There’s a deeply held assumption in most self-help and personal development thinking: that somewhere underneath social influence, there’s a pure, private, purely personal self and a purely subjective reality that belongs to you alone. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also, on close inspection, hard to defend — because almost everything we experience turns out to be shaped, from the very beginning, by other people. This is close to what scholars mean when they talk about how reality is socially constructed.
Built in Relation to Others From the Start
The argument runs like this: from the earliest moments of life, experience is built in relation to others — literally beginning before birth, in a relationship that precedes any concept of a separate “self.” What later gets experienced as private, subjective reality is better understood as a kind of figure standing out against a much larger ground: the ongoing, inter-subjective experience of being in relationship with other people, including people we’ve never met but have read about, been influenced by, or simply imagined. This idea has a long history in social constructionism, which studies exactly how much of what we take as given is actually built between people.
What Actually Exists Only Between People
This isn’t a claim that nothing objectively exists outside of social construction — the physical universe carries on regardless of what anyone thinks about it. But a great deal of what actually matters day to day — status, achievement, relationships, even the sense of who we are — exists only as something constructed between people, not as an independent fact sitting outside human interaction. A promotion, a reputation, a marriage: none of these exist as physical objects. They exist because groups of people hold them, collectively, as real.
Why This Changes How Change Work Should Happen
The practical payoff of taking this seriously is significant. If even our most personal sense of identity is built in an ongoing relationship with others, then working on “who I am” in isolation — as if the self were a private, self-contained project — misses something important. Real, lasting change tends to involve the relational field a person exists within, not just their internal, private thinking. This is part of why coaching and change work that only ever happens in someone’s head, disconnected from how they actually engage with the people around them, tends to be more fragile than change that’s tested and reinforced in real relationships.
This idea sits underneath a great deal of the MythoSelf Process — not because relationships are simply “important” in a generic sense, but because the process treats the inter-subjective, relational layer of experience as foundational, not optional.
If you’d like to explore how this shows up in practical coaching work, our About Us page has more on the thinking behind the approach.
