Agency can only be understood from within a first-person perspective. We live in a relational world; one made up of relationships. If we could look through another person's lens, we would experience this person's way of framing experience from his or her point of view.  We would see how they were thinking, feeling or how they were acting/reacting to the relationships in their sphere of influence.  We would see that they were framing experience from within their unique situated embodiment, just as we were within each of our unique circumstances.  While one can observe another's agency in action and even share a similar context/experience, it is impossible to know how that person is framing his or her experience without being empathic. If you lost a family heirloom, for example, I may not know how you are really responding to this event, but I can attempt to understand by asking you questions about your experience.  If I were to say to you, "Don't worry about the heirloom; it will be ok," I would not be trying to understand how you are thinking or feeling about what happened.  As agents we frame and make sense of our experience in our own unique contexts including imagined or spiritual realities as well. 

One of the properties of agency is that it is directional or intentional. As agents, we frame experience intentionally for the sake of acting toward different ends. Since conceptualizing our experience is intentional or directed, and action is not an automatic result of meaning-making, we can intend differently from how we behave. According to Rychlak (1994), a framed meaning or group of framed meanings must be affirmed by the agent prior to action. He describes this agentic process as a logical ordering of ideas and meanings rather than a mechanical, time-dependent process. 

Our psychology must be able to capture the facts of being human, such as how agents construct reality from experience, and how they do this in directed ways often with competing intentions. I can, for example, direct my agency toward giving up an addiction to sweets (because I have watched a friend do that so I think I can also). At the same time, I can have a competing intention to continue eating sweets (because this has become a habit and is now configured in my neural networks, making change harder). 

As mentioned, agents' actions do not always reflect their intentions. Our traditional psychological theories do not have good ways of explaining this. Other agents can behave in ways that mask their true intentions consciously or innocently. One can think of countless movies and stories about individuals who deceive others with good behavior that hides darker intentions meant to manipulate and harm. One can also think of the person who has good intentions that are constantly misunderstood.

As intentional beings, we do not need to yield our agency to "the will" of others although religious leaders and teachers tell us that this type of submission to a higher power is necessary for bringing peace and spiritual enlightenment. If, for example, we are experiencing a situation that is fearful or sorrowful, we can still choose how to deal with it as seen in the lives of Jesus, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha and so many more great leaders and mystics. Great learning often results from intentionally yielding to challenging circumstances. 

Finally, agents can learn to align their intentions with their behavior. In my experience, this is an essential task for human beings, and it allows us to find joy.  People will learn that a lot of mental health problems arise from internal conflicts between intention and behavior. One can ask:  How am I directing my agency and toward what ends? Does my behavior align with my intentions? 

Our agency is asymmetrical.  What we have chosen is not the same as what we will choose. Agency is a hinge between prior knowledge (our framed experience), and independent action (toward possibilities which we can freely choose). Williams (2005) has provided philosophical arguments for how our agency must be both determined and free at the same time.  

In referring to the determined aspect of agency, what we know now results from what we once agentically framed. This knowledge becomes the meaningful background knowledge for directing our agency toward any number of different ends (Rychlak, 1994). Another way to say this would be that our framed experience provides the determining contexts (Sauvayre, 2008) or the framing for future learning.  Let's take, for example, someone without significant learning challenges. More possibilities will open up for this person if he or she works hard in school to earn good grades. Now take someone with significant learning challenges. Good grades may be difficult to earn for this person, but this does not take away from the fact that an engaged student, finding joy in learning, will be prepared to receive more possibilities for future growth. 

In referring to the freedom aspect of agency, having possibilities for action provide us with opportunities to learn and grow.  We have the ability as agents to build upon what we know and to expand possibilities for new learning in ourselves and in others.

For each of us, agency is the learning process whereby meaning is made from within our unique, embodied, situated contexts.  What we understand (meanings that we have framed) through our agency (process), provides the background knowledge or the determining contexts for the framing of future experiences. 

In an agency-centered psychology, our knowledge base can limit or potentiate what we can learn in the future, depending upon how well we have organized meaning from experience.  Numerous psychological studies have shown that learning and memory are facilitated by background knowledge (see Bransford, 1972). New research shows that we also conceptualize emotions, based on context (Feldman Barrett, 2017). Agency is universal because we all frame experience and we build knowledge within multiple contexts (societal, cultural, and familial).  

Agency is exercised via awareness (Gorlin & Békés, 2021). We need awareness to frame experience in order to act.  What we have framed in the past, continues to influence our on-going framing of experience. What may seem habituated was once agentically framed with awareness (Rychlak, 1997). I ride a bike now, for example, without thought or mental effort. When I agentically developed the skill of bike riding, I consciously framed knowledge (patterns of meaning) for learning it.  I now bring my past knowledge for how to bike ride to the present. I can now bike effortlessly and even direct my agency toward improving my biking skills.

Agency (the process) is intimately intertwined with the meanings (the contents) that the agent has framed and will frame. It makes the most sense to say that we learn by analogy, applying what we have learned to new situations with real world consequences. We learn best by organizing and understanding ideas well, and by elaborating their meanings which improves memory (Lang, 1999, Rychlak, 1994). We can organize meaning around guiding principles and test them in the world of real consequences. We can reorganize our past way of framing meaning to learn new things, to gain new perspectives, and to understand future meanings differently.

For agency to be free, we must have the opportunity to act for the sake of different possibilities. Agency allows us to direct ourselves freely toward different ends within the limitations or potentialities of our circumstances.  These ends may be real (e.g., you are about to get married to your loved one in a few days), imagined (e.g., deciding you will win the lottery when you have not bought a ticket) or spiritual (e.g., feeling the presence of a deceased relative). As we increase our awareness of possibilities, our agency increases (Gorlin & Békés, 2021).  What we choose affects others because our choices (accumulated framed meanings) either open up or close down possibilities for both ourselves and others. We have the potential to care for the agency of others' and to make our relationships positive and healing (healing relations), rather than contentious and hurtful.

Choosing, via agency, is an often imperceptible process in which the embodied, situated agent intentionally directs agency toward different ends. (Rychlak, 1994). The content created in the process is the meaning that we organize from our experience. Meaning is affirmed and acted upon with an end in mind.  The affirmed content becomes a determining context for framing our on-going experience; in this way the process and content become intertwined.  

Our knowledge becomes entangled with our unique contexts because we frame experience within them. This is different from social constructionism which theorizes that we are shaped or determined by our social context.  From an agentic perspective, what we frame and how we direct that framing for action, leads to consequences in reality. Consequences in reality, further inform how we direct and exercise our agency and therefore, make meaning. We can learn, for example, from others in a way that expands our lens and allows us to choose differently from what we have already framed. 

The meaning-making process frames meaning from what is known to what is not known. One might say that meaning flows from predicate to subject.  When we say, for example, "Sally is dependable," the predicate, "is dependable," lends meaning to the subject, "Sally."  "Is dependable" tells us something about the person, "Sally." "Sally," however, tell us little about the meaning of "is dependable." This example aims to demonstrate that we cannot know something about a subject or targeted meaning, without a context or a predicate for understanding it. According to Rychlak, agents use predicates (or what I have been calling "determining contexts") to lend meaning to targets in the agent's context. What the agent is trying to understand, he or she targets with already known meanings or predicates. If a target is too incomprehensible, given an agent's predicating context, learning cannot take place. For this reason, we cannot learn something that we do not have a background for understanding. A childhood abuse victim, for example, may not have the words or understanding to make meaning from their abuse- something that should have never happened, so it is incomprehensible. For this reason, emotion cannot be metabolized at the time and remains unintegrated eventually causing symptoms. It is only as the victim gains learning and understanding, that he or she can use his or her current predicating contexts to target older painful events that were not clearly understood and integrated with background knowledge.  Unprocessed emotion from the past can be worked through in the present and metabolized by the individual who has developed a cognitive framework for experiencing and making sense of old feelings/emotions. 

To predicate also means to categorize. As agents, we are designed to organize/categorize/frame/conceptualize our experience (Rychlak, 1994).  Many psychological observations make sense in light of Rychlak's observations about how we, as agents, predicate experience. We learn, for example, best with direct mentorship, based off the students' precise strengths and deficits (their predicating contexts). The more broadly experienced mentor helps a student to essentially practice their agency in tune with where student growth is needed. This is also why the therapy relationship can be very helpful because it is specifically tailored to and about the client (i.e., based on the client's predicating contexts). A good therapist is helpful as they become familiar with a client's predicating contexts. There is much more to say about what Rychlak terms, predicating. Rychlak (1994) conducted multiple experiments to demonstrate that predicating experience is a better way to describe how we learn than traditional models that reduce learning only to neurobiology. I will refer the reader to his text, Logical Learning Theory, or to my dissertation (Lang, 1999), to explore this aspect of agency in more depth.

Oppositionality is another quality of how the agent makes meaning and helps account for how our agency is free. Psychological theories that rely on a computer model of the mind and brain are unable to account for how humans reason oppositionally (see Rychlak, 1991). Words/phrases often have multiple meanings embedded in them including what is not meant by them. When, for example, we say that Brian is sick, we also infer that he is not healthy. Our agentic process allows us to recognize and understand, at the same time, the opposite meaning of a meaning we are targeting as we intentionally frame experience.

We might also refer to our ability to reason oppositionally as dialectical. Dialectical reasoning is another way of describing how the meanings humans make from experience contain a synthesis of what is being targeted and what it is not. Agency would not be free if meaning-making did not afford us the opportunity to consider what something is also not. How many times do we infer meaning from what someone did not say? Such inferring is a human quality that our psychological model must account for. It is what gets us into trouble by allowing us to project both positive and negative meanings on to others. It is also what causes us to pause and think when we notice that someone has responded in an unexpected way. We notice what was not said.

Unlike how the brain organizes information from sensory data over time (time is needed for electrical signals to pass through neural networks), meaning-making occurs in a time-independent fashion. One may spend time thinking through their understanding of a topic or issue but to agentically frame meaning is instantaneous. One does not need the passage of time to switch one's understanding of a meaning. We call these instantaneous moments of understanding, "insight" or "ah-ha" moments in therapy. These occur when several ideas align for new understanding.

For many years people on earth lived according to Newton’s laws until Einstein expanded their vision to see that under different conditions, those laws no longer apply.  Newton had discovered how forces act on earthly objects (i.e., at low velocities the mass of an object does not change). In contrast, Einstein, in his theory of relativity, discovered that as objects in the galaxy move at speeds approaching the speed of light, the mass of the object becomes very large.

A similar parallel can be made about the laws that govern our physical world and those that govern our agency. Grounding is a term used for how we explain something and the laws by which it works. What makes agency different from the way our brain works is that agency has  intentionality (i.e., the directional component to our meaning-making), oppositionality (i.e., the dialectical component to meaning),  predication (i.e., meaning's logical ordering from what is known to what is not known), and time-independence (time's passage is not needed for meaning making). 

Philosophers, psychologists and religious leaders refer to the power of prayer, love, and altruism, however, few of our psychological theories explain how these are possible. While many in the field of psychology often speak agentically, they rely on psychological theories that reduce agency to a part of the brain (i.e., executive functioning). An agency that emerges from the brain would need to follow the laws of our neurophysiology. 

To distinguish the laws that agency follows from the laws of our physical world, Rychlak described agency as grounded in the Logos. Logos means "the word" in Greek. Victor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor and developer of Logos psychotherapy, also used the word logos as the grounding to his multidimensional psychological approach. He thought a Logos ground was needed to explain how we will and make meaning from experience which was different from the observed physical world (see Frankl, Will to Meaning, 1961). Isn't it true that we make meaning from our experience, but we can't really say where this meaning is located in the brain? Neuropsychological research cannot show where in the brain we make meaning, only that different parts of the brain work on different aspects of the meaning-making process, including parts that bring this information together.

Researchers have found that some values lead to better mental health and well-being. In other words, not all meaning that we make from our experiences is equal. Some of the ways we frame experience will lead to peace and joy, such as learning to speak kindly to each other within one's family. While some ways of framing experience will lead to mental health struggles such as persistent worry or unrelenting sorrow.  We can choose how we direct our agency. We can direct it toward thinking (organizing our experience), experiencing and expressing emotions, and  behaving in ways that bring about positive mental health. We can direct our agency toward learning about how to become people who live truthful and meaningful lives. Living in this way can help us become mindful of others. This, in turn, creates positive and healing relations. 

Love is one of those essential, all-encompassing emotions that human beings experience and cultivate. Love explains much of what we frame and why we frame it for our particular purposes. We might love our spouse, our children, our parents or a sibling or co-worker. We may love our possessions. We may love power.  Love can be controlling or self-respecting. It can be mutually rewarding and it can be hurtful. Not all the ways we love are of equal value; how we love matters. 

Exercising agency in wise and healthy ways, such as respecting another's agency or caring for others, is what creates strong bonds, trust, and love for one another (see Sue Johnson, 2012). Our agency, therefore, provides us with an opportunity to learn about how to love well, bringing more love into our lives, and sharing more love with others.