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Self-Transcendence as a Therapeutic Model: Rethinking Emotional Regulation and Mental Health Care

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20 August 2026

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20 August 2026

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Abstract
Conventional models of emotional regulation center on the individual mind, training attention inward toward thoughts, sensations, and self-referential appraisal. Yet sustained self-referential processing is also a hallmark of the conditions such approaches aim to treat, including rumination, anxious self-monitoring, and narcissistic self-inflation. This article argues that self-transcendence, the shift of attention and motivation away from the self toward another person, a cause, or the transcendent, deserves formal status as a therapeutic target in its own right. I first outline self-transcendence's conceptual and neurobiological basis as a controllable attenuation of self-referential processing. I then argue, drawing on the neurobiology of autobiographical memory and narrative identity, that this same attenuation interfaces directly with the machinery that constructs and maintains the self-focused, ego-bound attention characteristic of rumination, and that, because self-defining memories are reconsolidated rather than fixed each time they are retrieved, self-transcendent states occasioned during therapeutic memory work may offer a route to rewriting identity-relevant narrative material, not merely managing momentary mood. I review converging evidence linking self-transcendent states, such as awe, compassion, meaning-seeking, and religious practice, to prosocial behavior, emotion regulation, and well-being, and sketch a therapeutic model built on structured awe elicitation, compassion training, and meaning-focused reflection. I close by addressing the ethical tension between instrumentalizing spirituality and secular clinical exclusion, and call for controlled, longitudinal research testing self-transcendence as a mediator, not merely a correlate, of therapeutic change.
Keywords: 
self-transcendence
;  
autobiographical memory
;  
narrative identity
;  
emotion regulation
;  
spirituality
;  
mental health
Subject: 
Social Sciences  -   Psychology

Introduction

Contemporary approaches to emotional regulation share a common architecture: they place the individual mind at the center of the therapeutic effort. Cognitive restructuring, symptom monitoring, and even mindfulness-based interventions, as widely practiced, train attention to turn inward — toward one’s own thoughts, sensations, and appraisals. This self-focused architecture has produced genuine clinical gains, yet it sits uneasily beside a robust finding from affective and clinical science: sustained self-referential processing is also a hallmark of the very conditions clinicians aim to treat.
Rumination in depression, hypervigilant self-monitoring in anxiety, and the fragile self-inflation of vulnerable narcissism all involve an attentional system locked onto the self. Neuroimaging work on the neural circuits supporting emotion regulation suggests that resilience to conditions such as depression is closely tied to the cognitive control exerted over self-referential emotional material, not merely to its suppression (Rodman et al., 2019). Consistent with this, research on the “quiet ego” — a disposition marked by reduced self-centeredness and a more balanced attentional stance toward self and others — links lower self-focus to greater authenticity and psychological well-being (Chew & Ang, 2023). Taken together, these findings suggest that the degree to which attention and motivation remain centered on the self may itself be a clinically relevant variable, not just a byproduct of pathology.
This raises an uncomfortable question for the field: what if part of the therapeutic answer requires deliberately loosening that lock — directing attention and motivation toward something beyond the self? A growing body of work in affective neuroscience, positive psychology, and the psychology of religion converges on a candidate mechanism for doing exactly this: self-transcendence, broadly defined as the temporary or enduring shift of focus from the individual self toward another person, a cause, a sense of meaning, or the transcendent (Levenson et al., 2005). Self-transcendence has been conceptualized both as a stable developmental capacity that deepens across the lifespan and as an acute, inducible state, and a growing methodological literature has begun to catalog the range of ways it has been operationalized and measured (Kitson et al., 2020).
Historically, self-transcendence has deep roots in contemplative and religious traditions, but it was also placed at the center of secular clinical practice as early as Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy (Frankl, 1959), built on the premise that the search for meaning — not the pursuit of pleasure or power — is the primary human motivational force, and that this search is inherently self-transcending (Chung, 1995). Contemporary reappraisals of Frankl’s work continue to draw out its clinical relevance, including its capacity to hold together religious and strictly secular articulations of meaning-making without collapsing one into the other (García Alandete, 2024; Schimmoeller & Rothhaar, 2021).
Empirical support for the mental-health relevance of self-transcendent states has accumulated from several directions that rarely cite one another. Work on awe — the emotion elicited by encounters with vastness that exceed one’s current frame of reference — finds that awe reliably diminishes the perceived size of the self relative to the world and, in doing so, promotes prosocial behavior and other-oriented positive emotion (Piff et al., 2015; Sturm et al., 2022). Parallel work on compassion training shows that deliberately cultivating other-directed concern changes how the brain responds to the suffering of others, in ways consistent with a shift away from purely self-protective processing (Ashar et al., 2021). Experimental work manipulating self-transcendent motives directly has shown effects on neural responses to persuasive health messages, suggesting that self-transcendence is not only correlated with well-being but can be causally engaged to shift behavior (Kang et al., 2018).
A separate but convergent literature situates these effects within religious and spiritual life more broadly. Religious participation and practice have been linked to prosocial behavior among practitioners (Van Cappellen et al., 2016), and qualitative work on humanistic growth in late midlife has identified self-transcendence as a recurring feature of the life stories adults tell when they describe becoming, in their own terms, better people (Reischer et al., 2021). Even outside explicitly religious framing, transcending immediate self-interest has been associated with better regulation of emotional expression and higher subjective well-being (Kao et al., 2017), and meaning-seeking itself — arguably the most secular expression of self-transcendence — has been proposed as a direct pathway to well-being in its own right (Wong, 2016).
What is missing from this literature is not evidence that self-transcendence matters for mental health — that evidence is now substantial and comes from multiple independent traditions of research — but a clinical model that treats self-transcendence as an active ingredient to be deliberately engineered into treatment, rather than as a side effect of therapy, a private matter of faith, or a topic reserved for the psychology of religion.
In this article, I argue that self-transcendence deserves formal status as a therapeutic target in its own right. I first outline the conceptual and neurobiological basis of self-transcendence and its relation to self-referential processing. I then review converging evidence linking self-transcendent states to reduced rumination, increased prosocial behavior, and greater life meaning. I go on to sketch what a self-transcendence-informed therapeutic model could look like in practice, drawing on both its logotherapeutic roots and its secular operationalizations. I close by addressing the central tension such a model must navigate: how to make clinical use of a construct with deep spiritual roots without either instrumentalizing spirituality for therapeutic ends or excluding it under a narrowly secular clinical framework.

What Is Self-Transcendence: From Concept to Neurobiology

Self-transcendence has been formally conceptualized as a multidimensional shift in the locus of a person’s identity and concern, away from a purely individual, bounded self and toward identification with something larger — other people, humanity, nature, or the transcendent (Levenson et al., 2005). This conceptualization deliberately spans two levels that are often studied separately: self-transcendence as a stable trait or developmental achievement, cultivated over decades and associated with the integration of wisdom in later life (Le & Levenson, 2005), and self-transcendence as an acute, transient state, triggered by a specific experience and dissipating within minutes to hours. Any therapeutic model built on self-transcendence has to reckon with both levels at once, since a trait-like capacity for self-transcendence likely shapes how readily a person can be moved into transient self-transcendent states, and repeated state-level experiences are a plausible pathway by which the trait itself develops.
The construct also spans a spectrum from explicitly religious and spiritual expressions of self-transcendence to entirely secular ones, and the literature has not always been consistent about where the boundary between these should fall. Meaning-seeking has been proposed as one of the most secular articulations of self-transcendence, tying it directly to well-being without requiring any reference to the sacred (Wong, 2016), while other work has mapped a broader set of pathways — including relational, creative, and nature-based routes — through which people arrive at self-transcendent experience regardless of religious framing (Worth & Smith, 2021). This diversity of pathways is not incidental to the construct; a recent methodological review cataloging how self-transcendence has been operationalized and measured across studies found substantial heterogeneity in both instruments and underlying definitions, which complicates comparison across the literature but also suggests that self-transcendence is not the property of any single tradition or intervention (Kitson et al., 2020).
At the level of mechanism, the most consistent thread across this heterogeneous literature is a reduction in self-referential processing — the degree to which attention, evaluation, and motivation remain anchored to the self as a reference point. Experimental work manipulating self-transcendent appeals directly has shown that engaging self-transcendent motives changes neural responses to health-relevant messages relative to self-focused appeals, providing direct evidence that the shift away from self-reference is not merely descriptive but has measurable neural correlates (Kang et al., 2018). Personality research reinforces this picture from a different angle: self-transcendence has been shown to moderate the relationship between neuroticism and both perspective-taking and materialism, suggesting that a greater capacity for self-transcendence changes how a self-focused disposition like neuroticism translates into outward-facing versus inward-facing concerns (Wegemer, 2020).
Awe offers perhaps the clearest paradigm case of an acute self-transcendent state with a well-characterized psychological signature. By definition, awe is elicited by encounters with stimuli that exceed one’s existing frame of reference — vast landscapes, extraordinary skill, moral exemplars — and its signature effect is what has been termed the “small self”: a temporary diminishment of the self’s perceived size and importance relative to the surrounding world (Perlin & Li, 2020). This shrinking of self-salience is not merely subjective; it is precisely the mechanism proposed to explain why awe reliably increases prosocial orientation and other-directed positive emotion, discussed further in the following section.
Taken together, these conceptual and neurobiological threads converge on a single underlying process, expressed differently across religious, secular, trait-level, and state-level instantiations: a controllable attenuation of self-referential salience, with measurable consequences for how a person allocates attention, evaluates experience, and orients toward others. It is this convergence — a shared mechanism beneath surface heterogeneity — that makes self-transcendence a plausible candidate for formal therapeutic engineering, rather than a loose family of unrelated phenomena that happen to share a name.

Memory, Narrative Identity, and the Architecture of Self-Focus

The self that self-transcendence is said to move attention away from is not a static entity waiting to be de-centered; it is continuously constructed, moment to moment, through the retrieval and integration of autobiographical memory. What has been termed the self-memory system binds episodic recollection to an organizing sense of “who I am,” and meta-analytic neuroimaging work has mapped the neural substrates that support this binding across studies (Martinelli et al., 2013). At the level of basic cognitive architecture, self-reference has been shown to actively integrate perception and memory, meaning that the self is not merely a filter applied after the fact to neutral memories, but a structuring principle built into how experience is encoded and later retrieved in the first place (Sui & Humphreys, 2015). This is why the continuity of one’s sense of self depends so heavily on autobiographical memory: when the capacity for autobiographical recollection is disrupted, the sense of a continuous, unified self is disrupted along with it (Prebble et al., 2013).
The neural substrate of this self-memory system overlaps substantially with the self-referential processing network discussed in the previous section as the target of self-transcendent attenuation. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex, implicated in the valuation of self-relevant information (D’Argembeau, 2013), shows heightened activity during self-referential reflection as measured directly with PET imaging (D’Argembeau et al., 2005), and this activity dissociates reliably from the processing of information about others, whether that self-relevant processing is implicit or explicit (Rameson et al., 2010). This is not a coincidental overlap: it means that the very network self-transcendent states have been shown to attenuate is the same network responsible for retrieving and valuing the autobiographical material out of which identity is built. Self-transcendence, in other words, does not act on some peripheral emotional byproduct of identity — it acts directly on the machinery that constructs identity in the first place.
Identity, however, is not merely an accumulation of retrieved memories; it is narratively organized. Narrative identity theory holds that adults construct and continually revise an internalized life story, integrating a reconstructed past and an imagined future to provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose, and that this narrative layer operates alongside — not merely on top of — dispositional traits in shaping personality (McAdams et al., 2004; McAdams & Olson, 2010). This narrative integration is itself a memory-dependent skill: autobiographical reasoning, the capacity to draw explicit causal and thematic connections between past events and one’s present self, develops across childhood and adolescence and is what allows isolated autobiographical memories to be woven into a coherent account of who one is (Habermas, 2011), a process that begins even earlier, in the co-constructed reminiscing through which autobiographical memory itself is first made available to a developing self (Fivush et al., 2011).
It is at this narrative layer that the “hyperfocus on the self” introduced earlier in this article becomes visible not as a vague clinical description but as a specific, memory-level failure mode. Narrative identity researchers have shown that certain recurring narrative patterns — most notably contamination sequences, in which a positive scene turns irrevocably negative without redemptive resolution — are measurably associated with worse psychological and life-satisfaction outcomes than their redemptive counterparts (Dunlop et al., 2020). Consistent with this, the capacity to regulate emotion during recall directly moderates how negative autobiographical memories are re-experienced, such that poorer emotion regulation is tied to more intrusive, less resolved re-encounters with one’s own past (Colombo et al., 2021), and a stable sense of self depends jointly on the specificity and the coherence with which autobiographical memories are recalled, such that deficits in either property leave the self-concept correspondingly destabilized (Vanderveren et al., 2017). Rumination — introduced earlier as a hallmark of self-focused psychopathology — can, in this light, be redescribed with more precision: not simply “thinking about oneself too much,” but a maladaptive mode of autobiographical memory retrieval, in which self-referential material is repeatedly reactivated without integration, resolution, or narrative repair.
Critically, autobiographical and self-defining memories are not fixed archival records; they are labile representations that are updated, for better or worse, every time they are retrieved. Human reconsolidation research shows that a retrieved memory re-enters a transient unstable state before being restabilized, during which its emotional content is open to modification by the conditions present at retrieval, and this basic mechanism has direct clinical relevance for how memory-focused interventions might be designed (Schwabe et al., 2014; Schiller & Phelps, 2011). Directly bearing on the present argument, experimentally inducing a positive emotional state during the retrieval of negative autobiographical memories has been shown to interfere with their reconsolidation (Piñeyro et al., 2018) — demonstrating concretely that it is not only a memory’s content that determines how it comes to be re-stored, but the affective and motivational state the rememberer occupies at the moment of retrieval, consistent with the broader principle that memory reconsolidation and memory updating are two sides of the same coin (Editorial, 2017; Lee et al., 2017).
This is the point at which the therapeutic promise of self-transcendence stops being merely correlational and becomes mechanistically concrete. Self-transcendent states are, by the account developed in the previous section, a distinct affective and motivational context: other-oriented rather than self-oriented, marked by a diminished rather than inflated self, saturated with meaning rather than threat. If such a state were deliberately occasioned during the therapeutic retrieval of self-defining, identity-relevant memories — the same memories that sustain contamination narratives and ruminative self-focus — reconsolidation research suggests this would not be a merely palliative exercise in mood management. It would be an intervention on the narrative material itself, with the potential to nudge identity-relevant memories away from static, ego-bound, contamination-marked self-concepts and toward the more redemptive, other-integrated narratives associated with generative, flourishing adult lives (McAdams & Guo, 2015; Bauer & Thomsen, 2022).
Taken together, this reframes what a self-transcendence-based therapeutic model is actually a model of. It is not simply a technique for making a person feel, in the moment, less absorbed in themselves. Because self-transcendence interfaces with the self-memory system, the narrative-identity apparatus built upon it, and the reconsolidation mechanisms by which both are continually rewritten, a therapeutic model of self-transcendence is, at its core, a model of how identity-relevant memory itself can be rewritten — which is precisely why it offers a plausible answer to the hyperfocus on the self identified at the outset of this article, rather than merely a temporary distraction from it.

Broader Evidence: Self-Transcendence and Well-Being Outcomes

Having established a mechanistic account of how self-transcendence interfaces with self-referential memory and identity, I now turn to the broader empirical base linking self-transcendent states and traits to well-being outcomes more directly. This literature has developed largely independently across several research communities — affective science, positive psychology, and the psychology of religion — which rarely cite one another despite converging on the same construct.
Awe research offers the most experimentally tractable evidence. Beyond its signature “small self” effect discussed above, awe reliably increases prosocial behavior, generosity, and ethical decision-making, and these effects have been replicated across induction methods ranging from vast natural scenes to virtual reality (Piff et al., 2015). Structured awe-elicitation interventions translate this laboratory finding into an everyday practice: brief, repeated “awe walks” have been shown to increase prosocial positive emotions such as compassion and gratitude in older adults over several weeks, with effects visible in daily emotional reports rather than only in a single laboratory session (Sturm et al., 2022). Physiological and electrophysiological work is beginning to characterize the state itself, describing awe as an ambivalent affect with a distinctive behavioral and cortical signature (Lee et al., 2025) and identifying spectral and complexity markers in EEG activity that distinguish it from other positive emotions (Chen et al., 2025, preprint), which strengthens the case that awe is a specific, identifiable state rather than a loose descriptive label.
Compassion-based interventions provide a second, independent line of evidence. Deliberate compassion training has been shown to change how the brain responds to the suffering of others, a shift consistent with reduced self-protective, self-referential processing and increased other-oriented engagement (Ashar et al., 2021). This dovetails with evidence at the group level: shared awe experiences have been linked to group cohesion and to the willingness to make self-sacrificial contributions to a collective, particularly within religious contexts that formalize and repeat such experiences ritually (Naclerio & Van Cappellen, 2022).
A third line of evidence comes from research on transcending self-interest more broadly, independent of any single induction method. Individuals who report greater capacity to transcend immediate self-interest also report better regulation of emotional expression and higher subjective well-being, suggesting that the benefits of self-transcendence are not restricted to acute awe or compassion states but extend to a more general orientation away from self-interest (Kao et al., 2017). Life-narrative research complements this picture developmentally: when adults in late midlife are asked to describe their own psychological growth in their own words, self-transcendence emerges as a recurring, spontaneously generated theme in the stories they tell about becoming better people, suggesting that self-transcendence is not only an experimentally inducible state but a naturally occurring axis along which people organize their own accounts of maturation (Reischer et al., 2021).
Finally, religious and spiritual practice constitutes the oldest and most culturally embedded route to self-transcendence, and it shows converging effects with the more secular literature above. Regular religious participation has been linked to increased prosocial behavior among practitioners, not merely to private well-being (Van Cappellen et al., 2016), and spiritual well-being — measured independently of any single denomination — has been identified as an underappreciated but distinct dimension of human flourishing, including within demanding vocational contexts such as pastoral work (Rudolph & Barnard, 2023). Broader flourishing scholarship situates these findings within a wider argument that human flourishing itself is best understood and measured multidimensionally, spanning meaning, character, and relationships as well as mental health narrowly defined (VanderWeele et al., 2023), and validated instruments such as the Spirituality Index of Well-Being make it possible to bring this dimension into standard health-related quality-of-life research rather than treating it as outside the scope of clinical measurement (Daaleman & Frey, 2004).
Across these largely independent literatures — awe, compassion training, self-interest transcendence, narrative accounts of growth, and religious practice — the same pattern recurs: a shift of attention and motivation away from the self is followed by measurable gains in prosocial behavior, emotion regulation, and subjective and spiritual well-being. The convergence of evidence across methods that share almost no common authorship is itself notable, and it is precisely this convergence, combined with the mechanistic account developed above, that motivates treating self-transcendence not as a peripheral correlate of well-being but as a candidate active ingredient for therapeutic design.

Toward a Therapeutic Model

If self-transcendence is both mechanistically tied to the neurocognitive architecture of identity and reliably associated with well-being across independent lines of evidence, the natural next question is what a therapeutic model built on this foundation would actually look like in practice. Clinical precedent already exists. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy placed the will to meaning, an inherently self-transcending motivational orientation, at the center of psychotherapeutic technique rather than treating meaning as a byproduct of symptom relief, and contemporary reappraisals continue to find it clinically generative — including for conditions, such as post-traumatic stress, that are themselves often characterized by intrusive, self-referential re-experiencing of traumatic memory (Chung, 1995). Logotherapy’s central contribution is arguably not any specific technique but its insistence that meaning-making is a treatment target in its own right, one capable of holding together religious and strictly secular articulations of meaning without collapsing one into the other, an insistence with clear relevance for any clinician working across a religiously diverse caseload (García Alandete, 2024; Schimmoeller & Rothhaar, 2021). Recent applications extend this logic well beyond its original psychiatric context, for instance into genetic counseling, where logotherapeutic principles have been proposed as a framework for supporting patients’ decision-making, adaptation, and sense of justice in the face of difficult diagnostic information (Chanouha et al., 2026), suggesting that the underlying model generalizes across clinical contexts organized around meaning-relevant decisions rather than being specific to any single diagnosis.
Translating this logotherapeutic foundation into a broader, secular-compatible therapeutic model suggests at least three concrete components, each already validated as an independent intervention in the literature reviewed above. First, structured awe elicitation — of which awe walks are the best-characterized example — offers a low-cost, repeatable practice for occasioning the acute “small self” state and its downstream prosocial and emotional benefits (Sturm et al., 2022). Second, compassion-focused practice offers a route to the same attenuation of self-protective, self-referential processing through a more relationally explicit route, particularly relevant for patients whose self-focus is organized around perceived threat from others (Ashar et al., 2021). Third, and most directly continuous with the memory-based mechanism developed above, structured meaning-making practices — guided reflection, autobiographical writing, and other techniques that engage self-defining memories directly — offer a route to occasioning self-transcendent states not incidentally but precisely at the moment when identity-relevant material is being retrieved and is therefore most available for reconsolidation (Wong, 2016).
What distinguishes a genuine therapeutic model from an unstructured menu of “spiritual” techniques is the claim that self-transcendence functions as an active therapeutic ingredient — a process variable to be deliberately engineered at specific points in treatment — rather than as an outcome to be measured only after treatment has concluded, or as an incidental benefit of practices undertaken for other reasons. Concretely, this reframes the clinical task: instead of asking only whether a patient’s well-being has improved, a self-transcendence-informed model asks whether, and how reliably, a given intervention is capable of occasioning a self-transcendent state at the moment a patient is engaging with identity-relevant emotional material — the same moment, per the previous section, at which that material is most open to being rewritten.

Limits, Tensions, and a Research Agenda

A model of this kind must be advanced with two forms of caution, one methodological and one ethical. The methodological caution follows directly from the heterogeneity already noted in how self-transcendence has been operationalized and measured across the literature (Kitson et al., 2020): most of the evidence reviewed above is correlational, cross-sectional, or drawn from single-session experimental inductions, and very little of it directly tests self-transcendence as a mediator of therapeutic change over the course of treatment, as opposed to a correlate of well-being measured at a single time point. The reconsolidation mechanism proposed above is, at present, a plausible and evidence-consistent hypothesis, not a demonstrated clinical effect; it has not, to my knowledge, been directly tested by occasioning self-transcendent states during the therapeutic retrieval of self-defining memories in a controlled clinical trial. This is the most direct and, in my view, most important empirical gap this article identifies: longitudinal and trial-based designs that track identity-relevant memory content, narrative structure, and clinical outcome together, before and after self-transcendence-based intervention, would be necessary to move the argument developed here from a plausible mechanism to a validated one.
The ethical caution concerns the temptation to instrumentalize spirituality. Self-transcendence has deep roots in religious and contemplative traditions for which it is not a wellness technique but a constitutive part of a life oriented toward the sacred, and a clinical model that treats it merely as a mechanism for symptom reduction risks flattening this meaning into a productivity hack — “transcend yourself for better outcomes” — in a way that would be experienced, correctly, as reductive or even exploitative by patients for whom self-transcendence is a matter of faith rather than technique. At the same time, a narrowly secular clinical framework that excludes explicitly religious and spiritual expressions of self-transcendence risks discarding precisely the route to self-transcendence that is most accessible, most culturally resonant, and most already-practiced for many patients (Van Cappellen et al., 2016). Navigating between these two failure modes — instrumentalizing spirituality on one side, secular exclusion on the other — is not a peripheral detail to be resolved after the model is built; it is a design constraint that should shape the model from the outset, most plausibly by allowing patients themselves to select the register (explicitly religious, broadly spiritual, or entirely secular) through which they engage self-transcendent practice, rather than the clinician or the model prescribing one register for all.

Conclusion

This article has argued that self-transcendence deserves formal status as a therapeutic target for emotional regulation and mental health care, not merely as a byproduct of religious engagement or an outcome measured after the fact. The case rests on three converging pillars: a conceptual and neurobiological account of self-transcendence as a controllable attenuation of self-referential processing; a mechanistic argument, grounded in the neurobiology of autobiographical memory and narrative identity, that this same attenuation interfaces directly with the machinery that constructs and maintains the self-focused, ego-bound patterns of attention characteristic of rumination and related psychopathology; and a broad, if still largely uncoordinated, empirical literature linking self-transcendent states and traits — awe, compassion, meaning-seeking, and religious practice alike — to prosocial behavior, emotion regulation, and well-being.
Frankl insisted that the search for meaning could not be reduced to the pursuit of pleasure, and clinical psychology’s subsequent, largely self-focused turn toward symptom management should not be read as having settled that argument so much as having set it aside. The evidence reviewed here suggests it is time to take it back up, not as a philosophical aside to psychotherapy but as a candidate mechanism of change in its own right — one already technically implementable through structured, low-cost practices such as awe elicitation, compassion training, and guided meaning-focused reflection, whether delivered in person or, increasingly, through structured digital tools designed to support such reflection at scale. I close, therefore, with a direct call to the clinical and research communities addressed by this journal: to design the controlled, longitudinal work needed to test self-transcendence not merely as something that correlates with a flourishing life, but as something that can be deliberately, safely, and respectfully engineered into the process of healing.

Funding

This work received no external funding.

Ethical approval

Not applicable. This is a theoretical/opinion article; it does not report new studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.

Data availability

Not applicable. No new data were generated or analyzed in this article.

Competing Interests

The author is affiliated with CATE Latam, TeachBeyond, and KeenFisher. KeenFisher develops digital tools for guided emotional reflection, an application area related to the therapeutic model discussed in this article. The author declares this affiliation as a potential competing interest and confirms that no product, service, or commercial offering of any affiliated organization is named, promoted, or evaluated in this article.

Preregistration

This article does not report an empirical study; therefore, no preregistration applies.

Use of AI tools

During the preparation of this manuscript, the author used Claude (Anthropic, 2026; Sonnet 5), an AI-based language model, to assist with reference verification against source materials, citation formatting, consistency checking, and manuscript formatting in accordance with the journal’s submission guidelines. All substantive arguments, interpretations, and conclusions are the author’s own; the AI tool was not used to generate original scientific claims or data. A complete log of AI-assisted edits is provided in the supplemental file “AI Assistance Disclosure and Edit Log.” The author reviewed, edited, and takes full responsibility for the content and conclusions of this publication. No AI tool is credited as an author. For preparation of this preprint version, the tool additionally merged the previously separate title page, abstract, and main document into a single file and standardized the author byline.

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