The Wounded-Self and Celebrated-Self
With which self are you navigating your world?
Introduction
Two distinct and powerful emotional identities have emerged in society over the past 60 years. Both individuals and groups have internalised them, becoming unconsciously attached to either the Wounded-Self (WS) or the Celebrated-Self (CS). These two ‘selves’ are not fixed positions and clearly, there is a spectrum. Some people and groups cross the boundaries between them with ease, depending on the context and situation they are in, yet many get stuck in one place or the other. In my experience as an executive coach, therapist, and organisational consultant, I have observed how individuals and groups become polarised and follow groups, narratives, people, and the media that align with their ‘chosen’ position.
Below I summarise the Wounded-Self and Celebrated-Self identities before describing how therapy culture emerged to open the path for the WS and CS to become dominant identities. I then briefly reflect on how these identities impact society before concluding.
The Wounded-Self
Those who identify with the Wounded-Self frame the external world as a persecutory or dangerous place. Individuals and groups tend to look for problems and unconsciously see the shadow side of human relations, and veer towards pessimism. They often take up a victim identity, which can be mild or extreme, framing their past and present as a series of wounds they are working to heal or simply to find acceptance and integrate into their lives. When excessive, the Wounded-Self position is debilitating and entraps individuals and groups in a mindset that limits their capacity to enjoy life or engage in a process that leads to change.
However, being able to access the Wounded-Self position is vitally important as it enables us to tap into our pain and sadness, and to empathise with others. A good therapist or coach will be able to contain the sadness, grief, hurt, or trauma a client brings, and this is only possible if the coach/therapist has been able to face and experience their own pain. The therapist or coach’s skill is to be able to visit the WS without entrapping the client in a victim life script. Having access to our own Wounded-Self can enable us to identify with others and put our empathy to work to drive positive change e.g. to set up charities for suffering others, campaign for refugees, or face up to the reality of the climate crisis and engage to mitigate it. The illustration below sets out the core aspects of the Wounded Self
The Celebrated-Self (CS)
The Celebrated-Self identifies with personal empowerment and frames the external world as filled with opportunity and abundance. The CS individual is sovereign, believing we make our own happiness and can fulfil any dream if we are passionate enough.
The CS individual believes we each have a pure inner state, that if recovered from society's negative impacts, we can unleash our unlimited potential. Those identifying with the Celebrated-Self veer towards optimism on the surface at least. The importance of seeing opportunities and focusing on strengths is abundantly clear. However, when the Celebrated-Self gets excessive, it produces toxic positivity that damages individuals and groups . Aggression, anxiety, and sadness are denied and repressed as they are ‘negative emotions’. This leads to unconscious acting out such as passive-aggression, or displacement into manic activity. Depression or somatised problems and ill health can result from not facing the more difficult emotions that all humans experience. Turning a blind eye to real-world challenges in personal, relational, and global political issues becomes a problem for CS individuals and those around them.
Leave the past behind
The Celebrated-Self pushes us to leave the past behind, focusing on what we can become, rather than what we were. Cobb sums up the Celebrated-Self mindset:
Trust your feelings, have faith in yourself, follow your bliss, do your own thing, listen to your inner child, do what feels right, be true to yourself. These messages are offered as formulas for salvation. … Therapeutic values that are worthy of organizing one’s life around, such as self-esteem, self-fulfilment, self-realisation and self-expression have come to be accepted as axiomatic, occupying the normative heights once controlled by such counter values as self-discipline, self-control and self-denial. (Cobb, 2005; 252)
The Celebrated-Self demands an optimisation of the self. The aim is self-actualisation i.e. to realise ones potential through personal growth in order to improve happiness and well-being. To be happy in recent years became a social imperative, it became a social demand, rather than a personal desire. Society moved from a repressive and hierarchical ‘Society of Prohibition’ in the 1950s to the ‘Society of Commanded Enjoyment’ (Stavrakakis, 2007) in the 1970s. Happiness was no longer an option, but a need. If you weren’t happy, you were failing both yourself and others. To Celebrate the Self also meant to identify with celebrity culture, each of us could now aspire to become celebrities, which begins by sharing celebrity moments on your social media.
New Age Spirituality
CS identities merged with the growing individualistic spirituality that filled the void left as institutional religion rapidly declined in Europe, and more slowly in the USA. Eva Moskowitz (2001) claimed that therapy became a new religion, noting that in the 1990s Americans spent $69 billion a year attending to their emotional health. New-Age spirituality emerged alongside and fed into the Celebrated-Self, taking inspiration from the Transcendentalists, the Beat Generation and Eastern philosophies. Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now (1999) became a leading figure in the new age scene:
“Tolle talks like a contemporary Buddhist but without the religious baggage – the personal narrative that sells his story claims he became enlightened like the Buddha, but whereas Buddha sat under the Bhodi Tree to become ‘the awakened one’, Tolle found a contemporary place to become awakened; he sat on a park bench for two years in a London park. Tolle is a New Age phenomenon; the message is about how to live in the present and how to live calmly in the face of modernity’s distress – Tolle simply says “let go.” (Bright, 2009)
New Age Spirituality takes individual empowerment beyond improving our personal lives, reaching into a narcissistic grandiosity that suggests each of us can change the world. Ken Wilber (2017), a leading guru, concludes his book Religion of Tomorrow saying “It is possible to remake the world because you -the very deepest you- are its one and only author….Grab yourself, grab the world, re-awaken and remake both.”
CS culture and new spirituality entered the workplace via leadership development and coaching programs. It can be found in abundance in management texts and magazines on airport bookshelves. To become a successful transformational and visionary leader, was to align oneself with the dogma of the Celebrated-Self.
Celebrated-Self goes mainstream
A myriad of techniques and interventions exist to help individuals discover and celebrate their true inner selves: meditation, yoga, chanting, Eastern philosophy, Buddhist teachings, crystals, tarot cards, NLP, Reiki… the list is endless. Life-coaching in particular, has encompassed the CS and New Age philosophy. The New Age movement and Celebrated-Self are big business in financial terms and also in social terms, moving from the edges to the centre of social thinking. Oprah Winfrey became a leading figure of promoting therapy culture, mostly the Celebrated-Self movement and her phenomenal success reached millions. In 2008 Oprah Winfrey invited Eckhart Tolle to co-host a series of ten ‘webinars’ which were downloaded by 38 million people (Bright, 2009: 17). Paul Heelas describes the CS community as ‘expressivists’:
Expressivists live their lives in terms of what they take to be a much richer and authenticated account of what it is to be human. They are intent on discovering and cultivating their ‘true’ nature, delving in to experience the wealth of life itself. (Heelas, 1996: 156)
Are we not all expressivists now?
The illustration below sets out the core elements of the Celebrated-Self.
Overview: Wounded and Celebrated Selves.
It is rare in the world of therapy, and less so in coaching, to engage in critical theory, and examine the structural power dynamics behind the therapeutic work. This lack, led me to write Coaching and Mentoring a critical text where I first identified these two polemic selves, to show how they inform and unconsciously frame the work of coaches. Coaches are often split between these two camps, entrapped in one of these positions, but without recognising it. Wounded-Self inspired coaches look for wounds and seek problems to cure, and (unconsciously) identify in role as a ‘healer’. Celebrated-Self influenced coaches ban ‘problem-talk’ as it leads to negativity. They are solution-focused, seeing themselves as modern-day shamans, enlivening the spirits of their clients. Clients often find therapists/coaches that match their identification with either WS or CS, seeking solace in sharing and reaffirming their perceptions and beliefs.
When the coach or therapist is very attached (unconsciously) to one of these positions, they create dependency cultures in their clients. The WS therapist needs a Wounded-Self client to maintain their identity of healer, so (unconsciously) keeps their client in the victim position. The CS coach needs to constantly receive positive feedback to fuel their own Celebrated-Self ego. They create dependency relationships in which the client relies on their wonderful ‘shaman’ to assure their well-being. To self-actualise is a lifetime journey of personal development so the need for life-coaching/therapy has no end (which happens to be a good business model).
Blind-Spots
Therapeutic clinicians claim a false neutrality; therapists, counsellors, and coaches identify as being non-judgemental, and yet they come filled with the baggage of unconscious assumptions, and informed by social-cultural influences. This also applies to the WS and CS folk who are not therapists or coaches. Unless we undertake a critical perspective, our assumptions about the world go unquestioned.
When supervising Chinese MBA students I quickly realised that the individualistic/therapeutic assumptions I had grown up with were a foreign emotional landscape to these students, coming from collectivist cultures where taking group time to share personal feelings was frowned upon. Having supervised therapists and coaches, I observed how their unconscious attachments and investments in their own Wounded-Self or Celebrated-Self determined how they interpreted a client’s experience.
Ideally, a skilled coach or therapist (or any of us) will have an awareness of our biases towards the WS or CS. However, the ideal is often lacking. When the unconscious bias is identified many go into denial. The reason for the denial is that challenging these positions goes beyond challenging an idea, it is to challenge the person’s very identity, and their whole way of being in the world.
I will next explore how WS and CS emerged.
The Rise of Therapy Culture: How WS & CS Emerged
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, known as ‘the talking cure’, were founded as a new treatment for the Wounded-Self at the beginning of the 20th century. Freud and others recognised a need to address our emotional and psychological Wounded-Selves, and they developed a framework of psychological understanding. Many variations of psychotherapy emerged and in recent decades there has been a huge proliferation such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Solutions Focused Therapy, and Neurolinguistic Programming. What all therapies initially had in common was the treatment of ‘suffering’ patients in a clinical setting.
‘If you have problems, it’s good to talk: if you don’t talk, you have problems.’
The 1960s counter-culture heralded rapid social change which enabled therapy to transcend the clinic and enter into popular culture. At the centre of this social transformation, was the rise of individualism, free choice, a challenge to authority, and a ‘turn to subjectivity’ (Heelas, 1996). Expressing our feelings and emotions flourished and soon the focus on our identities followed. The complexities of modern life also increased, alongside the demise of traditional sites where solace was found, such as the extended family and the church. This opened a space for therapeutic culture to expand into.
Therapy is too good to be limited to the sick. (Furedi, 2003)
Therapy culture transcended the limits of treatment in a clinical setting, and became pervasive across the whole of society. Therapy culture was both a response to these social changes, providing ways to cope, create meaning, manage feelings and relationships. It also became an important driver of these social changes. ‘Therapy speak’ appeared everywhere, in popular talk shows, self-help books, support groups and family conversations. Our feelings, relationships, and psychic injuries, once hidden, now became part of everyday life. As it expanded into everyday life, it followed two paths; the Wounded-Self and the Celebrated Self.
The diagram below traces how therapy culture was influenced by two sources, 1) psychotherapy and 2) wider culture, and then how therapy culture manifests in two directions.
The Emergence of the Wounded-Self and Celebrated-Self
Under the psychotherapy column, psychoanalysis launched a psychological movement that became dominant and diverse. It went beyond treating our problems, to also informing how we think about ourselves. Carl Rogers, the 1950s American psychologist, was instrumental in democratising what he saw as elitist psychotherapy. He de-medicalised psychotherapy training and invented Person-Centred Counselling (1951). This enabled counselling/therapy to escape the limits of the clinic and make ‘therapy’ more publicly available such as in schools.
Rogers’s therapeutic work, alongside many others, was also focused on self-realisation. They believed in utilising therapy techniques beyond alleviating suffering, to emancipate an individual’s full potential. This shift towards the CS was part of a post-Second World War movement towards optimistic self-actualisation (Maslow, 1976) driven by the human potential movement. The ‘macho’ workplace was one of the last sites to accept therapeutic culture into its domain. Successful corporate leaders (mostly male) could not show weakness, therapy was considered for wounded people, not successful executives. Coaching brought therapy culture into the domain of work by drawing on Celebrated-Self approaches. Executive coaching began as a remedial treatment for failing leaders with little success, but when it was re-branded as a CS intervention for successful leaders, it became a badge of honour to have a coach. New Age therapies proliferated alongside more traditional therapy approaches from the 1970s onwards, with the Esalen Institute in the USA leading the way. Therapy culture had transitioned successfully from the clinic to become a major economic and ideological bedrock of Westernised society.
The wider cultural influences that produced therapy culture and the WS and CS can be traced via the post-war years leading to economic growth and mass production leading to mass consumption. For the first time a rising middle class had spending power and could choose how to express their identities through consumption choices, such as their houses, cars, and fashion. The 1968 counter-culture took individualism to new levels, throwing off the yoke of authoritarianism and demanding choice and free expression.
Individualism and identity moved to the fore in Westernised society. Expressivism became the norm and emotions no longer were to be bravely concealed, but openly expressed. The rise of feminism and the deconstruction of patriarchy also had a big impact on wider society, encouraging all to be more emotionally aware. The Human Relations Movement utilised psychology, sociology, and anthropology in the workplace to bring therapeutic and psychological understandings to motivate workers to raise performance. These changes gave rise to a new era where people gained societal permission, and a new emotional-therapeutic language, to explore and express themselves.
Globalisation increased both economic growth and cultural exchanges, bringing Eastern philosophy and practices such as meditation, mindfulness, and yoga to mainstream culture, and opening the door for even more therapeutic intervention. Finally, neo-liberalism and free-market economics amplified the ideology of individualism. The counter-cultural ideas of the 1960s were successfully appropriated by corporations for the service of profit. Hyper-consumerism emerged, binding personal growth to economic growth. The happiness imperative (Beradi, 2009) became tied to marketing and consumerism, ‘buy this and it will make you happy’.
These two overlapping forces, coming from psychotherapy and wider cultural changes, brought therapy culture into popular culture. Therapy culture then separated into two distinct directions; either as a means of healing wounds or for self-actualising.
Case Example
A client ‘Sally’ comes to therapy/coaching having had a difficult childhood. Their father was a product of his age, where fathers were more distanced and didn't have the permission to show emotions. He had a short temper and was unable to bond closely with his daughter.
The Wounded-Self therapist only saw hurt and asked about trauma and its impacts, hoping Sally will gain deeper insights into how this early traumatic experience impacts on her current relationships. They worked on reparation and integration of this hurt into her current day situation. Sally later visits a Celebrated-Self inspired life-coach, who spent no time on these ‘negative emotions’ and focused on helping Sally to think more positively. Her focus was to get Sally to self-improve, to think about how she could achieve her future dreams and happiness. The life-coach worked with Sally, by setting out clear goals, and they worked together to try and attain these.
These therapeutic stances are mirrored in wider social settings, with individuals, friends, and families siding with these positions. Sally’s sister takes a CS stance “it wasn’t so bad with Dad, he just got angry at times, you know he loved you. Don’t dwell on the past, you have a great job and a new boyfriend and you’re doing great!” Her WS best friend asks “What did your Dad do? Was it physical abuse? You must find it so hard to trust men these days. Your keep changing relationships and are never stable. I am sure it’s due to your relationship with your Dad….I really feel your pain.. read this self-help book on abusive parents, it will really help.”
When the pathway is polemic, problems always arise. Sally got stuck with both the WS and CS approaches, before she finally found a therapist who could bridge the Wounded-Self and Celebrated-Self allowing the real work be done. She acknowledged her suffering and troubles with her father, and realised how he was trapped in his own social code of behaviour, unable to express himself. This allowed movement in the relationship, and Sally began to see her father in a different light, and herself as well. Her relationship with him improved, and when he died she felt she had resolved much of the childhood angst she carried. She felt more whole and more energised and worked on her relationships with men in general, and found a long term partner in the process.
Nancy Pelosi “You gotta be proud of your wounds” (Irish Times,19 Aug)
Nancy Pelosi, the 84-year-old veteran politician known for her ability to fight for what she believed in, rose to become the most powerful woman in USA politics. Referring to a prayer that a Sierra Leonne Preacher shared with her, Nancy restated the need to be proud of your wounds… “When meeting their maker and their creator they will say... show me your wounds. And if I have no wounds he will say: was nothing worth fighting for?”
Nancy is acknowledging the need to look at the wounds and to be proud of the wounds that come from fighting for social justice. This ability to put a WS energy to work for change is very different from identifying as a victim, which leads to introspection and paralysis.
Critical Reflections
There are many critiques of therapy culture and of the Wounded and Celebrated-Self. Most critiques are concerned with how therapeutic culture has co-opted the WS and CS, creating a narcissistic culture at the expense of collective solidarity.
The Happiness imperative feeds unhappiness
The CS is underpinned by what Beradi calls the Happiness Imperative, i.e. a social injunction that tells us it is our duty to be happy, and if we are not happy, we are failing. He writes, “Depression is deeply connected to the ideology of self-realisation and the happiness imperative” (Beradi, 2009: 99). Barbara Ehrenreich argues that positive thinking is damaging. In her book Bright-Sided, How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, she claims that “On a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out ‘negative thoughts’. On a national level, it has brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster” (Ehrenreich, 2009). Heelas (1996: 146) writes that the torrent of advice from the self-help industry ‘generates a climate of discontent’. The bombardment of advertising, TV, films and social media demanding that we should strive to be happy, leaves us feeling even more wounded, as it is impossible to live up to the illusive demands, and the media images of happiness and success.
Self-Optimisation
We are constantly being posed the questions: ‘Am I happy?’, ‘Am I depressed?’, ‘Am I stressed?’, ‘Is my body perfect?’, ‘Is my sex life adequate?’, all with the following question: how can I optimise myself … to be a better person, to improve my work performance and my performance as a parent, a partner, in the gym… The pressure is relentless to continually undergo personal growth.
Commercial interests play a big part with products and services promising everything from beautifying you, to optimising you as a person. The pharmaceutical and therapy industries commercially profit from the increase in self-focus, with huge sales of anti-depressives and other drugs to treat the huge increase in the diagnostic criteria of psychological-physical ills such as ADHD, stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, autistic syndromes, depression, and anxiety.
Narcissistic culture and victimhood
Many claim that therapy culture creates a narcissistic, selfish, and introspective society, focusing on ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. Rather than liberating individuals from their concerns, it entraps them in an increasingly widening array of ‘ills’ (Lasch, 1979). Fitzpatrick writes that social approval demands a victim identity these days: ‘A therapeutic culture has become pervasive. It is apparent in the emotional ‘esteem’ and ‘support’; displays of emotional incontinence and claims of victimhood are guaranteed social approval (Fitzpatrick,2000: 64).
Cultural influences
The two selves are shaped by society around us. The greater our engagement with therapy culture, the more we see WS and CS identifications. The USA is the centre of therapy culture, it has a strong WS but is dominated by a CS culture which emerged from consumerism, individualism, and American Dream ideology. The United States Declaration of Independence (1776) famously pronounced ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ as being the unalienable right of all men.
Our unique life stories draw us unconsciously towards these different emotional states. Individuals invested in the Wounded-Self, find themselves comfortable in groups that affirm their position.These groups utilise peer pressure to maintain group norms, creating circular causality. If you’re drawn to a Wounded-Self group you will be peer-policed to express your victim status. If you are drawn to the Celebrated-Self group you will post images celebrating your life on Instagram/TikTok and engage with like-minded souls, listening to self-optimising podcasts and reading spiritual well-being magazines.
Each position becomes reinforced by peer pressure, social media, and the algorithms that push individuals towards their interests. Younger people who have grown up with identity politics and social media all around them are more likely to take stronger WS and CS positions.
Return of the Repressed
Both sides have a shadow. Psychoanalysis teaches us that when something is repressed and hidden from our conscious awareness, it returns to haunt us in different ways. Celebrated-Self identities maintain positivity by repressing sadness and by disavowing challenges in oneself and the world. Wounded-Self identities often miss opportunities, repressing the possibilities of hope because they are trapped by gaining unconscious ‘pleasure from their displeasure’ (Todd). WS people consciously complain about their situation yet gain satisfaction from their dissatisfaction, unconsciously enjoying their suffering.
As a family therapist, I also witnessed on many occasions how parents, deeply worried about a child, would keep the child/family trapped in the problem. If the ‘problem’ family member got well, another member took up the ill/victim role in the family. The dynamics in each family were different, but a common situation was when a parent needed a ‘problem’ child to keep their parental role as family carer. Similarly, Celebrated-Self families would be in denial, not acknowledging an underlying family issue until the problem had become so severe they had to seek help. Both CS and WS identities become polarised when a big part of themselves is repressed.
Polemic Combinations
When the WS and CS are both present in an individual or group, but not in an integrated way, they create split dynamics. Everything is black and white, good or bad. Individuals flip from victim mindsets to positivity speak, unable to integrate the positions.
I noticed how talk shows and self-help literature move through the WS-CS positions, without integration, as if they are steps on a path to salvation. This replicates the salvation narratives from a Christian cultural tradition. Talk show host created the ‘new confessional’ where a celebrity would be invited to confess publicly their misdemeanours, in order to be forgiven and start afresh, usually following these four steps (the Christianised narrative in italics):
Confession: The Wounded-Self is exposed in confessional culture. I was an alcoholic and abused my partner. ‘I fell from grace, I was a sinner!’
The lost sheep: I struggled and lost my way... I turned to drink…. ‘the devil took control’.
Lost sheep found: I went to rehabilitation. My therapist led me to recovery, I realised my mistakes. ‘I was lost but now I’m found. The light of Christ showed me the way'.
Salvation: Since my confession and my personal growth work, I have found redemption, self-actualised and rediscovered my pure and true self. ‘I have been saved. Halleluiah!!
This secular adaption of the Christian path shows how our cultural underpinnings speak through us.
We see the WS and CS also play out in polemic politics. Populist Nationalist politicians like Donald Trump initially preached Wounded-Self politics i.e. “The world is doomed, we are all victims of the elite, and of immigrants, the country is broken.” They then jump to the politics of Celebrated-Self: “I am great follow me! We the people are great! Let’s make America great again!” A left-wing polemic narrative does similar work, initially taking a WS stance: “The capitalists have stolen our world, it’s a disaster, and we are all suffering.” Before pointing to the CS stance of the promised socialist future when they gain power. More recently the left has had a problem identifying a CS future, which is why maybe they are suffering and losing power to right-wing populism. For even when hope is a fantasy, it is better than no hope at all.
Last thoughts
Therapeutic culture is now integral to our lives, and the Wounded-Self and Celebrated-Self identities have become central to how we make sense of the world and live our lives. As we recall, some believe the WS and CS lead to hyper-individualist and even narcissistic norms, that undermine social solidarity and create greater unhappiness. Others argue that therapeutic cultures are essential to help us to navigate our fast-changing age. Having emotional and reflective capacity empowers us and helps us to make meaning, to find autonomy, and to realise our potential in this complex age (Giddens, 1991, Rose 1999). The four steps below set out possibilities that enable a more integrated way of being in the world.
Stop binary splitting When we split ourselves into binary positions of WS or CS we lose a part of ourselves and shut out a full engagement with the world. A part of us, and a part of others becomes repressed, and a return of the repressed will always take place to the detriment of all.
Building Bridges By acknowledging both the WS and the CS in ourselves, we create a bridge that begins to enable integration and synthesis and is helpful for a more balanced future. Helping each other achieve this is the work of a good coach, therapist, family or friend.
Decentring ourselves The constant focus on the self, whether WS or CS isn’t healthy! If we decentre ourselves we can discover new pleasures in collaboration, relationships with others, and mutuality. This can lead to supporting the suffering other, engaging with the creative other, and facing into micro and macro problems with others in common purpose.
The Holistic Self. Introducing a third position. The WS and CS are always leaning towards polarity. The Holistic Self works towards connectivity and interdependence rather than autonomy and independence. Our connectivity and engagement with the wider environment is a missing element in the WS and CS identities. Reclaiming our place in the universe, to live alongside the multi-species companions we share our planet with, is vital both for our survival and also to regain our sense of wholeness.
References
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