Axiomatology’s Three-Step Model for Radical Past Acceptance: A Response to Sub-Optimal Conventional Alternatives
In most conventional therapeutic or self-help interventions, the past is addressed in one of two ways: Pathologized and over-determined — where early childhood trauma is seen as the primary architect of the present, leaving the individual largely in the position of a victim of circumstance. Dismissed or “unhooked” — where the individual is encouraged to sever identification with their past entirely, treating it as irrelevant or merely narrative baggage to be transcended through radical present-mindedness.
This is dedicated to my daughter Carmen Brigitte Parvet, who understood this concept even before I did.
Both of these models, though diametrically opposed, share one flaw: they minimize or obscure the individual’s direct responsibility for their past. In the first, the past becomes an externalized causal script; in the second, a disposable artifact.
Axiomatology introduces a third and deeper alternative: a Three-Step Model for Radical Past Acceptance, grounded in metaphysical continuity and moral realism. This approach integrates personal agency and ethical development across time, rather than bypassing or dissolving it.
Axiomatologies approach
Seeing identity as a continuity over time
Identity is not a disconnected sequence of psychological states but a structured continuum composed of narrative, moral, and ontological layers. The Self is not merely what one feels now, but also what one has done, failed to do, and become through time.Taking radical responsibility for past actions
This means affirming that one is—not merely metaphorically but morally—responsible for one’s past, even if the original actions occurred under conditions of ignorance, immaturity, or social pressure. One must assume full ownership, not just of past behavior, but of its consequences for the “present Self”.Re-evaluating the past through a restructured SIHV (Structured Internal Value Hierarchy)
The key innovation of Axiomatology lies here: the past is not simply reinterpreted but morally judged through the lens of a restructured value hierarchy. This is not punitive; rather, it is redemptive. By applying the mature SIHV retroactively, the Self does not erase the past, but transfigures it—reclaiming dignity, responsibility, and alignment.
This triadic model allows for authentic growth, unlike models that either medicalize or erase personal history. It affirms both moral agency and narrative coherence—making the Self not only a subject of development, but a responsible author within an unfolding metaphysical story.
The Easier, “Guilt-Free” Treatment of the Past
In most conventional psychological frameworks, two principal approaches dominate when addressing an individual’s past: one deep, the other superficial. These approaches, though differing in technicality and emphasis, often share a tendency to reduce personal moral responsibility and reframe the past in terms of either trauma or detachment.
The "Deep" Significance of the Past
Therapies that emphasize the deep structural importance of early life experiences tend to locate the source of present suffering in unconscious, unresolved conflicts from childhood. These include psychodynamic therapies, classical psychoanalysis, and modern trauma-focused modalities.
In traditional psychoanalytic theory, especially as developed by Freud and Jung, the core premise is that unconscious conflicts, repressed desires, and unresolved developmental issues shape current psychological distress. The therapeutic goal is to bring these hidden elements to conscious awareness, thereby freeing the individual from their unconscious grip. Techniques such as free association, dream interpretation, and transference analysis aim to surface these hidden narratives and symbolically resolve them.
Psychodynamic approaches evolved from this base, focusing particularly on early attachment patterns, emotional development, and the internalization of caregiver relationships. The idea here is that emotional schemas—formed during childhood—continue to operate beneath the surface, entangling the present with unresolved patterns from the past. In this view, the past is the hidden root system of the present Self, and insight into that system is essential for meaningful change.
Over time, many modern derivatives of these frameworks have emerged, often attempting to streamline or accelerate the therapeutic process. These include integrative trauma therapies, parts-work models (such as Internal Family Systems), and experiential reconstructions of attachment wounds. A common motif is the notion that the Self is composed of multiple sub-personalities—many of them "frozen" in past traumatic experiences. Healing is thus achieved by revisiting and "unburdening" these inner parts.
Such methods may include:
Role-playing exercises to simulate and resolve early family dynamics,
Somatic and emotional catharsis techniques,
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to rewire traumatic memories,
Or even therapeutic "re-parenting" scenarios.
While these approaches can be deeply emotionally engaging and often effective in clinical terms, they still largely frame the past as something that happened to you, rather than something one bears moral agency toward.
This implicit framing leads to what Axiomatology calls a "guilt-free reconciliation"—where healing is achieved without the burden of full ethical ownership of one’s past behaviors or omissions.
The “Deep” Significance of the Past — and Its Hidden Problem
In many therapeutic traditions, especially those oriented around introspection and trauma resolution, the individual’s past is seen as the key to understanding the present. These approaches emphasize that early life experiences—particularly those involving trauma, attachment disruption, and unconscious emotional encoding—shape personality, behavior, and future decisions.
In this framework, change can only occur by confronting, reinterpreting, and reprocessing the past.
The most prominent examples include classical psychoanalysis and a broad family of psychodynamic therapies. Their central idea is that unconscious childhood conflicts and repressed desires form the root of present suffering. Accordingly, therapeutic tools such as free association, dream analysis, and transference interpretation aim to bring these unconscious elements into the light of consciousness.
Modern psychodynamic approaches further emphasize attachment theory and relational models, focusing on emotional development and the early caregiver–child relationship. The current self is seen as deeply entangled with unresolved emotional schemas formed in childhood. The metaphor is organic: the past is the root system of the tree; only insight into those roots allows the tree to grow healthily.
More contemporary variations attempt to accelerate or simplify this deep work, offering “faster” models of trauma integration and inner healing. Many focus on the internal family system model—suggesting that the self is composed of multiple sub-personalities or “parts,” some of which remain frozen in trauma. Healing, then, is about revisiting, comforting, and “unburdening” these inner parts to restore internal harmony.
These interventions often include:
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to neutralize traumatic memory
Role-play techniques where others simulate parents or siblings to resolve historical conflicts
Somatic or affective reconstructions of early childhood experiences to access pre-verbal trauma
These techniques are often effective in therapeutic practice. However, from an Axiomatological perspective, they also carry an often-unspoken assumption: the individual is primarily a victim of their own past, and healing consists in revisiting, re-narrating, and ultimately forgiving oneself for what was, by default, not their fault.
The Underlying Problem: Displacement of Moral Responsibility
The core issue with many of these trauma-focused models is not their emphasis on memory or emotion—it is their treatment of moral agency.
These frameworks implicitly encourage a view in which the individual's present struggles are causally linked to past traumas, especially those originating from parental dynamics. Since these events happened at a “tender age,” where the individual lacked full agency, the conclusion is subtly introduced: you are not responsible for who you became.
This interpretation—while comforting—is also dangerous.
It allows the individual to feel emotionally engaged with their history, even to reconstruct it in cathartic ways, but without requiring any deep, direct moral ownership of what has resulted from those earlier events. Even when the process is called “radical acceptance,” what is often being accepted is a lack of responsibility.
Thus, personal responsibility becomes narrowly defined: it means “dealing with the past,” “processing it,” or “reframing it”—but not taking full, moral accountability for the consequences that have unfolded in one's behavior, choices, or ethical position in the world. The underlying logic absolves the self from confronting the uncomfortable possibility:
"Yes, something terrible happened. But what I did with it—later, repeatedly, knowingly—is mine to own."
This is precisely where Axiomatology introduces its decisive break.
The Superficial Treatment of the Past
As a counterpoint to trauma-focused or “deep” therapeutic models, many modern interventions take an opposing stance: they dismiss the significance of the past altogether. Rather than confronting historical content, these models treat the individual's attachment to the past as the real problem.
In this paradigm, the past is not a meaningful system of causes or moral continuity—it is simply a thought-form, a cognitive pattern, or a psychological attachment that one can choose to "unhook" from. The dominant therapeutic imperative becomes:
“You are not your story.”
Or, more bluntly:
“You are not your past—unless you choose to live in it.”
This perspective is especially prevalent in:
Mindfulness-based therapies
Cognitive-behavioral frameworks
Present-focused “acceptance” models
And a wide array of pop-spirituality and Western mysticism-influenced interventions
These approaches emphasize immediate awareness, behavioral redirection, and cognitive reframing. The past may be acknowledged, but only as a transient mental object—something to observe, accept, and ultimately release. Narrative coherence is de-emphasized; the only thing that matters is present perception and future behavior.
In spiritual variants, the message becomes more metaphysical:
The past is portrayed as illusory, a construction of the “ego,” and therefore irrelevant to one’s true self.
According to this logic, liberation comes from disidentification: letting go of all stories, including painful ones, in order to access pure presence or higher awareness. The only reality is the “now.”
Some of the common features of this logic include:
A focus on thought-watching, not thought analysis
Identification of the self as a witness, not a moral agent
Avoidance of revisiting or emotionally reliving past experiences
A preference for solution-orientation over reflective processing
The assumption that focusing on problems strengthens them
The treatment of negative history as non-essential noise
Even in secular coaching or performance-oriented settings, this approach is widespread. The past becomes useful only when mined for “positive evidence” of success or competence. Otherwise, it's regarded as a distraction—a psychological anchor that prevents forward motion.
The Underlying Problem: Total Detachment from Moral Continuity
While this method may seem empowering—offering speed, relief, and psychological lightness—it carries a similar ethical blind spot to that of trauma-focused therapies, albeit inverted in form.
In this case, the past is not pathologized, but rendered irrelevant.
By encouraging total disidentification from one’s history, these approaches erase the moral chain between past, present, and future self.
Responsibility, in this model, is not taken for the past—it is actively avoided.
The individual is invited to "reframe" rather than confront, to "move on" rather than integrate. The past becomes not only emotionally distant but existentially untethered.
This produces what Axiomatology identifies as the pathology of amoral self-renewal:
a process in which the Self is permitted to reinvent itself indefinitely without confronting its own accumulated failures, omissions, or moral debts.
Such models may produce temporary relief or even outward success, but they leave a dangerous void:
a self unrooted in continuity, narrative coherence, and ethical development.
They offer freedom without structure—growth without grounding.
Axiomatological Critique of Responsibility Minimization
From the standpoint of Axiomatology, both conventional approaches to the past—whether therapeutic deep-dives into trauma or superficial disidentification strategies—share a core structural problem: they minimize or evade moral responsibility for one's past. But the deeper issue is not only psychological; it is ontological.
This avoidance of responsibility disrupts not merely a person’s self-narrative, but their capacity to experience reality with coherence. In Axiomatological terms, the Self is not a sequence of isolated psychological states but a moral continuum composed of prehended occasions—and this continuity cannot be bypassed without metaphysical consequences.
Influence on Identity
In Axiomatology, the Self is understood as a temporal continuum, a structured nexus of occasions extending from past to future. Each new occasion incorporates subjective prehensions from previous ones. These prehensions include not only memories, emotions, and physical sensations, but also moral content—what Axiomatology uniquely identifies as the Moral Non-Past: the counterfactuals, the failures to act, and the meaningful events that could have happened but didn’t due to moral avoidance.
To fully inhabit one’s present, an individual must accept this continuity. One cannot say “that wasn’t really me” about a past occasion, because in metaphysical terms, that was—and still is—you. There is no ontologically discrete "past self" that can be cleanly severed. Each new moment builds on the moral structure of previous occasions. Even when aims shift or values evolve, each new subjective aim emerges within a continuity that cannot be morally or structurally disowned.
Thus, responsibility is not a psychological burden but an ontological requirement: to reject one’s past is not merely to lie to oneself, but to fracture the metaphysical basis of identity itself.
The Erosion of Available Potential
Axiomatology introduces the concept of available potential: the total cognitive, emotional, and volitional resources accessible for the composition of each new occasion during Self Fusion. Available potential is not fixed; it fluctuates depending on the degree to which past moral content is suppressed, reframed, or denied.
When individuals suppress guilt or avoid confronting moral non-pasts, they unconsciously allocate working memory and semantic energy to the creation of narrative justifications—"semantic shields" that protect the self-image but reduce available energy for actual transformation.
This often takes the form of internal statements such as:
“That wasn’t really me.”
“I was a different person back then.”
“I’ve already processed that.”
From an Axiomatological view, such semantic interference disrupts the natural prehensive structure of Self Fusion. Rather than smoothly integrating past occasions, the person attempts to cognitively “overwrite” them—creating a semantic distortion field that blocks the retrieval of morally significant episodic memory.
The result is a cumulative suppression burden:
Each unprocessed moral truth adds to the energetic cost of each future occasion.
Each avoidance further fragments the narrative arc.
Motivation begins to collapse—because motivation, in this model, is the felt perception of accessible potential toward meaningful moral movement.
The Collapse of Interpersonal Connection
The consequences are not only intrapersonal but relational.
Radical responsibility for the past is the precondition for genuine interpersonal connection.
This is not a matter of confession, but of metaphysical alignment: without acknowledging one’s causal and moral continuity, trust cannot form.
In Axiomatological terms, the two requirements for honest relational presence are:
Truthful representation of one’s subjective past occasions, including failures, omissions, and misjudgments.
Clear moral evaluation of those occasions from the standpoint of one’s current Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIHV).
When someone says, “I understand why I am the way I am,” but frames that understanding as a detachment from the moral content of the past (“It wasn’t really my fault”), they embed a causal disjunction within their narrative. This not only distorts their own self-understanding but makes it impossible for others to trust the continuity of their moral development.
The same disruption occurs when spiritual or psychological "enlightenment" is used to sidestep disclosure: the person presents themselves as a new, evolved being—disconnected from uncomfortable truths about their past. This creates ambiguity.
The listener cannot discern whether patterns from the past have actually been addressed or merely spiritually bypassed.
When such unresolved pasts are disowned, they tend to replay themselves across new relationships:
“I don’t understand why this keeps happening to me.”
The answer is: because you never owned what happened before.
In summary:
Minimizing moral responsibility for the past—whether through therapeutic detachment or spiritual bypassing—leads to three fundamental failures:
Loss of identity continuity
Diminished available potential
Inability to form trustworthy relationships
Axiomatology posits that only through radical moral ownership of one’s past—down to the level of unacted choices and suppressed truths—can one regain the clarity, power, and integrity required to move forward without fragmentation.
Axiomatological Approach to Past-Work
In Axiomatology, Past-Work refers to the deliberate, metaphysically grounded process of engaging with one’s past—whether through structured therapeutic intervention or through self-guided introspective practice.
Unlike conventional models that either over-pathologize the past or minimize it altogether, Axiomatological Past-Work is built on three interlocking principles:
Identity as a continuum
Radical acceptance of the past
Critical moral judgment of past occasions
Each is essential to restoring coherence in the Self Fusion process and reclaiming available potential for the future.
1. Identity as a Continuum
The first foundational premise of Axiomatological Past-Work is that personal identity is not fragmented into “past selves” and “present self,” but exists as a single metaphysical continuum of becoming.
This continuum consists of a dynamic nexus of occasions, each composed through Self Fusion—the process by which subjective prehensions (memory, feeling, meaning) are taken up from previous occasions and formed into a new, structured occasion of consciousness.
Although every new occasion of Self Fusion is composed outside conventional spacetime—in a process resembling Whitehead’s concrescence—our subjective continuity persists as long as the brain functions as the receptive ground for consciousness-linked prehensions. This supports a model of continuous becoming, rather than momentary “selves.”
This means:
There is no true ontological separation between past and present.
Every new subjective moment is not a self-contained entity but a fusion of the past, including both what was done (moral past) and what was not done but could have been (moral non-past).
Identity is a beam of becoming, not a chain of episodes or a set of personality snapshots.
This model rejects the psychological metaphor of identity as composed of discrete “selves.” Instead, every new moment of awareness pulls from the entire archive of previous moral and experiential structures, forming a continuity that persists until death (i.e., the cessation of physical receptivity to subjective prehensions).
In Heideggerian terms, this structure of temporal continuity was already anticipated when he wrote:
“As being which is concerned in its being about its being, it is related to its being as its ownmost possibility. Dasein is always already ahead of itself (Sein-vorweg), in the sense of being toward its ownmost potentiality-for-being.”
(Being and Time, §31)
This passage points beyond future projection. It suggests that Dasein—like the Self in Axiomatology—always already carries forward the entirety of its past when forming the next moment of being. Every conscious moment is a moral occasion built atop the history of one's previous compositions.
Implication: No Disowning the Past
In this metaphysical structure, it becomes literally impossible to separate oneself from one’s past. There is no “that was a different me.” The subject is always composed of all that has been done and left undone, in each act of becoming. Even when the current subjective aim appears transformed, it arises within and builds upon the totality of prior moral content.
This includes not only memories or emotional residues but the ontologically real weight of unacted values, failures of responsibility, and moral avoidance. These are not psychological traces but metaphysical structures—elements of Selfcarried into each new occasion of Self Fusion.
Thus, Axiomatology does not treat past-work as memory therapy or psychological excavation.
It treats it as reclaiming moral continuity—as the only way to restore full identity integrity and regain access to unused potential.
Radical Responsibility for the Past
When addressing one’s past, a common framing is the dichotomy between personal agency and external causality:
To what extent did I cause what happened to me, and to what extent was it shaped by forces beyond my control?
In most therapeutic or reflective models, people attempt to assign degrees of responsibility to past events. This is often expressed in terms of a subjective percentage—e.g., “I was 70% responsible for what happened in that situation,” with the rest attributed to upbringing, society, context, or other people. A popular ideal is to cross the 80% threshold—where one takes mostly personal responsibility, but preserves some protective distance from total self-judgment.
From the Axiomatological perspective, however, this entire conceptual framework is flawed—both logically and metaphysically.
The Illusion of Partial Responsibility
Responsibility, as framed by conventional models, assumes that one can draw a clean boundary around the causal influence of one’s past actions. But Axiomatology asserts that such a boundary does not exist—and cannot exist for any finite human being.
Each action—or inaction—echoes through the lives of others as part of the causal resonance field of one’s being. In Axiomatological terms, each past occasion is not only a node in one’s own trajectory, but also a resonant nexus that reverberates into the Self Fusion processes of other people. Your life does not exist in a closed container. Every decision—especially those made without integrity—cascades into other people’s timelines.
To determine the precise limits of one's influence—to say “my responsibility ends here”—would require omniscience. You would have to know all consequences across all minds and all trajectories.
That capacity belongs only to God.
Thus, the very act of trying to quantify or contain one's responsibility is metaphysically absurd. The implication is radical:
Responsibility cannot be partial when the structure of reality itself is interdependent.
From Acceptance to Total Moral Ownership
This is why Axiomatology rejects not only responsibility minimization, but also the modern ideal of "accepting the past".
Acceptance, in this context, too often functions as a disguised form of detachment:
“I understand it now, I forgive myself, and I move on.”
But if every occasion in the Self Fusion process builds upon all previous ones—including the moral non-past (what you failed to do but could have)—then moving on without full ownership constitutes a structural break in narrative coherence.
There is no metaphysical logic that supports partial ownership of the past.
The only coherent stance is radical responsibility.
This echoes the radical moral vision expressed by Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov:
“Everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”
(Book VI, Chapter 3)
In Axiomatological terms, this is not spiritual hyperbole—it is the logical conclusion of causal resonance across self-generating occasions.
Radical Responsibility as the Only Ethically Viable Stance
If one accepts causality and intersubjective resonance as metaphysical truths, then the implications are clear:
Every deed you performed, or failed to perform, has moral weight.
Every person you influenced—directly or indirectly—resides within your moral arc.
Every lie, every silence, every negligence belongs to your Self.
You are not just responsible for what you remember, but for all the occasions you helped structure in the lives of others.
The only coherent position, then, is to take complete, unconditional responsibility for everything one has done—and everything one failed to do.
This is the cornerstone of Axiomatological Past-Work. It does not offer catharsis through insight or relief through reframing.
It offers moral clarity through radical ownership.
Critical Moral Judgment
Radical responsibility, while necessary, is not sufficient. One may fully acknowledge their past, accept the weight of their actions, and still fail to change. To stop at ownership without moral evaluation is to risk turning responsibility into mere narration—another story, not a transformation.
The next and essential step in Axiomatological Past-Work is Critical Moral Judgment.
Judgment Requires Free Will
At the heart of all moral evaluation lies one premise: the capacity for choice. Without free will—without the possibility of acting otherwise—judgment collapses into deterministic narrative. Axiomatology, in alignment with Kant, affirms that freedom and morality are intrinsically connected. As Kant writes:
“Freedom and the moral law reciprocally imply each other.”
(Critique of Practical Reason, Part I, Book I, Chapter I, §8)
To evaluate one’s past through a moral lens presupposes that one could have chosen differently, and now must answer not only to causal history, but to moral order.
Applying the Moral Law Through the SIVH
Once the individual accepts total responsibility for past actions, the next task is to apply the moral law—not abstractly, but through the lens of their restructured Structured Internal Value Hierarchy (SIVH). That is:
Each subset of occasions—specific actions, decisions, and behaviors across time—must be judged using a current SIVH that aligns with the Will of God (WOG), i.e., the deepest, most ontologically consistent structure of moral sense.
This means asking: "What value hierarchy was guiding my actions during this phase of life?"
"Is that hierarchy morally justified?"
"How did my behavior align—or misalign—with it?"
This retrospective application of the SIVH allows the person to generate clarity, coherence, and moral orientation for both present behavior and future becoming. Without this process, “taking responsibility” becomes another empty gesture.
Temporal Discontinuities and Moments of Transformation
Although Axiomatology affirms the continuity of identity through successive occasions, it also allows for transitional thresholds—pivotal occasions in which a new SIVH is adopted and a significant moral reorientation takes place.
These transformative points are morally significant dates—occasions in the past where the individual:
Recognized their misalignment with truth,
Reoriented their value structure toward the Good,
And committed, behaviorally, to live under a new hierarchy.
From that point forward, the vector of occasions extending from that moral decision becomes the new axis of identity—but only if behavior reflects it.
This means that moral transformation is factual, not emotional or symbolic. It is expressed not through remorse, but through action that consistently reflects the SIVH.
The Consequences of SIVH Betrayal
If a person violates their own value hierarchy—especially after a clearly demarcated transformation—then, from an Axiomatological perspective:
The moral arc collapses,
The continuity of repentance is annulled,
And the individual must rebuild their identity from the ground up.
This is why “deathbed repentance” is metaphysically incoherent unless followed by actual, sustained behavioral change—which, due to time constraints, is often impossible. Moral identity is not a conceptual position but a causal-behavioral chain aligned with values.
Axiomatology also warns against forming an identity as a “perpetual rebuilder”: someone who repeatedly claims new hierarchies but fails to sustain them through action. This form of identity results in compounded moral entropy and disintegration of trust—both in oneself and from others.
Critical Moral Judgment means assessing one’s past with full metaphysical responsibility, under the guidance of a morally aligned SIVH, and judging each occasion not by emotional reaction, but by objective value structure. It turns past-work into moral recalibration, not psychological storytelling.
