Concepts: Construct-awareness 🗾

“Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.”

- Alfred Korzybski

There’s a concept called construct-awareness in developmental theory. I first found out about it from Suzanne Cook Greuter, who presents the Fool archetype as an antidote to self-importance and save-the-world narratives. 

The heart of construct-awareness is recognizing that all meaning-making is incomplete. Yes, including this. Especially this… if I were wiser this writing would be way more foolish and fun.

Construct-awareness is like Gödel's incompleteness theorem of reality. This turns out to be a relief. When we realize our maps will never be “enough”, we get to play. Easier to empathize with radically different worlds. To reframe deep beliefs that give rise to people’s problems in coaching sessions. To be less defended in the face of critical feedback and therefore quicker to learn. 

Most of us see our ideas about trauma, parenting, or politics as pretty good approximations of an independent reality. Construct-awareness doesn’t deny this possibility, it points out that we must always “choose” a framing—time, scale, and purpose—to experience, much less name anything. We get a lot more creative freedom in how we make sense of stuff if we can recognize those “choices”. 

You don’t have to buy this as being “higher” development. Though higher always means higher level pathologies too. But the idea predicts that people who truly make sense this way will be less defensive about their models and more responsive in their problem-solving approaches as they’re less identified with their conclusions (on average). 

It also predicts that for some, this expands to being aware of constructing the “I” too, opening the door to more unitive experience. Being less enamored with the act of constructing, one starts relating with the stuff meaning/selfs are constructed from. Eg: “Making stuff out of play-doh is fun, but wtf is play doh?” This trends unitive because you see there’s only one play-doh: Pre-differentiated wholeness.

And then you put it in your mouth.

With love, Jordan