Agency, Communion, and the Dialogical Self

31:16I like keeping those little bits of grammar in there. Instead, it was important to me to follow through with the breakup and discover some things about myself outside of the relationship. um many many of the narratives are similar in um in this idea of a of a congruence with one's values even though that wasn't particularly a part of the prompt we asked them to give us a moment where they felt most like their true self so however we have to acknowledge that a portion of our students for sure are, or the majority of them are psychology students. So they have probably been exposed maybe potentially to ideas by Rogers and this idea of the true self.

32:05But I wanted to go over this. So yeah. So one thing I'll just say here again, sort of almost everything I say is through Utah lens. So what we're seeing here is a justification, right? What you're seeing whenever you're engaged in narrative report, we're tapping into a person's what I would call the mind 3AB. They're sharing this, but you're asking them to reflect on their ego to narrate what it is and create a network of propositions that legitimize is an ought, which basically says, oh, this is how I understand propositionally what's going on. Here's the story. I was struggling. It would have been easy for me to stay with her.

32:42She was hurting, but at the same time, there's something aspirational. You didn't use that word, but that's clearly what you're pointing to. There's aspirational becoming that's available to me if I go through this path. I will be on more of a hero's journey. I will be able to explore. I won't be constrained and, you know, sort of contained within this relationship, which I feel, you know, ultimate. And I had to break through the constraints of her needs and my ease of need in terms of comfortability, sex, et cetera. Right. So essentially the, I would just say, Here's a justification dynamic, okay?

33:18Now we ought to put it in context. He's getting primed and prompt. These are all the ordering effects and everything else because the justification system, it grips a memory and then after the fact, it re-narrates. In fact, we could tell if he stayed with her, he would be saying things like, well, I really wanted to care about her and things were this and who knows what's going to happen. The narrative would shift because that's the way justification dynamics work. But anyway, we can see it's great. It's enabled to see the way the propositional system is capturing, realizing certain elements, legitimizing them in a particular way, and binding them together to actually say, yes, there was an aspirational becoming capacity that I tapped into myself and followed that path rather than the more constraining path that was actually good for the other, but not really good for myself, therefore would be sort of an inauthentic or constraining structure.

34:10So that's the way I would sort of just interpret that system so that's their justification system on that particular event i'm uh thank you for that greg i'm just intrigued by the something inside me told me it was the right thing to do uh and and the and the performative contradiction in there uh of a single self and yet there's something inside me telling telling me what i should do uh that's a really really interesting bit of phenomenology there to pay attention to. Agreed. And to kind of touch base a little bit with our theory here, as we kind of laid out last time and kind of extending a little bit, I think one of the first questions I actually ever asked John, it was in a Q &A, and I was asking if you had to look at the way that we contrive, compose these narratives of ourselves, how do you think the trade-off relationships that are inherent in relevance realization might play into what is salient to us in the process of reconstructing a narrative?

35:22And I think that a very established finding, I believe, McLenn and many others, McAdams as well, they have found that people do have narrative styles. There is a style that people tend to have where whether or not they have a redemptive style, they may give a problem that happened to them, but by the end of the story, they can explain to you exactly how it is good for them. And I think that's really going to what Greg is saying. And there's good research that points to a lot of great mental health outcomes for those individuals, but a lot of frustration that might be encountered by their close others when they refuse to adopt responsibility for something or when they frame a narrative in a way like this.

36:11You could imagine that perhaps the girlfriend was very caught off guard in this. And this might, as you say, Greg, just be justification. So I definitely think we have to pay attention to that. Right. When I use the word justification, I'm actually initially just describing the network of propositions. Like right now, you and I, we're all engaged in justification right now. It's not just the rationalizing defense. It's just a description of the network. Now, certainly it can be a rationalized. I mean, that's rationalizing defense, which is a justification in sort of to block off certain elements, to live genomized particular elements, to stay conformed.

36:50That's a particular kind of justification. Okay. But so is Einstein's articulation of the theory of relativity. That's a particular kind of justification too. So I'm using that term in the broad. But there will be styles. People will grip the particular elements. We want to be aware of things like the cultural context. I don't know if you know Julian James and the bicameral mind idea. I think he overshoots it. But if we lived in a different domain, some of this narrative would be, oh, the gods had for me, the narrative would be this comes from the spirits or comes from this force, this true self is really authentic.

37:29I know who I am. We'll pick that up from the culture in a reified way that scientists might come and say, well, that's a creative fiction that utilizes a justification cognitive gadget to make sense out of the world. Whether or not that conforms to something that we would really say, oh, that's a really good ontology for how people actually are. That's a whole nother set. That's why you get into this. This is the social construction, the justificatory constructive narrative of what's unfolding, whereby people are given tools to make sense out of themselves. Different cultures will give them radically different tools.

38:06So anyway. Yeah, I didn't mean to kind of like simplify and use that term for this kind of defensiveness. I think I am being influenced a bit. There is a particular little line in this authenticity research that has begun to view the entire purpose of authenticity as it is expressed as a form of, what is it, self, I believe it is self-enhancement is the idea. Yeah, it's a defense kind of. Yeah, I have a lot of qualms with that, but not to get too far into that. But I do want to point on one little thing that I think, one last thing that I think is kind of confluent with that is this idea of self-articulation by Taylor, Charles Taylor.

38:58Yeah. I think that that is a, I know that John, in the past, you've had a little bit of frustration by the over-dependence on narrative and in our worldview, particularly now. but I think that there is this aspect of narrative that might not be getting encapsulated too much is this idea of or probably not encapsulated in the right maybe not enough attention is this idea of self-articulation and cognitive styles interacting in a way that is very grounded in our ongoing relevance realization as much as it may be. No, no, I agree with that. I think that's right. I think narrative is very important.

39:48But I wanted to, and I'm going to come back to the thing again, where underneath the narrative is this weird dialogical thing happening. Something inside me told me it was the right thing to do. I would like to ask this person, was that the true self talking to you? and if you're the one listening, then you're not the true self. Where do you think about between those two? And so my criticism isn't about narrative. I think it has all the power, but narrative has a blinding effect. We tend to leap into the narrative and we ignore this sort of internal dialogue that's going on that makes the narrative actually run in an important way.

40:30That's why I put my finger on it. Like I would want to ask this person, well, what was that voice? Is that your true self? Then who's listening? And who do you identify with? And it gets really murky really, really fast. That's all I was talking about. I wasn't trying to besmirch the idea that. So typically people misunderstand me. I think narrative is really important. I think it's really important. I think it's how we become temporally extended selves that are capable of moral and existential responsibility persons. I think narrative is indispensable. But narrative often blinds us to the pre-narrative, like this weird inner dialogue in which it's not clear who and what is going on there.

41:15That's the part that I don't know. There is a very famous thing called the narrative bias, which tends to make us overlook certain things. That's the nature of my criticism. Not that it's not central or important for relevance realization, but it often makes us ignore the non-narrative, the pre-narrative that is actually making the narrative possible. Well put. Lovely. All right. Well, I think we've lingered on this narrative for a little bit longer than my thought. But this is, I do want to highlight that this is an intersection between ownership of one's actions and these themes of agency and expression of the true self.

42:00All of these themes were present when we went through and we agreed, all three of us in our final code for this, that these narratives were here. And this is actually a pretty emergent common theme that we started to see. And it was something that was kind of across both the authentic and the transformative narratives where we saw it was very common for ownership of one's actions to be butted up against self-insight. And I think that you were kind of touching on it a little bit earlier, Greg, of this idea of self-actualization, of this interaction between the aspirational self unfolding and guiding our understanding in the moment of not only when we're behaving, but also in our re-articulation of ourselves.

42:49Absolutely. Yeah, that'd be key. I mean, we just put ourselves in teenage mode, right? You're a teenager, right? And there's a part of you who's like, hey, should we be doing this? Or what would I really want to be doing if I didn't have to belong to my group? And then eventually, hopefully, you get to a place where you're like, oh, wait a minute. I'm going to go against a little bit of the group. I'm going to stand up and be somewhat myself rather than be pretty obsessed with my place in the group and how I'm seen and what my impression management dynamics are doing. And again, that can take all sorts of different odd and painful things.

43:22People can do silly things and be reckless in particular ways. It's not always good. But we can see this whole dynamic about, I see myself being constrained. I see myself suppressing. I see myself giving to being overly agreeable in a particular way. And then finally, I need to kind of go beyond that so that I can give myself the opportunity to grow into the paths and potentials that I sense in myself if I were to take something that could move me away from the pressures of the group. And I think that really captures one of the two halves of this agency other dynamic that you were pointing out earlier.

44:01And I think that was informing our original idea when we wanted to include these themes. And I want to move now to the more communal side of things where I think we can get the chance to see the other side. I think you and the elusive eye discussion, you were kind of pointing at this idea of agreeableness almost as this kind of individuation, participation, kind of social interface dimension of human personality. And I think that idea is a little bit resonant. And I think that it might kind of hearken to what we might see here a little bit with the interaction between authenticity and some of these themes of communion.

44:45it. So just to quickly read through real quick, some close friends and I were studying for a test at someone's house and we took a break to talk. It was one of the best conversations I have ever had. I got to know them a lot better. We had broken down a lot of the barriers and we're having an honest conversation about our past and our feelings and our hopes and our fears about the future. And it felt so raw. I think that word raw is important there. I remember crying when I heard things about their lives that I could never imagine. And I felt the sadness and pain that they had gone through. I felt like I take, I feel like I take on the emotions of people around me.

45:28And that helps me to relate to other people very easily when they are being honest. So very strong scene. We can see that this... No, let's just quickly then. So normally there's a situation, we're following the situation. You go into a store, you buy the thing, we're getting together, we're just talking about the structure of taking a test of being a student, et cetera. There's all the contingencies for our personas so that we get along. And inside, there's really a lot of real stuff happening to us that we basically block. I became a psychologist precisely because I found so much aliveness when the filtering, the stereotype filtering of the social environment, you know, came off and then behind the veil of that filter, the quote unquote real action of what's happening in the I course, you know, ego core self-relation that is generally filtered out, but is so real from within is then the opportunities expressed.

46:30And when you get harmonization between groups and do that, you get the deepening of intimacy, right? This is what intimacy is ultimately, is transcending the general social conventions and finding the real particulate resonance that person A would have with person B to share in the intimacy of that and then bind their communal selves together, core communal selves. And the primate self feels that. It's like, oh my gosh, that's my affiliation is the binding of self. So affiliation is one in the influence matrix. That's the binding of self to other. We're shared interests. And so that's what you're getting here is you're getting an intimacy affiliation binding in relation and then feeling that connection, being seen and valued as you see and valued in an intimate affiliative connection.

47:22That's the way I would characterize this. i i want to put in a bit of a challenge here um the way we're the way this is titled the way we're talking about it make it make it sounds like it's it's directed back towards the ego but that's not what is happening here this is other centric it they're what makes it authentic is they were learning about other people and they were feeling other people um totally so yeah i i the key is It's affiliation. It's the binding of... So affiliation is when if I have my interests, and I'm buying them in a particular way, as I affiliate, I incorporate and identify with the interests of the other.

48:08And that's what's happening. So I wasn't disagreeing with anything you said about affiliation, Greg. I was challenging the idea of authenticity as self-expression. This is not self-expression at all. This is internalizing the other. And yet that is considered as much as authenticity as expressing, express, pushing out the self. This is taking in others, which I think is really interesting because this sort of goes standard trope that what authenticity is, is being true to your true self. That's not what this is. That's not what this is here. This is opening yourself up so that you can receive others.

48:52And he's finding this to be a real moment precisely because he's – look at what he says. I'm really getting to know other people. I started crying because I felt what they were feeling. And I just think that's important to note because we have this very egocentric notion of authenticity that's predominant. It's a super important point, John. Super important point. um and and i'll just say if we pit the the relational values the felt sense of being seen known and valued in contact with the other right um and and ultimately that's so and that's a two-way street right or for a multiple way street um and the reception of that or the taking in of that um relative to the pushing out of it is is every bit as much you know filling the heart uh in that regard so this to me is what's a good way of characterizing what's happening It's an important point, too, about what we think about what authenticity is or what's actually happening.

49:48Yes. Go ahead, Matthew. I was going to say, I think something that's really fascinating is that you're both pointing to different aspects of what these codes are highlighting and what we are highlighting with these codes as well. So I think one of the things that Greg is really noting, like this love friendship aspect, this, this becoming the actual like definition of that code is something along the lines of an individual protagonist expresses that they grew closer or deepened their love with another individual and or a friend. And then we also see this unity togetherness aspect, which I definitely think points to that idea of this affiliation process, this development of a communal identity, this participation in one another to some degree.

50:43But I think there's also a unique aspect of this expression of the true self that's occurring with the dialogue scene. Yeah, of course. This disclosure. And there's something really interesting that I want to point at. And I and some of the other individuals, and I want to take this moment to point out Dr. Barty and Dr. Silver. I don't believe that I was able to give them the due diligence that I needed to last time. excellent, excellent individuals, mentors of mine who have helped guide this process and deserve so much credit for it, their part and their role. But Dr. Bardi and I have recently been discussing, we really are considering in the future, potentially asking them, what about this made you feel true?

51:32Or what was the true aspect? What is, and we don't know exactly how to approach that little question, but what is this sense of reality that you might be indicating? But that's the thing I want to put my finger on here. I'm really pushing against that the authenticity is about the self. I agree. I agree. Both instances, the previous one in this, it's like, the thing was, I had this, I was going to learn more about my, there's this, authenticity is a moment of realization. Here's a moment of realization. I came into contact with other people or I got the sense of coming into greater contact with myself.

52:14But it seems, I think it's the action, not the object of the action that is defining the sense of authenticity. It's like, am I making contact with reality? Seems to be inner or outer, self or other directed, seems to be what's really driving the phenomenology here. And I'm worried that We're constantly trying to wrestle it back into that it's about the self in some central way. That's why I wanted to point at that raw aspect. Yeah, exactly. It's this idea that there is reality that is being unfiltered to some degree. There is a clarity, a coherence that is being afforded in this relationship that is allowing the person to have some raw understanding.

53:04I think it's vulnerability that makes me more sensitive to contact. That's what raw means. And that's what they're trying to express with the phenomenology. Sorry, I keep hammering on this, but this, I mean, we talked about this last time. This is part of Adorno's critique of the modern notion of authenticity. It is so self-focused and that doesn't seem to be being borne out. I think this is really exciting data to look at, by the way, for this reason, how much it opens us up to like, are we talking about something in terms of an adjectival property of the self, like a true self? Are we talking about an adverbial way in which people, to go back to Heidegger, their Dasein, their being, are they in more contact with what's real within and without?

53:50And if that's what I'm saying is right, then I would predict that if we give people experiences where they're feeling simultaneously deeply connected within and without together, they would find that the most authentic experience of all. I would be very fine to agree with that.

54:10So before we get into, and I think that everything you just said is about to be reflected in our main findings. Excellent. i was born your justification system

54:27wow that doesn't work usually

54:35yeah so um before we get into that is there any more uh notes on this last example narrative here or are we ready to move on into those? Well, I'll just double tap on John's point. I mean, their meaning in life. I mean, there's a convention, there's a stereotype, there's an everyday that's boring and stale. And what's raw here is that that came off for the group. And all of a sudden you contacted what's behind the veil for the group and was able to be seen, known and valued for the group. And you get this binding to, oh my God, we're real people in the world apart from this conventionality, everyday stuff that everybody boxes themselves into.

55:21And man, does that feel more real than just going through the motions? I mean, I'm saying that in a very everyday sort of way, but we put it in what's the gut feeling. That's the way I would frame it. And that's essentially what John's saying in a sophisticated way. Yeah, I agree. As usual, I'm agreeing with Greg. For sure. so let me just pull something by the one orthogonal point but relevant this kind of thing this is what dialectic into dialogos is trying to produce to realize you can't manufacture it dialectic is a set of practices so that this kind of thing prepares you for this kind of thing showing up because if you try and manufacture it because of what Greg just said then it doesn't show up at all but there's things you can do to make, you can't manufacture it, but there's things where you can prepare.

56:14So it's much more likely that this will like take on a life of its own and appear for you.

56:23So just to real quick. Okay. That's skipping ahead. Oh, okay. Sorry. All right. So I am I'm pulling up, not trying to move too quickly from your last point, John. I'm trying to get up this final.

56:50Okay, so I'm going to stop sharing real quick while I pull up some of these final points. And I want to really go in on, I know that we said we wanted to get into some of the data side of things. I'm going to emphasize the findings. I think the qualitative data is really the important side of things. But I just wanted to go ahead and say that after we did our analysis of the overall first half of the set of data, before we did the overall analysis in the end, we did find some significant findings. They kind of informed some secondary hypotheses that we had later, and we can get into that in a little bit.

57:39But just to, I think, refresh everyone on the initial hypotheses, which I think are kind of important to keep in line because they informed our analyses as well. We hypothesized that there would be a higher sense of agency in the authentic narratives over the transformatives. this was kind of informed by this idea that authenticity might be involved in either the expression or development of the individual kind of regardless of what those mechanisms might be we thought that it might have something to do with agency and we thought that there would be relationships between that agency and the agentic themes and we also thought that there would be particular relationships between the specific authenticity themes and the sense of agency.

58:33After looking at our analysis, we did find that there was a higher sense of agency, particularly, I believe, a higher positive sense of agency. In the measure that we looked at earlier, I don't think we touched on it much or I failed to, but there is a positive and a negative facet to that sense of agency. And they are correlated with each other, but they are not the same construct. One is this idea that you are being influenced and you're more under the control of your environment to some degree. And one kind of emphasizes this direct control over your thoughts and behavior. And the positive aspect of authenticity, sorry, of agency was more prominent in the authentic narratives than in the transformative.

59:22There was a significant difference between the two groups. And then after we had found that initially, the only predictors that we had is we ran our initial analyses on the first half of the data without the full set of codes was we found that an individual's current level of self alienation did influence how much agency they attributed to themselves in those. where there was a negative relationship between one's current self-alienation and the amount of agency that they were willing to attribute to themselves in either of the narratives that they wrote, which was a fascinating finding. And I think it's important to kind of frame that before we talk about what might be the relationships between the individual themes of authenticity and agency because it is a current measure of one's authenticity, the self alienation, and it has to do with being a contact and understanding oneself.

1:00:25So if we take that into account, there may be some process that individuals who have less contact with themselves or claim to might just attribute to themselves less agency in these narratives overall. So I just want to clarify that. It's an interesting finding. It is. I agree. That's interesting. My instinct to say a ton of statistical numbers, I've tried to quell that down. Yeah, please. Yeah. No one wants to hear all of that. But then I thought that a, I do want to emphasize that negative self-alienation, sorry, negative sense of agency was not different between the two narratives. Individuals reflecting on the negative aspects of their agency in those moments, how much control they felt other people or their environment had over them was not different significantly between the two narratives.

1:01:27But self-alienation did also predict differences in that as well. So just an interesting background. um and then luckily or uh any uh ideas on that i mean i that would probably just get us into if we want to stay out of the data let me i'll just inhibit that yeah if we feel if we feel like returning to it i'm all for it don't worry i got it all right i'm gonna crush my true data yourself and just say, let's move on. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, but it was very, very interesting once we actually got our hands on the themes, which was this very culminating moment. We've been working on for over a year and a half.

1:02:16Everyone had been putting in all of their hard work. And we did find that there were significant differences in the themes between the different stories. So in terms of the authentic themes, we did find significant differences in the amount of those particular themes across each. So the only one that we did not find a significant difference, the presence of, was resisting external pressure. And I think that is because that was generally a very uncommon theme for us to find, especially at the higher approaches. And we did approach the data in a couple of ways or we had just present or absent. So was there a two, three, or four for those authentic themes and kind of made it dichotomous in the same way as the agency and the communion themes?

1:03:03And then we also made it continuous. So how much was this theme important there? And it seemed for when it came to attempting to predict the agency or sorry, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. It did not seem like there was any difference in the presence or the intensity of resisting external pressure. But there was significant differences in contentment, in relational authenticity, and in expression of the true self. Those three were far more um prevalent in the authentic narratives and they were uh i i mean i'm gonna say just say for contentment just to give an example of some of the statistics that are underlying all this participants scored significantly higher on the continuous authentic variable um or within the authentic narratives compared to reflect to their scores for their transformative and it was about a Cohen's D.

1:04:06So like a magnet, like the magnitude of the effect was a 0.91. So it was a, is a, especially, yeah, for, for personality, that's pretty high. You have to tamp that down a little bit because it's an experimental, experimental design. But it is a very notable difference. Fairly notable, I would say. Exciting nonetheless. And the other differences weren't super far off. So expression of the true self was also higher and relational authenticity was also higher. Ownership of one's actions was actually higher in the transformative, which was counter to what we expected, particularly given the fact that ownership of one's actions we had assumed would be related to the sense of agency that people would have.

1:04:59and then that comes back later when we approach the data set to attempt to look at what exactly predicted the sense of agency for each of those narratives which we can touch on in just a sec. I do want to talk a little bit about the agency and community codes. In terms of the community codes we did find that there was more community codes in the in the authentic narratives and more agency codes in the transformative. But those were heavily, heavily driven by self-insight. Self-insight was the primary agency code and it kind of makes sense for these transformative narratives. We're asking them to give a moment where they had a change in their self-understanding and self-insight was by far up and away.

1:05:50It was almost well over... yeah basically the thing with relevance realization yeah and and very interestingly when you when you take into account what we were discussing earlier where self-insight and ownership of one's actions were very commonly paired and those were the two that were most um significantly more expressed um so but not to get too far um deep into the weeds i did want to talk about what predicted agency. And when we added in those, just the continuous variables, the continuous authenticity variables, none of them turned out. Especially, and neither did any of the agency or communion variables that were present or absent.

1:06:44So it's a little disheartening at first, but then we thought we would use those present and absent of variants of the authenticity city codes. And we also looked at the sum, the total amount of communion themes and agency themes. And it turned out that at least in the authentic group, what predicted the sense of agency was the total amount of communion themes people had, which is that, right? And also the total amount of ownership of one's actions. Right. Yep. Even though that was more prevalent in the transformative, which I think is very interesting. And self alienation remained significant.

1:07:32So all three of them individually contributed to the sense of agency in these narratives. One interpretation of that, and take this with a grain of salt because much has to be done but like this is kind of like preliminary prima facie evidence for a dialogical self over a substantial self very much there because it's it's like it the communion aspect and the ownership of others which is in a communal ownership of self is in a communal relationship like it's all it's it's so processual and dialogical which I think is really really interesting mm-hmm so I I just want to get a little bit into the nuances so our regression analysis, we were using hierarchical regressions, as you could imagine.

1:08:17And we were for, we had two models, one that was attempting to predict the positive agency and the negative agency, like we had discussed. And when it came to the negative agency, it was the amount of communion and it was the ownership of one's actions and self-alienation. Those were our three predictors. When it came to the positive sense of the agency, it was only the self-alienation and communion themes. Ownership of one's actions was not involved or it didn't significantly contribute although i will say it was not very far off so there's a chance with a bit of a higher end it might become significant but uh it wasn't strong i want to get into p hacking yeah who no i know and so yeah yeah no um for our purposes it did not come through um which is i think it's very interesting um um that ownership of one's actions had this kind of negative relationship with um how much negative agency not to get too many double triple negatives in there but um those are very interesting findings and then when we looked at um sorry one second making sure i'm not all over the place.

1:09:38I did also want to touch on the differences in the transformative narratives, trying to predict the agency and the transformative narratives, because there were some very, very interesting findings, particularly the only thing that predicted significantly above self-alienation was the relational authenticity score. All right. and it had a negative relationship a negative relationship negative relationship so the more a person expressed the themes of relational authenticity in their transformative narrative the less agency they had or they on average it predicted less agency i should say is that a second step though following the self-alienation are you doing a stepwise here are you doing in terms of just the regression predictors, is that dynamically interrelating with the self alienation in the prediction?

1:10:37Do you know? So it is predicting above it, moving them in either way in the model and then accounting for interactions. Nothing is going on in terms of the two together. This feels like people's grokking of authenticity is not internally consistent. This is another thing that's coming out for me.

1:11:05I did want to, I know I just went through a lot of statistics for our audience. I don't want to overwhelm everyone, but there are some very interesting facts in there. And I think I might have an interpretation of why that latter case might be. Yeah, I'd like to hear it. And then let's have that be the last thing. And then you're going to have to come back again and we're going to have to do the meaning and lifestyle. Yeah. So just a very interesting thing. There was throughout all of these narratives, particularly in the transformative ones, you would occasionally see a narrative where there was authenticity.

1:11:49There was relational authenticity. And it wasn't always this kind of mutual back and forth kind of opening up to one another that we saw before. One example is an individual who was struggling with drinking. They were studying abroad. They were struggling with drinking. And they had been abroad for a full semester. and they came back from being abroad and they had realized that they had just lost control of their drinking, their stability, their ability to manage their time, their schoolwork. It was all kind of falling through. But it wasn't there. It wasn't some self-insight that caused this.

1:12:36It was someone, I believe like an older sibling sat them down. It was like, you need to wake up. You need to be aware of what is happening. And it was coded for relational authenticity because there was this sense that they were comfortable with each other in the expression of truth. The expression of truth thoughts and feelings is a part of what that toad is. And we thought that that might be kind of representative of something that might be occurring, although we do need to look a little bit more closely.

1:13:15okay what's your overall interpretation you you threw that out um and uh like uh i mean obviously good science moves back you you go out into the data and then you have to gather it all back into an explanation what what is the interpretive explanation you're coming from coming up with not to foreshadow two uh things in the future but we did talk a little bit about meaning and congruence with one's environment, this kind of fittedness. Yeah. And it definitely seems like this supports some of those ideas. It seems like it's preliminary evidence, kind of convergent evidence, that when we feel this alignment, this congruence, not only with our self-concept and with our goals and aims in the environment, Not only when we feel like we're being afforded, but also when we feel like we're able to congrue in almost a kind of harmony or a unity togetherness with the people around us.

1:14:21That can give us potentially this insight into what is most true or raw, as it was said before. Sort of agent arena optimal gripping is what's getting tracked. Is that sort of, does that land for you? For sure. I definitely get that sense. And I think it's so important when we think about this idea of this process of composing ourselves by recalling moments when we were who we thought we were, or when we went under a transformation and we see that there are things in the environment or there seems to be relationships that can be developed that allow us to kind of cultivate that identity. And we hold on to those.

1:15:21We recall them. They're in our memory. They're kind of representative. They came to mind first for some of these participants. Yeah, it sounds like you get a sense of realization of the self when there's some also coupled realization of others or the world. That's what it sounds like. And that's what I was trying to get at earlier about this realization being what's actually going on. I mean, this is an argument, and I know you're not totally neutral. You've been influenced by me and by Greg. But, you know, it's more of a transjective notion of authenticity rather than a subjective notion of authenticity.

1:16:07That seems to be what's coming out here in a very real way. I agree. So this is great. So you're going to come back and we'll do the last leg of the trilogy. I didn't know it was going to be a trilogy but that's okay because I want a little bit more especially towards let's say there's more we could mine here but I'd like to move on to what you just foreshadowed the connection to meaning, meaning in life and we can pick that up next time how does that sound to both of you? sounds good to me sounds weird to me as well so as always Greg, thank you. You know your insights are always appreciated. Greg empowers us with a very rich and systematic vocabulary that is, well, it's liberating.

1:17:04It helps to break us out of the old restrictive categories that beset psychology. And Matthew, you're taking, you're what every teacher, and we're both teachers, Greg and I, longs to have somebody who's taken their work seriously, deeply, and then gone on and done interesting and new and theoretically relevant work. So I just wanted to express my appreciation. Thank you. I know when you're doing research, there's the 10 ,000 things you want to say, and you were trying to get the balance between saying too much and saying too little. I think overall, just if you want my feedback, you did a great job.

1:17:42Thank you. Thank you very much. a lot. We'll have you back. We'll do one more. We'll really focus in on authenticity and meaning in life. And then that'll sort of, I think, wrap it up at least at this stage. I think that'll be great. I look forward to it.

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