From Experience to Identity: A Conditional Ownership-Process Model of Selfhood, Agency, Emotion, and Psychological Distress

This paper proposes the Conditional Ownership-Process Model, a secular philosophical-psychological framework for explaining how ordinary experience can become self-binding psychological distress. Its central contribution is to identify ownership attribution as the pivot between experience and identity: an event becomes psychologically consequential not merely because it occurs, but because it is appraised as self-relevant, incorporated into a self-model, expanded through narrative construction, and reinforced through action or rumination. The model develops a ten-step sequence: input, affective valence, cognitive appraisal, ownership attribution, narrative construction, emotional-motivational activation, agency point, action or rumination, reinforcement, and identity pattern. The sequence is conditional rather than deterministic. It is used to reframe problems concerning selfhood, agency, moral responsibility, emotion, motivation, narrative identity, self-deception, trauma, therapy mechanisms, well-being, memory, and related philosophical questions. The paper is conceptual and phenomenologically informed rather than experimental. It draws on Western philosophy, moral psychology, cognitive psychology, embodied cognition, narrative identity theory, compatibilist agency, emotion regulation research, habit learning, and clinical-theoretical models. Its aim is not to provide a final metaphysical or clinical solution, but to make several problems of lived experience more tractable through a recursive ownership-process framework.