a socio-historically sensitive and philosophically oriented psychotherapy despite a shift in audience and purpose. This was an opportunity to clarify my own thinking and bring coherence to my the broad arc of my psychotherapy practice. Beyond that, I am sharing this document in the hope that it will serve as a coherent example of a transdisciplinary practice and validate what is idiosyncratic (and works!) in the practices of others.

Psychotherapists make assumptions about what a person is and what forces shape their becoming. Psychodynamic theorists focused on what intrinsic forces oriented to sex, power, or meaning, drove a person through the world and their relationships. Other thinkers focused on relationality itself and how it shaped a person, especially in their childhoods and family of origin. Some focus on the pressures of culture more broadly. Still others focused on structure/organization and managing it actively: thinking processes, emotional processes, and nervous system or somatic processes.

Psychotherapists often might not always account for their own assumptions about what a person is but the psychotherapy theories they subscribe to often account for these assumptions.

Doing therapy while ignoring the cultural context in which we form beliefs and make meaning would be like a doctor prescribing medications without considering factors like age, lifestyle, or medical history.

Like a biome and microbiome

The broad frame of culture exerts a subtle influence on how we regard ourselves and what a “self” is. When you step back and see social forces and influences for what they are, they may not seem subtle at all, but when we are immersed in them, and think in and with them as naturally as breathing air, we take them for granted. If we are going to take a less reactive posture towards leading our lives, we need to be gently alienated from our assumptions and inherited identities and coaxed into opening toward the breadth, depth, and multiplicity of a life.

So let us step back and consider what we as Americans may be taking for granted in the therapist’s office. Philip Cushman, a psychotherapist and historian of psychotherapy, has argued that in the United States, following World War II, saw the development of an “empty self.” Or rather, this is how our self-perceptions became constructed by dominant forces within American culture.

The American self is empty, in part, because many of us are untethered from a core community and traditions. Trauma researchers have identified these relational factors as a tremendous source of resilience and sense of reward (Levine; Perry), so their absence will coincide with an increased susceptibility to being traumatized or developing unhealthy dependencies on and excessive consumption of drugs, salty/sweet/fatty foods, sex, shopping, etc. This squares with Cushman’s assertion that the empty self is characterized by its need to constantly fill itself.

Among the industries that arose to fill this insatiable emptiness are advertising and psychotherapy. Advertising suggests you will feel fulfilled if you achieve an idealized state simply by getting something—probably an expensive something. Unsurprisingly advertising tends to exacerbate our perceived scarcity rather than heal it. I, for one, know this, and yet I continue to fall for it. When we feel empty, lonely, bored, or discouraged, many of us can’t help turning toward an internet full of tantalizing mirages in a desperate attempt to realize some idealized self. We may feel better for a time. We may feel in control when we are controlled by and held aloft by an ideal. We may float above the void for a time. Then the bubble bursts.

Surely therapy succeeds where advertising does not? Unfortunately, not always. Inadvertently therapy also can validate simple solutions that perpetuate a belief in unrealistic ideals. Ideals can be subtle, the way culture is subtle, as seen from the inside: ideals of empathy or companionship, ideals of self-control or individuality, ideals of happiness or peace, etc. If not done carefully, therapy can exacerbate our sense of emptiness if it seems to promise we get to be someone else, someone who we think we should be or we are supposed to be. Even the well-meaning therapist can end up cheerleading clients in their fruitless gambits to escape their emptiness by aligning with taken-for-granted ideals. Good therapy help us question such beliefs and where they came from in the first place.

But what about that gnawing emptiness? I do not agree with Cushman that the “empty self” is merely a historical development. As I said earlier, psychotherapists make assumptions about what a person is in addition to looking at what forces shape shape our continued becoming. Our emptiness is attested in many places and times and addressed by all sorts of cultural and religious practices. I believe this emptiness may well be part and parcel of human existence. What I think arose in a historically specific way was not the emptiness of the self, then, but particular strategies for dealing with emptiness.

Well what is this emptiness. This is a metaphor, of course…

Community and traditions are indeed a potent natural balm on the awareness of an empty self, and they absolutely blunt the impact of traumatizing experience. They are not enough for human thriving, however, and can impede it. The very structures community and traditions impart are to support us are also limiting and oppressive, involving deep-seeded biases and xenophobic exclusionary factors.

American perceptions of the empty self, in the absence of strong community and traditions, gave rise to a strategy of desperately filling the self. Like eating to avoid the feelings of hunger, we can try to fill ourselves so often and so completely that we hope never to feel the pang of emptiness. It’s futile. In keeping with this analogy to hunger, I would suggest that developing a tolerance and context for managing that emptiness is the path of psychotherapy. As with eating, we may choose when and how to fill ourselves a matter of pleasure, relational joy, and health.

The first issue is reconceptualizing “emptiness” in this case. It is a metaphor of course, in Cushman’s use, coinciding with the fear of emptiness. It’s a bad combination. Emptiness can also, in Buddhist or Heideggerian thought, be seen as a fact of human existence to be accepted. Instead of the empty self as object of knowledge, to be filled with other objects, what if we lived as empty subjects capable of endless possibility, ever learning and expanding from experiences, overlapping with other subjects in a non-hierarchical fashion. Experiencing how our subjectivities may differ from others and yet not conflict. Deleuze and Guattari ( ) call it rhizomatic, the way …. The “emptiness” of subjects, through their capacity to coincide, makes a conscious relationality possible. We could call the fundamentals of these relations of forces “attunements.”

What if, instead of feeling in control by being filled with the right things, we are most in control of our lives when we are able to tolerate our emptiness and keep ourselves open and receptive until those right times in which we choose to act and get what we want rather than, out of fear of the emptiness, constantly filling ourselves with whatever is at hand. Our capacity for holding emptiness is actually a measure of liberation.

It is not right/wrong or good/bad that determines how we should live but increasingly sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities. Psychotherapy can help identify various aesthetic modes or styles of attunement that help us engage with the problems we face. I believe the primary problem of psychotherapy will always involving attuning to the unaddressed pain imbedded in problems. Avoiding this pain can lead to so much suffering.

Some aspects of therapy focus on developing the self (Kohut). I might call it converting the client’s sense of self, often too passive or reactive, into a subject. Some aspects of therapy focus on developing awareness of relationality, such as mentalizing (Fonagy).

Enter Foucault. the self as subject. Grossman, the self as person. Not transcending the emptiness but an active mode in which to regulate and manage it through self-constituting practices and relationships. Or rather, practices and relationships that constitute the self as an active subject and person with presence.

How does therapy do this? Through the micro-culture constituted in the therapeutic relationship and in reference to what promotes congruence in therapist, client, and their relationship as a whole. Normative assumptions are irrelevant except as they are discerned as the basis of beliefs and oftentimes as obstacles.

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.