No doubt you’ve heard the old adage about putting on shoes rather than trying to cover the world in shoe leather. One might think at first that whoever came up with that had a firm grasp of the obvious, yet in our counseling sessions, we frequently meet bright and thoughtful individuals stuck in suffering because they won’t put on their shoes. They have, instead, been busy trying to cover the world in shoe leather, and all that did for them was get them into counseling. It isn’t hard to spot them; usually, they begin the session by talking about someone else, the one who has upset them, the one who is treating them or others unfairly, the one who is the problem. And the first thing that has to happen in order for counseling to be productive, is for them to come out of this “immersion” as we call it, shift the focus from world to self, and look in the mirror of their participation in whatever is tearing up their gears. This is fundamental to philosophical counseling. The work is self-work. It’s never about the other guy. As long as we don’t get that, we keep trying to cover the world in shoe leather, and there just isn’t enough of that to go around. The answer, the solution, the resolution always shows itself when the client comes out of immersion, accepts responsibility for his or her part in the drama, and identifies and makes the better choice, essentially, to put on shoes.

The importance of this turnaround hardly can be overstated. As long as we persist in the assumption that the problem lies outside us rather than in our participation, whether witting or unwitting, we cast ourselves in the role of the victim and cut ourselves off from our native creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, resilience, courage, and power to transcend. Immersion then becomes a kind of drowning, a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle that can be broken only through the willingness to accept responsibility. Note that by responsibility here, we do not mean “blame,” but only the ability to respond rather than react. One of our students shared the useful insight that if you mix up the letters in the word creative, you get reactive When we’re immersed and reactive, we’re all mixed up, because we’re trying to live from the outside in, which is a formula for failure. Philosophical self-work demonstrates its profound value only when we become willing to live from the inside out, when we stop exporting our authority and own the choices we’ve been making, which frees us to make better ones. In those cases where one finds oneself in the quicksand of abusive or dysfunctional conditions, one is free to disengage, to choose not to participate. Sometimes, all we can do is refuse to walk barefoot over broken glass. The situation is what it is, but if we are responsible enough to put on our shoes, then the situation is at least by that measure improved.

Although immersion and the seductions of the victim role can leave us feeling hopeless and at the mercy of forces outside ourselves, the abiding truth is that we are responsible for our participation, and therein lies the way out. There is an old joke about a man who takes a job as a corporate bookkeeper. Two weeks later, he receives his paycheck, and in the pay envelope, he finds a note that says: “We have decided to give you an increase. It will become effective as soon as you do.”

Solutions to even intractable problems, even those that occasion much suffering, are often right under our nose—or our feet.

It would be no overstatement to say that the key to transformational self-work lies in the willingness to tell the truth, which as we’ve heard many times, has the power to set us free. This simple idea has immediately useful implications. It tells us, for example, that if we’re feeling “unfree,” stuck, burdened, and so on in a situation, then there’s some relevant truth that we have not told, perhaps not even told ourselves. Admitting the truth to ourselves is, of course, a precondition of being truthful with others, and throughout history, poets and philosophers have instructed us accordingly; “This above all: to thine own self be true,” writes Shakespeare in the famous declaration delivered by Polonius in Hamlet (Act I Scene III), “And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Nor have our most notable spiritual leaders failed to recognize and affirm the saving power of the truth. Gandhi, for example, writes:

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall—think of it, always.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. expresses the same understanding:

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

It is no accident that both of these great leaders discerned a correspondence between truth and love, similar to the one found in Plato’s work between Truth (capitalized because the term was used to denote an eternal form), Goodness, and Beauty, which suggests that the truth is by its nature good and beautiful. Even if we don’t go as far as Plato, we have Gandhi, King, and many other eminent teachers testifying that somehow being truthful and being loving are two sides of a coin, which leads to the conclusion that being truthful is always the loving thing to do, while any untruthful act is by that count also unloving.

Here steps forward the devil’s advocate with the inevitable counterexamples that aim to make a case for what we might think of as “loving untruths.” “Do I look fat in this dress?” “How old do you think I am?” “Was it good for you?” Worse, say a man who has experienced a relentless series of setbacks and reversals of fortune finds himself standing on the ledge of a building, about to end his life in a final leap of desperation. The fellow clearly is unstable. You are leaning out the window, wanting to save his life. He looks at you, his eyes focused nowhere, and with a tremulous voice, asks, “Am I crazy?” What is the truthful answer? What is the loving answer? Is this a case likely to demonstrate the power of the truth to set free?

But we have a reply to our devil’s advocate. We can maintain that telling the truth is always the loving and good and beautiful and saving thing to do, but acknowledge that, given the holdings we may have against the truth, we may react at first hearing the truth, finally told, with resistance, perhaps a great deal of it. Not uncommonly, the truth that can set us free strikes our ear as the miserable truth, the terrible truth, the truth that hurts—but it hurts only to heal, and often when resistance has gone on for so long, the need for the healing is long overdue. The miserable truth may upset our plans, end a sham of a marriage, insist that we quit a soulless job, even leap—not from the ledge of a building but into the unknown. In all of these, however, it is not the truth that is miserable but our resistance to it, our investment in untruth, and it is just this from which we need to be set free, so that we can begin moving with life again rather than against it.

We choose our battles of course, and there is nearly always a way to be truthful with others that will evoke in them at least a momentary willingness. We can be tactful, skillful, kind, empathetic, and so on. Sometimes the truth is hard to hear, a “miserable” truth in this sense, but it is in just such situations that telling the truth is most important. Especially in those cases where the truth hurts, a greater purpose is served in the telling. Shakespeare’s Hamlet gives us this, too, unforgettably, in Act III Scene IV: “I must be cruel only to be kind; thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”

Ups and downs. We all have them. How we get through them—that’s another matter. It may seem a curious idea, “getting through” the ups, but it will make good sense if we take a minute to remember the ancient Chinese curse (or so it’s been described): “May you be born in an interesting time.” If we let the ups define us, if we get attached to them, if we come to depend on a particular arrangement of conditions, sooner or later we learn the lesson taught by the Buddha, that our life here is impermanent, fleeting, and that to live “outside in” is a formula for suffering. High times are great, if we can balance our enjoyment of them with the wisdom that remembers that “this, too, shall pass.” Then we can experience the ups without getting carried away, and the downs without being knocked to the mat.

Up and down are also the two directions available on a staircase. You may have noticed that the little geometric element in the PhilosophyCenter logo resembles three stairs. It seems a perfect symbol for philosophical counseling, which opens the door to higher perspectives and deeper truths—the up and down of self-work. Sometimes this work calls us to go up, to transcend, to adopt a higher vantage, see the bigger picture, overlook something, reach for something loftier, break out of an old habit, rise above, surface, take the high road. Other times, the direction is down, calling us to a new depth of self-awareness, something foundational in our being, the deeper truth about something, a delving that exposes a hidden contradiction or unexamined commitment that no longer serves or is costing us too much. In this way, the up and down of self-work work together simultaneously.

Philosophical dialogue proceeds according to the principles of “the dialectic” as practiced by Socrates. The German idealist philosopher, W.F. Hegel, offers a profoundly useful mapping of how the dialectic operates, a mapping that, interestingly, one scholar likens to a spiral staircase. The dialectic is a process of evolutionary self-movement through which a thing brings forth the contradiction inherent in a given conflict, then—when the conflict has reached the intensity of a breakthrough—resolves them in a moment of self-transcending to a new way of seeing and being. Such a process is not unlike a birthing, and in this regard, the philosophical coach is a midwife of sorts, a term that was often used to describe Socrates. This philosophical midwifery that helps us give birth to new and improved versions of ourselves goes back as least as far as Socrates, who described himself as a midwife of ideas. In the surging upswing of the dialectic, we become more than we were, leaving the old somewhere below us as we embrace a higher order of self.

Along the way, as you navigate the stairways of your life, you may come to a point where you feel stuck. The way on isn’t clear, but the old routines aren’t working anymore. You may be in a lot of pain. Perhaps you’ll be willing to consider that you’re in labor, that something wonderful, even though difficult, is moving you to rebirth.

You might not believe some of the stories I hear from clients. The ones that stand out most involve what’s come to be known as “relationship issues.” Someone’s lover did this, a coworker did that, a family member is driving the client crazy, this sort of thing. It is amazing how, despite the endless variety of details in the props and furnishings of the drama or the particular lines that the characters keep reading—there tend to be common denominators, themes and through lines, archetypes of distress and relief from distress. A good analogy here is found in the mechanics of color images on a printed page or screen. In the case of a printed page, the color model underlying the image is called “CMYK” (for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). Even images that, to the eye, appear to have millions of colors, can be seen, under close magnification, to be made up solely of “halftone” dots in those four colors, which are in this sense primary to the model. It is the organization of those dots in rosette patterns interacting with the human eye that produces the visual effect of the full range of colors. Images on a screen, such as a computer screen, follow the “RGB” model (for red, green, blue), so that the full-color images we see on the web sites we visit actually are made up only of those three colors, which are “mixed” in real-time like the dabs of paint on an artist’s palette, to create all the other colors that we see in the image.

In a similar way, there are primary colors that appear on the canvas of experience as the quality of our associations with others. These colors are hidden deep in the infrastructure of how these associations get staged, but fundamentally, any work that’s needed has to be done at the primary rather than the manifest level. What are these primary colors? Well, here are a few: the self, the truth, and the will. These are primary in the sense that how we engage them inwardly determines how our worldly involvements with others gets rendered. Put another way, a problem in a relationship can be traced back to a problem in the client’s self-engagement, or in the client’s engagement with the truth, or to how the client engages his or her will. Correspondingly, resolution is achieved in session by adjusting the relevant “color.” Once the adjustment has been made and takes effect, a shift occurs that alters reality itself. Even if the facts remain for a time, the shifted spectrum allows the client to recognize and accept the previously problematic conditions, so that in a real sense, they are what they are but they are no longer a problem.

In the Apology, Plato documents Socrates’s testimony before the Athenian tribunal that eventually sentences him to be executed. Socrates all but laughs at the absurd charges against him—of worshipping false gods and corrupting the Athenian youth—and when, in keeping with Attic law, the court gives Socrates the opportunity to state a fitting punishment, Socrates suggests that the state pay him a stipend so that he can continue his philosophical work without the distraction of having to make a living. Offended by this, the tribunal leaves it to the chief prosecutor, Meletus, to determine Socrates’s sentence. Meletus proposes death.

One of the main philosophical ideas put forth by Socrates in the Apology is this: “No harm can come to a good man, in life or death.” This seems, on the face of it, absurd as we can look around us and see all sorts of harm coming to good people, who may even suffer as a result of their goodness. But Socrates’s claim becomes meaningful and even illuminating when we understand the position developed in the Republic that happiness lies not in outer conditions, but in having a “well-ordered” soul. Since outer conditions are irrelevant to the state of one’s soul, no outer condition has the power to inflict harm. In this view, the one who inflicts harm harms only himself, for by his action, he sets himself against what is true and good and beautiful, thus allowing his soul to become disordered. It seems clear that Socrates believed this, and we can assume that his recommendation that the state paying him a stipend would be an appropriate response, while ironic, was nonetheless sincere.

Back to our primary colors of the psyche. Our relation to self, our relation to the truth, and our relation to our will, in broad-brush terms, will be either harmonious, congruent, and “well ordered” or discordant, incongruent, and “disordered” in the Platonic sense. Much of what measures where we stand has to do with a healthy sense of our limitations, as this in itself protects us from self-rejection, deception, and willfulness, three dark colors that can produce a million miseries. If we hold to the best in us, refusing to give in to petty, ignoble, or self-aggrandizing promptings that may call us from time to time, then we find that we are happy regardless of what someone else does or does not do. If another person slanders us, it diminishes us not in the least. On the contrary, it diminishes the slanderer. If someone lies to us, or spreads gossip about us, who is harmed by the act? If a thief steals our property, we are not made less by it; our happiness remains intact because its wellsprings lie within our resolve to honor what is true and good and beautiful, while the thief has paid for his stolen property with his soul, and by his act harmed his own happiness. This is why Socrates makes the statement that no harm can come to a good man. Hannah Arendt, in her book, Life of the Mind, even goes as far as to say that it is better to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator, for one has to “come home” to oneself, and the only way to live with a murderer is by having no thinking life at all. Countless philosophical coaching sessions prove that happiness is an inside job, and that once one has picked up the brushes and painted well, no situation, no matter how painful, and no other person, has the power to harm us.

Socrates was influenced by the Stoics, but what we’re suggesting here is not merely stoicism. Other people and the conditions of our life matter greatly to us; no reasonable person would suggest that it should be otherwise. But if other people and conditions matter so much that we lose ourselves in them, if we give them the power to take us hostage, if we succumb to what the I Ching calls “inferior influences,” then we allow ourselves to be harmed. As a rule, pain can be outlived, and all the more quickly when we are on friendly terms with ourselves and with life. In this regard, the end of Socrates’s life demonstrates a degree of spiritual independence and strength worthy of emulating.

The clients who take charge of these primary choices regarding the self (choosing to honor the inner voice), the truth (choosing to place unalloyed honesty above any situational gain), and their will (choosing willingness and acceptance over willfulness and resistance) soon outgrow the need for the support that coaching provides, because they find that support within them. The world’s fires may be burning around them, but they no longer stand in the flames, condemning the world, blaming others, lamenting their rotten luck.

When I was in my junior year at university, I worked for a year as a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten. To this day, it remains one of the best jobs I ever had. The teacher, an African American woman named Julia Harper, and I would walk out to the circular driveway at the end of the school day and wait with the kids for their parents to pick them up. One day—I had just begun seriously studying philosophy, and had a mind to impress Mrs. Harper with my political perspicacity—I said, “You know, Mrs. Harper, the worst thing that the white man did to the black man in our history wasn’t treating him like a second-class citizen; it was getting him to feel like a second-class citizen.” Visibly unimpressed but always gracious in her candor, Mrs. Harper replied, “Nobody can make me feel like a second-class citizen but me.”

It would be fair to say that philosophical work is all about telling the truth. This presumes that we’re in possession of the truth, which we aren’t always, of course, and if we were, philosophical counseling would find itself without clients. Now, when we say “the truth,” we don’t mean something lofty or esoteric, and certainly not something limited to scientific truth, which is tied to correspondence to observable fact and, interestingly, falsifiability—in the sense that if one makes a statement that one holds would not be falsified by any imaginable condition, then the statement is no longer scientific, but something more like superstitious or dogmatic (thanks to Karl Popper for this fascinating insight). Beyond scientific truth is something more personal, and this is the sort of truth that has our interest as philosophical coaches. Personal truth often cannot be verified scientifically, because it has to do primarily with the self-relation, or as the Greeks might say, one’s relation to one’s daimon, or inner being. Staying on good terms with this inner aspect of who we are is so important, that the matter hardly can be overstated. And we cannot be on good terms inwardly if we’re out of sync with the truth, which means with what is. So, personal truth is ontological—in the sense that it has to do with being, with what is and is as it is, and nothing less. An example may help make this clear: If someone asks you to go out on a dinner date, and you know that you don’t want to go—you can feel the “no” rising within you—but you say “yes” anyway, the damage you do to your happiness goes far beyond the discomfort of an inauspicious evening out, because in the moment that you say “yes,” you dismiss or deny or trivialize the truth. It sounds like such a small thing, a forgivable error, and of course, errors are made to be corrected, but it is no small thing, because in turning your back on this little truth, you turn your back on being, on life, on who you are, and no good can come of it.

This is one of the most fundamental realizations underlying the methods of applied philosophy. Our happiness depends on our willingness to defer to the truth, to acknowledge it, honor it, live up to it, and so on—and never to regard any worldly or circumstantial benefit as having more value than the truth. Simply put, we cannot set ourselves against what is and win.

The commitment to the truth, in practical philosophy, unfolds through dialogue of a truth-minded sort. Socrates was a master of it. It is referred to in philosophical circles as the “dialectic,” because it is more than mere conversation. The dialectic is probative. It examines assumptions, beliefs, and implications in order to reveal imprisoning untruth, and at least to that extent, brings us closer to whatever truth the untruth was obscuring. While we may not always be in conscious possession of the truth, we can turn to the dialectic in order to “recollect” (another term from Plato) what we know, but “know in forgetfulness.” And this truth that we recollect can set right any inner disjunctions, reestablish harmonious relations with the daimon, and set us free.

Free of what? Most of the time, the truth frees us from the constrictions of ego-driven conclusions that, while promising some boon, invariably cost us far more than they deliver. In fact, many of us pick up some funny beliefs along the way, beliefs that life refuses to support, but this never seems to count against them—not until the internal stresses and strains surface as a serious health issue, a shattered marriage, or an uncanny series of setbacks that throws us, finally, into self-doubt, which can be a wonderful opportunity for self-examination and a rapprochement with the truth of who we are.

Let’s return to our example. If we say “yes” to a dinner invitation against our better knowing, we have for the moment turned away an opportunity to show up in the truth of the moment. Perhaps we harbored a belief that we must never disappoint someone else, never hurt another’s feelings. But as Socrates tells us in the Gorgias, the truth cannot be denied. We can look at the situation dialectically, and ask questions that may reveal how our expedient answer works against us. Suppose the invitation is not to dinner, but to bed? Or to the marriage altar? How far does one go in sparing another’s feelings when each step along that path takes one deeper into the dark territory of untruth and self-denial? These are important points that the dialectic can clarify and illuminate. We may be largely unaware of the toll that our departures from the truth take on us, but they add up, like accumulated debts, until finally, in one way or another, the bill comes due.

So, in coaching sessions, we work our way back to what is. It takes willingness and sometimes a little courage, but once the burden of untruth overtakes the temporary benefit, these things tend to make an appearance. If we’re willing to tell the truth, even if it means forfeiting this or that non-moral good, if we’re willing to defer to what is, a great deal can be put right in a short time. What the Greeks called “the good life” begins within. The truth is the beginning and the end, something the ancients knew and perhaps we have forgotten. “Know thyself,” the most famous of the Delphic maxims, does not require us to go on a retreat or undertake long periods of austerity or mediate on a hilltop. It is enough to tell the truth when someone asks us to dinner.

One of the most challenging states of consciousness that we see in session is the stance of the “victim.” No doubt you’ve run into it. The victim suffers, protests, and complains. There is always a problem, and the problem is always someone else’s fault. Victims rarely can go longer than a minute (literally) in a conversation before seizing the microphone and reciting a list of the things they are enduring, often with clever insights into the psyches of those who, for some reason, insist on persecuting them.

We all have off days, and perhaps on occasion even feel that life has conspired to test or defeat us, or at least isn’t doing much to help. These are the days when we cannot put a foot right, when everything good falls from our hands or finds a way to elude us. Occasional experiences in which we feel this way come and go, like stormy weather. A stance of victimhood, however, is a problem of the most serious sort. It cuts us off from our own creative resources, from opportunities that may be right in front of us awaiting our recognition, and from others, including friends and family members who love us. Victim consciousness can poison the well of daily life, and all the more so to the extent that our stances, our beliefs and expectations, our assumptions, tend to be self-fulfilling. Worse, victimhood seems to generate a gravitational field that can pull us (and others) into a growing darkness and pessimism. In extreme cases, this hole becomes a black hole.

To illustrate: Imagine someone holding his hand in a fire. Obviously, this person is in pain. The longer he keeps his hand in the flames, the greater the injury he suffers. Now, in the reality of the victim, the fire is responsible. It is hurting him. Certainly, there is no denying this in terms of the nature of fire to burn. However, that is not the issue. The relevant conversation here has nothing to do with the nature of fire, and everything to do with the nature of responsibility and choice. The fire has no choice but to burn. That is what fire does. We, however, have the power to remove our hand from the flames. In this sense, “the fire is burning me” misses the point. “Why am I keeping my hand in the fire?”—this is the beginning of wisdom and liberation from suffering. When the victim takes responsibility, he comes home to his power to remove his hand.

One of the main reasons that victims stay victims is that they equate responsibility with fault. In other words, they believe that accepting responsibility would mean admitting that they are to blame.This belief keeps them from appropriating their creative authority, because responsibility is not blame; it’s power, and specifically, the power to choose. Sometimes this comes down to the power to choose not to participate, e.g., in a chronically unhealthy or destructive situation or relationship. We have no power to change another’s behavior or stance, but we have all the power we need to determine our own. In any situation where we have allowed ourselves to indulge in feeling like a victim, we can stop and ask ourselves: What choice do I have here? How is my participation in this situation (problem, relationship, etc.) perpetuating my suffering? How am I keeping my hand in this particular fire?

Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras, presents the idea that “man is the measure of all things.” Without getting into the theoretical implications of this somewhat controversial statement, we can recognize that it has tremendous practical application to those areas of experience that pertain not to the natural order but to human interactions, such as ideas, feelings, beliefs, judgments, assumptions, relationships, and so on: I have seen clients take responsibility for their participation in circumstances they regarded as inherently problematic and in an instant, they were able to measure the situation differently. In the most practical way, the problem as such was not merely a certain arrangement of facts but a construct rooted in the client’s stance, and any stance can be deconstructed in favor of a better one through our power to choose. It is no accident that the ancient Greeks had such a strong appreciation for the heroic. To refuse to be a victim is no small thing, for as victims we can never be happy, never discover the good life or its roots within ourselves. The heroic acceptance of responsibility may not change the facts, though certainly it can influence them profoundly. The fire may may continue to burn—but the willingness to take responsibility for our role in our suffering allows us to remove our hand from the flames.

The liberating reach and power of such willingness is hard to overstate. It is something that one must experience. Through its efficiency, the victim vanishes, and we find that we can move gracefully through conditions that a moment earlier felt overwhelming and unbearable. Simply by refusing to be a victim, we can set ourselves free and enrich our lives immeasurably.