Yet Another Substack Writer: An Introduction

A mental health professional obsessed with the human experience.

There’s considerable potential for narcicissm in taking up writing beyond simply journaling. The latter is great for one’s own reflection, though often it’s a way of concretizing memories in a way that provides a greater sense of finality than should exist. If considered through the lens of context-limiting perspective-taking, a way of acknowledging that one’s perspective is now and forever funneled through variables of which you have little control over and in no way captures the totality of an experience, journaling can be a fantastic habit to get into. As may already be apparent, my writing doesn’t do well as a journal, as even I at times get into a fit of head-shaking at the deep-seated desire to appear smart. Since I, when not castigating myself at a mistake, which happens enough to be a solid source for humility’s hunger, already consider myself moderately bright, it is not my own voice I’m looking to hear in an endless echo, but that of a myriad of voices in community.

Which brings me all the way around to the title of this piece and why oh why would I want to create yet another Substack among the multitude. Do I think my voice can stand out among the crowd? I certainly hope so, but that’s not the main reason. Do I want to offer an alternative viewpoint I consider different enough from others to be important for those and still others to find signifcant? Well, if I thought I was simply mouthing thoughts I find in others, then this would be simply a list of “Who To Read” and frankly who’s going to pay for that? No, the central, though not only, reason I’m doing this is in one word: community.

I’ve long considered community as the result of communication, itself understood through the combination of two other words: communal and creation. Community is the creative enterprise naturally springing up whenever two or more people are gathered in Value-based decision-making. It’s the soup we all provide ingredients for and sometimes it’s truly delicious, other times it’s rancid, and still others it takes some time to simmer before being good to eat. This is my attempt at offering both my own ingredients and, given the nature of Substack, to participate in building a community of thoughtful creatives where it concerns primarily psychology, but also social issues and the attempts we’re all making in finding meaning and purpose in our short sojourns upon this planet.

Psychology is where we begin, if for no other reason, it’s my central topic of interest and what I’ve been making a career out of for over 20 years. I’ve worked in mental health for that time, connecting, helping build social skills, and sharing in the struggles of life, with everyone from children in foster care coming out of abusive homes, to adults, couples, adults in the prison system, and the elderly. I’ve worked in social work as well as community mental health, helped create trainings for professionals utilizing principles of psychology, and currently am mostly focused on a private practice working with adults to navigate the difficulties of emotional instability, trauma within a religious context, and broadening critical reflective skills for psychological flexibility. I have a Master’s in both Mental Health Counseling and Forensic Psychology and currently am at work on a PsyD in Clinical Psychology.

Principles

Now that the bonafides are done with, I want to point out a few principles that my perspective is based on, so you know where I’m coming from, what to expect, and possibly even start asking some questions about.

Ethics is fundamental to a reflectively good life.

I take ethics to be largely about problem-solving. As Mark Johnson in his book “Morality for Humans,” ethics is a natural extension of the social spaces within which we all find ourselves, and navigating how to handle the competing desires and needs that come up due to varying perspectives. The navigation requires communication and healthy communities that support it, as well as a dedication to epistemic humility. The latter can be particularly difficult, because our evolved minds are not set up for caring about Truth, but providing a continuity of experience for consciousness to ride along as, with all the attending cognitive heuristics or biases that make that travel as smooth as possible.

“Moral deliberation at its best is a process of reconstructing our experience in a way that resolves the morally problematic situation that is currently confronting us. Such a process involves the only reasonable notion of transcendence available to humans—namely, the ability to move beyond our current habits of thought and action to creatively remake some aspect of ourselves and our world” (Johnson, Mark. Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science).

Ethics is, then, a consciously deliberative process within community, rather than simply a declaration of fundamental dogmas. The latter may occur but it is only ever short-hand for the deliberation that may still need to take place to see how such will practiced within a given context. This is why I find fundamentalism, both as a religious ideological stance, and a psychological tendency towards authoritarian simplicity, to be utterly abhorrent. It completely denies our communal reality and hobbles the creative spirit that allows us to find new solutions to challenges.

Poetic naturalism as a way of understanding reality.

From Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture,” poetic naturalism essentially posits that naturalism is the ontological lens of seeing ourselves and our world/universe, and there are multiple ways of describing the various parts of that naturalistic experience. For instance, when moving from description to prescription, from what is to what should be done, a person will be using different ways of verbalizing their thoughts. This is where ethics as a problem-solving journey finds further connection with who and what we are. The various ways of verbalizing our thoughts may be different but they are not at odds with one another, because the goal is still focused on broadening an understanding of our shared reality.

Poetic naturalism is why categories are so important to keep in mind. If a person is describing their personal experience going through a hurricane using poetic language, it would be ridiculous to castigate them for not mentioning wind speed, the coriolis effect, and their seeming lack of concern for global climate change. Further, categories is where we have gotten into a great deal of trouble where it concerns much of our social activism as it has cascaded downward into narcissistic clownishness on the slippery slope of the idea that ‘the personal is political.’ Much of activism and discourse these days is the substitution of moral claims for epistemic ones, often by simply folding the latter into the former. This will be a theme of writing later, but suffice to say, anytime someone meets a factual claim with a declaration of emotional ‘safety’, the need to not ‘harm’ others through wrong verbiage, or is hyper-focused on seeing individuals through the lens of group-level victimization, has decided to forego a conversation about understanding a situation for one of moral authoritarianism.

Consciousness is the only substance we partake of in experience.

As noted briefly before, out minds are not evolved to find Truth. Instead, they’re problem-solving devices dedicated to navigating reality through creating narratives of continuity for our conscious experience. These stories allow for the allocation of resources in a constant informed guessing game of what is likely to be needed in the future based on past experience funnelled through present awareness (Lisa Feldman-Barrett, “7 1/2 Lessons of the Brain”)

Making this more difficult for reflection and critical thinking, consciousness is all we ever actually experience. We do not see things as they actually are, but through the perspective provided by the bodies we inhabit feeding, indirectly and in a limited way, into our conscious awareness. This includes other people as well, where we never actually see the person as they are, but as facsimiles of the information we perceive them to have given us through their various actions. We’re essentially living in a venn diagram of existence, where there’s a constant attempt at increasing the overlap between what is and what we perceive it to be, where such never becomes a full circle.

There’s of course far more to these three principles than I’ve gone into here, but I can hope they’re enticing enough to see you come back for more, particularly as they work in reflecting on and critically considering various parts of the human experience.

Welcome

I’ve called this space “Humanity’s Values,” precisely because Values are what I consider fundamental to our ethical consideration and the desire to understand ourselves and the world we live in. They guide each and every single behavior we engage in as an extension of our conscious experience, even when such may be at odds with other Values we hold and/or are not always the best way to uphold the Values we are attempting to.

It is my desire that questions will come up and be asked, that dialogue will happen, and a community, of whatever size, will be created to explore the questions together. As I tell all my clients, I don’t ever want to be your guru and have you believe I think I know all the answers. I’m in this planetary boat with you and we’ll sail the seas of uncertainty together.