“All parenting is experimental,” my dad used to tell me. I didn’t fully understand it when I was younger, but it has become one of the truest things I know, not just about parenting, but about life.
We’re all experimenting. Trying to figure it out as we go.
And we’re not starting from scratch. Each of us shows up in the world within a particular context, a family, culture, historical context, and belief system.
That’s our starting point.
And most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to make sense of it.
We’re flooded with meaning systems. Psychological theories. Family expectations. Religious narratives. Cultural myths. Personality assessments. Political ideologies. Philosophical frameworks. Instagram wisdom.
Each one claims to tell us something important about who we are, how we should live, and what matters most.
And some of them do help. Probably all of them help in some way. But taken all at once, they can leave us more fragmented than whole, like we’re holding a thousand puzzle pieces from a dozen different boxes, trying to make a picture we can actually live inside.
That’s the space I found myself in years ago. And it’s the space I’ve watched many clients struggle to name.
Eventually, I found myself reaching for a frame that could help me make sense of the contradictions I kept running into. I needed a way to sort through the noise, the pain, the beauty, and the confusion. I needed to be able to map the terrain of my life in a way that made sense to me.
I call that frame Me–We–The.
The earliest seed of this idea came years ago, walking through London on a work trip. I was listening to Richard Rohr describe his “cosmic egg” of meaning: my story, our story, other stories, the story. It's a layered model of expanding awareness from the personal, to the tribal, to the global, to the transcendent. It was a framework that assumed a kind of mystical unity at the center of all things, something universal and true that holds everything else together.
That idea stayed with me. But over time, it's morphed. I've never rejected it outright, but life pushed me to reimagine it. Where Rohr sees a deep, underlying harmony at the heart of meaning, I’ve come to see things a little differently. I'm not confident in any single, totalizing “The Story,” but I do think there is shared human ache for one. We humans seem to have an innate need to make sense of things.
In my frame, the “The” isn’t a final truth, it’s a placeholder for all the meaning systems we inherit, challenge, and create. It’s theology, yes, but also ideology, myth, history, science, cosmology, culture. The “We” in my frame holds what Rohr might call our story and other stories, all the collective, communal, and cultural forces that shape us.
I grew up in a world that offered big answers about who we are, what matters, what’s true, and what happens when we die. It was a powerful story, and in many ways a beautiful one. But it demanded total allegiance. It had little room for questioning. And it made the The story central.
I lived there for a long time. Me was incidental. We was conditional. The was everything.
And yet, from a young age, I kept running into things that didn’t quite fit: scientific explanations, philosophical doubts, lived contradictions, relational ruptures. These weren’t always dramatic revelations. More often than not, they were small disruptions or contradictions that stuck with me. Dissonance that I couldn't seem to resolve.
I’ve come to call these “What the hell?” moments. Not because they destroyed everything all at once, but because they made me stop and look around. They made me wonder if something deeper wasn’t quite right.
For many years, I tried to manage the tension, to fold those moments into the story I’d inherited, to patch the holes without dismantling the frame. But over time, the contradictions piled up. The structure started to strain. And eventually, it couldn’t hold.
The story didn’t collapse in a single moment, but it did begin to unravel. What replaced it wasn’t certainty. But I began to rebuild something. Piece by piece. The Me–We–The frame grew out of that process.
It's not a totalizing theory that offers answers. It's more like a lens. Something I don’t look at, but through to try to make sense of my life, my work, my relationships, and my place in the world.
To understand the frame, it helps to see each layer for what it is.
Me
The inner world: body, story, memory, emotion, personality.
The way we come to know ourselves, and sometimes avoid ourselves.
Therapy often starts here:
What hurts? What’s stuck? What’s surfacing?
But even the most personal pain is rarely personal alone.
We
The relational layer: family, friends, culture, church, community, society.
Where we learn how to love, how to hide, how to perform, how to survive.
Even the most inward-looking work is shaped by this layer.
We carry others inside us. And we’re shaped by the roles we’ve played, willingly or not.
The
The big-picture layer: meaning systems, metanarratives, philosophies, histories, religions, cultural myths, -isms of all kinds.
The stories we inherit about what the world is, what people are, and what matters most.
Sometimes they hold us together. Usually we don't look at them very closely.
Sometimes they fall apart.
Either way, we’re in them—always.
Me–We–The isn’t linear. It’s not a developmental model or a hierarchy.
It’s more like a zoom lens. You can zoom in on one layer of experience, then pull back and see how it connects to the others. A personal struggle (Me) might stem from a relational rupture (We) or a fragmented worldview (The). Sometimes all three.
They’re not stages either. And they’re not separate or seperable. They’re interdependent. Emergent.
This is part of why I’m drawn to complexity theory. In complex systems (whether in biology, software, or social life) nothing exists in isolation. Everything arises in relation to everything else.
That’s how this frame works. It doesn’t resolve the complexity.
But it offers a way to hold it, name it, and stay oriented within it.
Me-We-The has helped me make sense of my own story, the unmaking and remaking of belief, the dynamics of marriage and parenting, the work of therapy and writing and meaning-making.
It shapes how I try to help my clients observe their lives. It influences how I approach relationships and questions about the world. It’s even influencing the shape of the software I’m building.
I don’t pretend to have the whole picture. Maybe there is a map for being human, some deeper pattern or masterplan that ties it all together. But if there is, I haven’t seen it, and I feel like I've looked pretty hard for it.
We may not choose the world we’re born into, but we are responsible for the person we become within it. That’s both the burden and the gift of being human.
And it’s the reason I keep coming back to Me-We-The. It doesn't explain everything, but it helps me live more honestly inside the questions.
This blog is one way I’ll keep expanding this lens. Some essays will focus more on the Me (identity, parts, healing, embodiment), some on the We (family, communication, culture), and others on the The (belief, history, metaphysics, myth). But all of it will live within this frame in one way or another.
We all need a place to stand. This is one of mine. And if it helps you find your own, I’m glad.
Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858