Relational Field Theory

When Meaning Gets Misused: How a Core Human Insight Was Twisted Into Control

There’s a pattern I keep seeing whenever a powerful idea enters the culture:
the closer it gets to the human core, the more likely someone will try to weaponize it.

Meaning. Purpose. Coherence.
These are not small concepts. They sit at the center of what it feels like to be alive.
And because they’re so central, they’re also incredibly easy to distort.

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve been writing about Relational Field Theory, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this happened to Viktor Frankl’s work. His original insight was simple and profound: even in the harshest conditions, humans retain an inner freedom to choose their stance toward their circumstances. Meaning isn’t handed down. It’s made.

But somewhere along the way, that liberatory insight got repackaged into something else entirely.

It became a slogan.
A doctrine.
A behavioral program.
A bestselling book that promised purpose but delivered obedience.

And that shift matters.

Because when a culture takes a framework built on agency and turns it into a framework built on submission, something essential gets lost. The very thing that was meant to free people becomes the thing that constrains them.

How does this happen?

It’s almost predictable:

A powerful idea emerges.
It resonates because it names something true.
Institutions notice the resonance.
They translate the idea into their own language—usually the language of control.
The public receives the diluted version and thinks that is the original.

Meaning becomes mandate.
Purpose becomes prescription.
Freedom becomes formula.

And suddenly, the thing that was supposed to help people reclaim their lives is being used to tell them how to live.

Why does this matter now?

Because we’re living in a moment where people are hungry for coherence.
Hungry for connection.
Hungry for something that feels real and grounded and alive.

And when that hunger meets a distorted version of a core human truth, people end up feeling like they’ve failed—not because they lack purpose, but because the version of “purpose” they were handed was never built for them in the first place.

What Relational Field Theory tries to restore

RFT isn’t here to replace anyone’s belief system.
It’s here to restore something that got lost in translation:

Meaning as emergent, not assigned
Purpose as relational, not dictated
Coherence as something you build, not something you obey
Agency as the foundation, not the threat

The goal isn’t to tell anyone what their life is “for.”
The goal is to give people a way to understand how meaning actually forms—between people, across time, through experience, in relationship.

The deeper truth

When a culture misuses a core human insight, the damage isn’t just intellectual.
It’s emotional.
People start believing they’re broken because they can’t live up to a script that was never written with them in mind.

But the core itself—the real one—was never the problem.

The problem was the distortion.

And part of what this work is trying to do is give that core back to people in a form that’s actually usable, humane, and grounded in consent.

Meaning doesn’t need to be weaponized.
Purpose doesn’t need to be prescribed.
Coherence doesn’t need to be controlled.

It just needs to be understood.