Framework · Formation · Practice
This page outlines the theoretical framework that informs my approach to counseling and my understanding of internal conflict, identity, and change.
I. Framework
A. The Division of the Self
One pattern is unmistakable: much of human suffering is rooted in one’s separation from one’s True Self—the “I”—and in the overidentification with the constructed self, the “Me.” The “I” is the self directly created by God. The “Me” is the fabricated self-shaped by the world. When a person confuses the two existing selves within, and comes to identify with the self that is shaped by external forces by adopting delusional beliefs that the worldly Me is who they truly are, they remain separated from their True Self the I and suffer in that fragmented state.
People often do not truly know themselves, and they remain estranged from their True Self because they refuse honesty about what they see in the “Me.” They do not recognize that the “Me” itself becomes the trap that keeps them from returning to the I. Accepting the faults within the “Me” loosens its hold and opens the path back to the “I.” Yet many continue to refuse this acknowledgment, their fears are in the belief that accepting the “faults” and “flaws” that are presently within oneself will make it a permanent state.
B. The Trap of the Constructed Self
In their thoughts they are thinking “If I admit this is who I am right now, then I am condemned to remain this way”. When in reality, what they fear accepting of themselves is not even their True Self at all, but the fabricated identity of the world they have been conditioned to mistake for it.
But acknowledgment is not a life sentence. It is a starting point. Refusal does not preserve the self, it begins the dismantling process. Preservation is in the denial because it allows it to continue to govern from beneath the conscious. What is seen can be engaged. What is named can be transformed. It often feels easier to remain in the suffering than to put forth the effort to acknowledge and change; because familiarity often feels safer than the unknown states of change—the “devil I know” is better than the one I don’t. The same principle applies internally: the truths we avoid are precisely the truths that hold the key to transcendence.
C. Clinical Grounding
My clinical work has spanned local government, nonprofit organizations, and private practice, including service within juvenile justice and community-based settings. I have worked with individuals and families navigating inner struggles, trauma, the need to be loved and accepted by the world, and the suffering that is the aftermath of it being unresolved.
I am a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) in California and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Texas and Pennsylvania. I hold a Doctor of Education in Professional Leadership & Policy Studies, where my dissertation examined employee burnout and factors that contributed to it. My approach integrates psychology, philosophy, theology, and the possibility of human transcendence. This has been formed through the culmination of lived experiences and the interactions with incredible people willing to trust enough to be vulnerable to share their suffering.
This philosophical practice emerges from those experiences of witnessing the tension between “Me” and “I”. It is a lived and clinical reality I have witnessed repeatedly. When a person learns to confront the constructed self, accept it as it is without surrendering to it, by challenging thoughts with honest questions, one begins to move beyond the self they have been, and the suffering begins to recede. The self that was shaped by the world loses its deed to claim ownership of the true self, and one begins to live in the world without belonging to it—restored to the “I,” the self created by God and no longer a slave to the world.
II. Formation
A. Birth of the True Self
When a baby is born, they are born as their true and natural self, as God created them to be—the “I”. But as the child grows, society, culture, family, and the expectations of all three begin to press upon that true self, and start extracting one from the “I” in order to construct the “Me.” This naturally creates a sense of displacement from the process of being pulled away from the natural self of the “I” and into the fabricated self, the “Me.”
B. Construction of the “Me”
The process first begins through the fear of punishment and the hunger for reward. Followed by the need to be accepted by peers. Over time, this process removes the “I” within the child so that as an adult the “Me” has been fully rooted and that person then derives identity from achievement, status, material possessions, judgments, and opinions of the world.
C. Free Will & the Possibility of Return
How then does God allow the spiritual “I” to be transformed into the worldliness of the “Me”? There are two parts to this. First, a person can move from “I” to “Me” because they possess the gift of free will. Second, perhaps it is part of the design of human existence, the story of the prodigal son, to be born in one’s true home, to become lost, in order to create the opportunity to consciously choose to return—exercising free will to rediscover that which one once had.
When the “Me” begins to be formed, family, culture, and society do so in a manner that ensures that the baby will be of service as an adult. Nonetheless, the initial development of the “Me” is foundational, because that development provides precisely the tools one will later need, as a fully developed “Me,” to use to escape it and return to the “I.” To be lost is a blessing, if one uses it as an opportunity to be found.
D. The Comfort Trap
However, as the foundation for the “Me” is being laid, people impatiently begin constructing their homes upon it way too early. They become trapped within the familiarity of what they have built, rather than using the foundations of the “Me” as a launching pad back to the forgotten and therefore unknown “I.”
When does one fully commit to the “Me” and lose sight of the “I”?
It happens when the space they have built within the “Me” becomes comfortable enough to call home.
Comfort is easy. When people repeatedly choose what is easy, they construct a habitat in which laziness takes root and grows within their being. The preference toward easy slowly becomes a disposition of laziness. A disposition that gets tattooed within one’s identity.
Laziness becomes the prison bars that confine a person within the “Me” and prevent movement toward the “I.” It feeds on comfort, and comfort feeds it in return.
Because laziness prefers what is effortless, transcendence becomes undesirable—not because it is impossible, but because it demands effort.
Transcendence requires will. It asks for commitment, dedication, consistency, and the conscious decision to face difficult truths, to accept the things about oneself that are difficult to admit. It requires overriding the things one wants to do in order to do the things one must do. Transcendence needs the will to be able to do the unwanted and the needed, and not do the wanted and unneeded.
The want to refuse truths feels safer than acceptance because it does not have to face its fears. Truth is the mirror that reflects one’s being, raw and unfiltered in its essential bareness. Therefore, people choose to live in the falsity of existence that they believe to be comfortable in rather than disrupt it with the truth that will bring forth uneasiness and discomfort. They perceive discomfort as suffering, when in fact there is no greater suffering than existing in the comfort of lies. Because the lies of comfort provides momentary relief so that one is blind to the lifetime of suffering it will cause. Whereas, transcendence asks for suffering in the moment in order to produce a lifetime of peace.
Unlike the suffering comfort provides, transformative suffering liberates and therefore dissolves suffering. Yet, beings choose to remain under the control of their comfort’s suffering rather than surrender to truth and witness revelation, and transcend one’s current state of being beyond the suffering.
E. Truth and Liberation
Transcendence calls for truth—and that truth is God. It does not require a false sense of hope, it does not ask for false optimism. Because with God, when it’s good it’s good, and when it’s bad it’s good, because the bad reminds one of the bitter so that the sweetness of good can truly be appreciated.
Living in truth allows one to live as the “I” and no longer the “Me,” because it understands that the world’s values are not universal but merely economical, cultural, and societal. Truth reveals that the world’s recognition does not validate the self nor make it true, and the “I” is not disturbed nor bothered by it. The liberated one lets the world function as it does, but respectfully bows out of that game, aligning instead with God’s truth and God’s values all the while understanding that people around them are engaged in the game…and that is okay.
III. Practice
A. How to Approach this Work
This work is not to be approached as informational but as directional. There is no hierarchy in this, because within all of us is the same “I” and the same truth—the truth that is the source of transcendence into liberation. This work asks one to take the ultimate test of God: patience, in order to allow things to take root, in order for it to grow and to begin to form, and to come to fruition.
B. The Role of Honesty
One may not always have the truth nor be able to grasp it, but what one can always do is be honest. For just as only through Christ does one come to the Father, only through honesty does one come to the Truth. The material can be dense. It may not always be pleasurable reading. But if taken openly, it may spark the flame needed for change. These writings are merely pieces of a blueprint that one must piece together, which will reveal the directions one will need to take to escape the “Me” and return to the “I.” We all have different starting points as the “Me”, and therefore different journeys and experiences towards the one and only “I”.
Teo Estepani, LPCC 