Agency via Knowledge

The fundamental process by which we (re)build ourselves, with or without a therapist

Dear subscribers: I’ve got some exciting updates on the horizon regarding my new book deal (working title The Builder’s Mindset: A New Psychology of Ambition in Life and Work), and the opportunities it will open up for deeper exploration and more intimate community engagement around the ideas in this newsletter. Meanwhile, as I wrap up my summer in San Francisco* and get my ducks in a row for the book, here’s a post I’ve thrown together by compiling and lightly updating several previously published pieces, including this Psychology Today post and this academic paper co-authored with my colleague Vera Bekes.

*If you happen to be in the Bay Area next Tuesday evening (8/13), please join me for this fireside chat on the “psychology of ambition”. Paid subscribers get in free with the discount code provided at the bottom of this post.

Gorlin & Bekes (2021), Figure 1. Schematic illustration of agency via awareness [i.e., knowledge] meta-process aimed at in psychotherapy. [See original paper for full figure caption]

Despite the wealth of research and clinical insight that psychologists have accumulated over the past century, there is still no unified theory of how, when, or why therapy works. Instead, the field's knowledge is scattered across hundreds of particular "schools of therapy" that largely talk past each other, despite their many common elements.

Among other issues, this makes it frustratingly hard to know what to look for in a therapy or therapist, or what strategies to use when undertaking one's own self-improvement.

To address this problem, psychotherapy researchers have been working to distill the principles of change found across many therapeutic approaches. Partly building on their work, and partly bringing my own philosophical lens to it, I've proposed that we can go a step further and articulate two fundamental assumptions implicitly shared by every effective therapy:

1. that therapy’s core aim is to help people exercise more agency over their lives;

2. that people exercise agency primarily through the pursuit and application of working knowledge.

The thesis explained

An “agent”, according to Merriam-Webster, is “one that acts or exerts power” or “produces or is capable of producing an effect.” In the context of a human being, the ultimate “effect” to be produced is a life well-lived; so your level of “agency” is the extent to which you have and exercise the power to produce a well-lived life for yourself. This includes both choosing the kind of life you want (versus having it chosen for you) and effecting that desired life in action (versus idly wishing and waiting for someone or something else to effect it for you). This scales all the way up from your choice of breakfast this morning to your choice of the life projects, relationships, hobbies, geographical settings, etc that will make up the bulk of your adult life.

Exercising agency is not the same as being all-knowing or all-powerful, nor does it guarantee that all of your chosen life goals will be fulfilled. Rather, it means that you do the things that constitute self-authorship and tend to generate success: you are able to choose your own goals and strategies based on the information available, and to take action in light of them; to navigate obstacles and creatively solve whatever problems arise; to learn from failures and adjust your goals and/or strategies accordingly. In short, it means you’re a competent and responsible manager over the project of building your best life.

By "knowledge," I mean awareness and understanding of whatever aspects of yourself and the world are relevant to building your best life. The potential scope here is obviously vast, and vastly variable depending on the kind of person you are and the kind of life you want to build. At minimum, though, you need some insight into the “kinds of people” and the “kinds of lives” that are possible—and what it would look like to actualize any one of these possibilities, given your current starting points.

To have a working knowledge means you can access it when you need it, and that it has fully “sunk in” for you; it has the power to stir your emotions and motivate your actions. 

To have a working knowledge, versus just any set of beliefs and attitudes that stir and motivate you, is to have done the work of forging your beliefs and attitudes through active engagement with reality—which includes gathering the needed data (both introspective and extraspective), reflecting on it critically, and checking and updating your conclusions through continual experience. This is hard work, and it is work that never stops. It is chosen, self-directed work. It is, in fact, agential work. For individuals struggling to make sense of deep loss, failure, misfortune, or injustice, it can be very painful work. But it is work that needs doing if you want the power to envision and enact a more satisfying life.

The thesis applied

To briefly illustrate this "agency via knowledge" process in context: Imagine you've been stuck in an abusive relationship (be it personal or professional) for years. Perhaps you believe “on an intellectual level” that “my life would be better if I ended this relationship,” but you cannot begin to imagine what such a version of your life might look like, nor specify any concrete steps you could take to bring it about. Your belief is at the level of a vague, untested speculation, and is unlikely to motivate you to end things. To turn this belief into “working knowledge,” you would need to do a lot of work to specify, in vivid enough detail, the realistic costs and rewards associated with staying in the relationship versus ending it. Consider some of the steps this might involve:

• First you may need to gain awareness of the unadmitted anger and resentment you feel toward your spouse, cofounder, or whoever it is (we’ll call them your “partner” for short), or the unadmitted fear that you would be unable to make it on your own. This is the kind of insight that a psychodynamic, IFS, or emotion-focused therapist might help you gain, both by offering interpretations you had not considered, and by helping you summon and give voice to the parts of yourself that are scared versus angry. A humanistic approach could also aid you in this task, both by reflecting and validating your emotional states in a way that helps you more fully articulate them, and by providing a supportive space for you to open up to aspects of your experience that might have previously felt too threatening. 

• Having consciously admitted your fear that you cannot make it on your own, you might then need to check it against reality, both by considering the evidence you already have available (e.g., your ability to get by prior to this relationship) and by gathering new evidence (e.g., making some independent decisions and seeing how they go). In other words, you may need to do some cognitive restructuring and conduct some behavioral experiments—two of the main building blocks of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

• To do this data-gathering successfully, you may need tools to help you tolerate the distress that certain painful conclusions (e.g., “I’ve been needlessly tolerating abuse all this time”) and anxiety-inducing behavioral experiments (e.g., standing up to your abusive partner at the risk of backlash) would entail. This is where interventions like mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy, or dialectical behavior therapy would offer you ample tools for tolerating and distancing from distress enough to bring your growing knowledge to bear on your choices.

Each of these and many other therapeutic approaches, I contend, derive their value from the role they play in helping people engage in the active, non-defensive pursuit and internalization of new knowledge about what is really true and what they really want, so that they are empowered to act accordingly. 

By understanding these various strategies through the "agency via knowledge" lens, you gain the power to assess what further knowledge you need to acquire and/or internalize to make more informed choices in your life, and what's standing in your way.

In other words: armed with this new knowledge about the nature of psychological change, you gain greater agency over the process of changing yourself.

Agency via knowledge as the “third way”: resolving seemingly intractable therapeutic debates

As a unifying framework that captures what’s best and truest across many different therapeutic approaches, the agency via knowledge model has potential to reconcile some of the seeming conflicts that have kept psychologists divided.

To take just one example, the field is currently entrenched in a conceptual standoff between those who regard the process versus the content of human thought as more important to target in psychotherapy. Interestingly, therapeutic approaches rooted in the Psychoanalytic and Behaviorist traditions have largely converged in their prioritization of process, albeit in different ways and for somewhat different reasons. The psychoanalytic tradition explicitly views conscious thought content as being at the constant mercy of reality-distorting motives and defenses that operate outside of awareness. As such, any effort to engage directly with this content—such as by offering counter-evidence or checking its logical validity—would just perpetuate the illusion of objectivity created by the patient’s defensive processes, instead of bringing those processes to light. Meanwhile the Behaviorist tradition explicitly regards thoughts as conditioned behaviors controlled by environmental contingencies, leaving no theoretical room for checking their veracity or modifying them based on evidence (e.g., Gross & Fox, 2009). Both traditions thus emphasize the importance of changing the process by which patients relate to their own thoughts: how attached they are to those thoughts, how flexibly they are able to move between or away from them, and so on.  One might say that these traditions emphasize agency while deemphasizing knowledge. 

By contrast, traditional cognitive approaches rooted in “information processing” models of human cognition tend to focus on correcting the distorted content of patients’ thoughts and beliefs, but are less attentive to the different motivations that might energize a person’s thought processes. As such, a cognitive psychologist might err on the side of trying, in effect, to force knowledge on someone who defensively resists it, without first identifying or addressing the source of that resistance. The tendency to view people as mere information processing machines, in other words, may lead to an emphasis on content but an underemphasis on agency in choosing whether and how to engage with such content to begin with.

If we adopt the agency through knowledge model I’m proposing here, the apparent conflict between content- and process-focused approaches would dissolve. Rather, we would come to think in terms of an agential process that has working knowledge—i.e., accurate and useful content—as its goal. The motivation to work toward knowledge must itself come from past or current experience of the rewards this work can bring: more effective decision-making, increased confidence in one’s choices, and the sense of vitality that comes from being awake and alive to the full reality of one’s experience.

Many existing interventions already get at these ideas in many different ways, using many different terms (such as “willingness,” “acceptance,” “self-congruence,” “metacognition,” and “mindfulness,” just to name a few). Having the unified perspective I’ve proposed here would allow us to develop a common language for what we are really doing when we utilize these various strategies. For instance, we can now speak in terms of summoning the courage to face painful truths, arming oneself with knowledge, doing the work to make one’s knowledge fully real to oneself, valuing one’s need to really know, etc. It would also allow us to be more judicious about when and how to use these terms, based on an assessment of what working knowledge we need in order to make more effective choices in the relevant domain of our lives; what information, inspiration, or experience we need next in order to work toward that knowledge; etc.

In this way, the “agency via knowledge” model can provide us with a parsimonious understanding and vocabulary for the many stages and manifestations of the psychological change process. Thus we can learn and capitalize on the distinctive strengths of whatever therapeutic approaches we happen to encounter and find resonant, while contextualizing them in relation to the broader task of understanding and building our best lives.

Coda: How I got motivated to solve this problem

One of my least reasonable personal peeves is when someone talks about a particular term, concept, or finding in psychology as though it were the definitive framework pertaining to the issue at hand.

It’s unreasonable because my interlocutors, many of whom are founders, technologists, or other busy working professionals coming from outside psychology, have found great value in these frameworks. For instance, maybe they’ve gained self-understanding and a sense of visibility by seeing their personality quirks through the lens of MBTI (or the “big five,” or neurodiversity, or…). Or maybe they’ve learned to listen and lead more effectively by applying the tools of non-violent communication (or emotion-focused therapy, or radical candor, or…). Or they’ve gotten a firmer grip on their emotions via IFS parts work (or CBT core beliefs work, or EMDR trauma work, or…).

In my view, all these frameworks are incomplete and at least partly misleading, often in ways that enshrine certain local maxima at the cost of more radical self-betterment. But to compare and conceptualize their relative strengths and weaknesses is a complex, long-term project which has largely eluded even the scholars working on it full-time, and is not necessary for reaping value from their strengths. It would hardly be a fruitful use of time for someone whose life does not revolve around psychological theories.

As someone whose life does so revolve, I decided some years ago to try taking up the mantle—and quickly gained respect for the challenge of contextualizing any given psychological framework within the vast and sprawling jungle of semi-overlapping theories and findings and schools and sub-schools of thought that comprise our field. As a relatively nascent science, psychology has accumulated a massive amount of disparate observations, findings, theories, and methods, but has come nowhere close to organizing and integrating that mass of material into a unified body of knowledge, a la the three laws of Newtonian motion or the four laws of thermodynamics. This doesn’t mean we can’t still get enormous value from the particular approximations or heuristic models we encounter within the field—so long as we treat them as just that, rather than latching on too strongly to any given iteration as the “one true system.” 

To put it another way: our knowledge of so complex a phenomenon as the human mind does not come neatly conceptualized for us by default. The default is ignorance, and any step toward integrated understanding—toward working knowledge—is an ambitious intellectual feat. 

My own efforts at that feat have so far resulted in the “agency via knowledge” model I present above, and in the“builder’s mindset” framework and tools I’ve been laying out in the pages of this Substack. And now I’ve got the charter to turn it all into a book (with the world’s biggest publisher betting good money on its bestseller potential)—and you all to hold me to the ambitious intellectual bar I’ve set for myself.

Paid subscribers: stay tuned for an invitation to the first in an experimental series of chapter-by-chapter book workshop + Q&A calls, which (pending some clarification of my contractual agreement with Penguin) will include early access to a draft of the Preface/Introduction (and possibly Chapter 1)!

Finally, as promised: use discount code SUBSTACK to get into next Tuesday’s SF event FREE (when you register here).