#agency

#agency

Do you blame others for the choices you are making? Have you blamed others for the previous choices you have made? To shed more light on these questions, you might also ask yourself: "What am I responsible for, and what power do I have?" From there, you might agree with this self-reflective response: "I am responsible for, and I've got the power over what I think, do, say, learn, and choose" (Purje, 2014).

In practice, most alignment efforts fall into two buckets: ensuring obedience ("do what I tell you") and enforcing social norms ("don't do bad things"). These approaches treat alignment as something imposed externally. According to Emmett Shear, that's not alignment - it's control. Alignment only makes sense in the context of multiple agents. It's not about restricting behavior, but about agents being oriented toward the same goal.

The movie opens with a brief prologue. A family is driving at night. They hit something on the road, which turns out to be a dog, and the dog dies. The daughter in the back seat is visibly upset. The mother consoles her by saying, "It was just an accident-Dad didn't do it on purpose." Then the title appears, and the main story begins.

At some point when I was running around doing a bunch of people's work for a project that was supposed to be supported by an entire group, I thought, "Wait a minute. Why am I in this by myself?! Then I remembered something that I'd heard from someone a few years prior that basically asserted non-reciprocal relationships are abusive relationships.

Renowned Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo says that pain is fundamental to human existence - not merely an incidental experience, but its very starting point. Pain is the price of consciousness, freedom, and choice itself. Reflecting on this insight, I recognized a profound yet rarely acknowledged truth: every choice we make inherently involves regret, so there are no completely pain-free paths in life.

I wasn't expecting a conversation about single cells and cognition to explain why a large language model (LLM) feels like a person. But that's exactly what happened when I listened to Michael Levin on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Levin wasn't debating consciousness or speculating about artificial intelligence (AI). He was describing how living systems, from clusters of cells to complex organisms, cooperate and solve problems. The explanation was authoritative and grounded, but the implications push beyond biology.

When my youngest foster daughter was in treatment for her severe eating disorder, one of her therapies involved writing a trauma narrative. In 11 single-spaced, both sides, she documented all the obstacles she had overcome in her young life: the death of her father, her mother's alcoholism. Then, in what her counselor called a destruction ceremony, she shredded her words, stuffed them into balloons, and set them sailing on her way outside of the residential treatment facility where she was living at the time.

Trauma Culture blurs the line between survival wounds and the ordinary pain of living. Even in unsafe lives, small daily hurts can deepen distress and block healing. Healing can begin by tending to small, manageable wounds that restore agency. Full healing means repairing what keeps hurting inside, not just surviving events. A few days ago, I had the honor of presenting my new book, How Deep Is the Wound?, in the company of a panel of incredibly talented clinicians at my alma mater, NYU.

I once completely lost my voice, on a flight from New York to London, and spent the next week having to communicate through gestures and mime. Without a voice, it became difficult for me to express what I thought or felt or needed. For humans, the voice acts as a fundamental tool for communicating a spectrum of meaning, emotion, and intention to others.

In Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential (Penguin, 2025), psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman delivers a timely and incisive critique of what he calls "victim mindset culture"-the growing tendency for individuals to view themselves primarily through the lens of past hurts and limitations, rather than as active agents in their own growth and transformation.

It is only in this existential reality of the present where decisions, choices, behaviors, and actions can be initiated. What that then means, in terms of bullying, which only takes place as a choice in the present, is that one can choose to be a bully, or one can choose not to be a bully. Either choice will have consequences, for which the individual will be and is responsible (Falla et al., 2023; Menesini et al., 2013; Purje, 2014).