Value systems and Worldviews

Because they are easily recognisable, value systems are an excellent introduction to development. But from the beginning, the discussion is more complex than this (you can read a bit on 'proficiency').

The idea is that we have some systems of belief that can be put in a hierarchy of complexity. And then rank them... yes, then you can say you are cooler than your neighbour.

That is the problem with developmental systems that we tend to use to see the issues of the people around us, not our own. We tend to position ourselves a lot higher than where we are and to look as if from a vantage point.

I like and find developmental models extremely useful because they organise much of my thinking. However, before explaining this model to you, I must also make a good case for not using them.

This applies to more things, like using DSM or any other category: they are like lenses that highlight a part of reality and obscure others.

Therefore, they are useful, but they make us make lots of mistakes on their own. We always need to triangulate with more than one paradigm and, even better, more than one person.

In my opinion, we are some of the worst judges of our character, and that is because who you really are needs to be invisible to yourself. That is a developmental thought I have, coming after reading Robert Kegan, who says that the one you are cannot be seen; you can only see the one you have been, the one you have. Therefore, the one you are is always invisible to you until you have a developmental jump, a deep insight, a change of paradigm, and the one you are becomes old and not you anymore.

The one you are is always in creation/discovery; it is always on the verge of being something new and leaving a self behind. The "I" becomes "me" and needs a new "I".

We also are bad at seeing our shadows. We do not see our dark parts if they are not brought to us by messing up, which means other people call us out. The only way of real growth is by repairing our messes, not by deep introspection and reading books. Those last two are useful, but it is always more useful, something that surprises us and usually comes from an unexpected angle.

So here I will describe some stages of development. Be careful with them. I think we are always in all of them; we only put one to the front for some periods and tend to access the higher ones more often.

If you leave the lower levels behind, you are also in trouble because healthy development needs integration, not slicing yourself in repressions, forclusions or dissociations.

The next is based on Spyral dynamics, Robert Kegan and Ken Wilber. I will make some personal touches on this as well.

Dependant

A person who needs other people to make all the decisions. It predominates in the first year of life and slowly recedes as you grow. It will accompany you all your life in close relationships and fragile moments.

It is a part that is always with us, and the more you grow, the more you learn to take care of your tender and fragile self.

The risk of leaving this part behind is to fill it with narcissistic inflation that tries to hide fragility by looking strong and secure and then having moments of intense fragility you need to hide by being stronger.

When this stage is presented, there is no rulebook to follow, which makes it different from traditional (even though they share a need for others). Both stages need constant input from others.

Self-centred

This stage is all about yourself, but not really; it is more about how others see you. It is about being great in the eyes of your parents and then other people around you.

It is also a stage of discovering yourself as something big, important, creative, and full of surprises and new colours.

It is a stage of healthy narcissism when you are defining who you are. You may try many identities by playing characters and messing with other kids.

As this stage develops, it incorporates other kids, sometimes leading to conflicts of interest and clashes of ego.

When we see adults fixated in this stage, we can sense that they need to be the centre of attention. They dominate the conversation and are sometimes a bit feeble in their logic (any resemblance with some politicians is not a coincidence).

At this stage, others are seeing as a tool for my goals, as I am slowly making sense of what it is to be a person myself, and others need to be something closer to objects.

As I grow from this stage, I understand that others also have their own needs and own self. I realise I am being cared for and need others to be myself.

Traditional

Also called inter-personal by Kegan, it is a stage of belonging to groups, couples, and close friendships. Our identities move from being centred on us to being centred on close interaction. In a way, we identify more with the collective than with ourselves.

This stage is crucial as it also introduces the need for rules. We are reaching higher abstraction, as rules are an abstract construction. We start following them to be good and not make mistakes for our group.

As we use our minds to understand the group and its rules, we do not have space yet to think of ourselves and to have personal opinions and experiences.

For that reason, as we grow out of it, we slowly learn that we can make choices, that the rules are for a reason and that we can also make our own.

Now, we understand the collective and other collectives and want to be part of a bigger group. We see society as a space to grow and our identity as something to develop.

Many trainees start in this stage or need a way to tune in with this stage to become part of a tradition. Sometimes, I feel it is a mistake in training when I see students questioning with clear experiences and examples, and the lecturer responds, "Wait, we will explain in another class". This stops dialogue and curiosity, and discourages the next step. (I was tutoring in a class where this happened often and it was painful to see a lecturer say this to hide they did not know the answer, nor how to reflect with his students).

Modern

As we move beyond the group, we develop a new sense of self, which is now more abstract and positioned in a social coordinate. We also start understanding the rules of the world, physics, and ourselves.

We aim for greatness and feel that figuring out how things work will lead us there. If we keep finding the right rules, the world will open to us.

Progress and development emerge in this stage but as a linear and mechanical thing. Something achievable only by pushing forward.

Our minds are concentrated on getting better, and in a way, still trying to fit into a group. We create a little bubble in our minds that feels like we are getting it all, but it slowly shows that there are little problems with our linear logic.

Sometimes, friends and partners may feel like far away people at this stage, distinctive from us, like we are two interesting people together but with less in common than before.

We slowly learn that relationships are messy and enmeshed and that making them work requires more effort than we thought and that may make us start questioning this stage.

When we qualify as therapists, we need to feel we can be independent thinkers in the room and that we understand our tradition well, so we need to reach this stage.

Anti-modern

It is somewhat in parallel with modern, but more a response to its pathological side. Some of us may have only a short period here; some may stay long and make it some parallel development at the side of modern.

Counter-modern groups emerge when modern becomes too rigid into one sphere (religion, science, art, politics) or excludes a group.

We may have a crisis with modernity or never feel it fits us. In this case, we must take steps to become more knowledgeable and independent. Still, we may join other, more collective groups and read alternative narratives and philosophies.

In our case, the hippie and new age tried to compensate for the intense centre in science and aggressive politics, showing we can develop in other ways that modernity was leaving behind.

There is usually a crisis after our modern or anti-modern minds. In a way, both need to collide and find a way forward, that is, neither of the other two.

Integrative

When we enter integrative, we are still grappling with the conflict between modern and anti-modern, but we start creating patterns that can handle the contradiction.

We may see that both sides have a point. We may stay in our trench but make it more flexible, like a scientist who is still materialistic but accepts there may be some truth in Buddhism.

In moral terms, this stage opens up the possibility of thinking that all cultures are equivalent, that all may have their own development, and that the conflicts we see in our culture show us that culture itself is problematic as a dividing concept.

We may start creating more complex mind maps and attempting to have more holistic views of our fields, politics, and ourselves.

Integrative somehow completes the modern project but simultaneously opens up a new stage that goes beyond this conflict.

Post Modern/Compost

I like putting post-modern here, even if Wilber has it in the anti-modern step. This is because if you read post-modern authors, they are usually complex and problematic, with multiple things that go far beyond the modern level. However, when you listen to the followers of post-modern authors, you may feel like it has stepped down in complexity quite a bit.

This starts a process of deconstructing ideas and systems. As Gödel's incompleteness theorem proved, the same idea of making a system is flawed.

You may still believe systems are helpful, but you feel they lack the shiny quality they had before. You start appreciating the messiness that the system leaves behind and wonder if maybe there is where we should be paying attention.

How do we observe the cracks in our minds?

Maybe we can slow down, dissolve our ego, and dismantle our mind systems to see what we can find.

In a way, it is the first time we can question the mind itself, and therefore, it is the same time we can say the mind may be problematic and that the project itself could stop for a bit.

We may have a Heideggerian feeling of thoroughness, like being thrown to life and then finding ourselves in a place we did not reflect upon.

A new name for them is “compost”, referring to the breaking to make the growth of nature. Dissolving to make a new, not to let things fall.

Interindividual

Robert Kegan proposed this stage, and it is interesting for many reasons.

A purely conceptual one is that Wilber places it higher than Kegan himself, and I follow suit by adding the previous steps after Modern. Kegan proposes that Inter-individual comes after modern, and it may be that the last two attempt to sort modern thinking but still not overcome it.

This stage resembles traditional, but it is different in many aspects. The similarity is that at this stage, we may again feel part of relationships and groups, merging with others.

The difference is that we maintain a sense of self, and then we can easily return to our centre.

He calls it inter-individual because we have already delineated our individual-in-society self in modern and then have let that go to be part of bigger wholes. We can see the multiplicity that an individual entails, the multiple systems they inhabit, the cultural and relational layers, and the complexity of their minds, and be part of it at the same time, that being ourselves.

This stage also allows us to see ourselves as multiple individuals and explore the many of us that make ourselves. We can dialogue with our younger selves without a contradiction as we can hold more than one 'individual' in ourselves.

I believe that many of the founders of therapeutic traditions were at this stage, and they arrived at different versions of it.

When Carl Rogers talks about the conditions for therapy, I think he is referring to the capacity of this level to stay with another without losing yourself. I have always found some of his almost mystical descriptions of practising in complete attunement to the needs of his clients fascinating.

When Fritz Perls talks about being yourself without needing the approval of others and completing Gestalts of the past, with his unparalleled capacity to 'call people's shit' and be assertive and attuned at the same time, it seems to me as a capacity of this level.

Also, Freud, with his mind able to narrate his clients' stories as if they were mystery novels and follow the clues to find the last answer. We can follow in his stages of inquiry how his mind was getting deeper and deeper and reaching a more complex understanding of transference and the impacts of our past.

When Jung starts his own path and separates from the tradition to then find the archetypes and the mystical texts of alchemy, he starts writing about the Self as a centre that connects your own individuality with the collective.

Many of them had strong attachments with other levels, as we all have. But it seems to me that our beloved authors tend to move here and be able to create a tradition that they then manage to describe and share.

But their path takes them here, their difficulties, their fight with the previous groups, their discoveries, the defence of a new truth, and the creation of a new group.

And that is a big problem for how today's traditions are organised. As we get a digested version of that long path, we get the conclusions without the steps.

This is great because it saves us time and gives us organisation, and it is a shame because nobody encourages us to find our unique growth path.

Many therapy teachers I have met seem to push students to a rigid understanding of the 'rules' and, therefore, keep students in a traditional or, at best, modern understanding of their practice. They may also make you feel that if you speak your opinions, they may expel you or look you down.

One of CreaTherapy's goals is to enable a process where you make your path as you learn from the giants. But if you do not question, have a crisis, wonder, or challenge, you can stay comfortable following what others have discovered.

We step on the shoulders of giants, but after a while, we need to become giants ourselves to breathe new life into our traditions (or create new ones).

Inter-Individual allow us to stop fighting inside and outside about points of view and let us be part again of a collective where our selves can merge and not be lost.

Intra-grative

This stage is one I am adding to the discussion, and I do not know if it goes somewhat parallel with inter-individual. Wilber proposes some higher stages that are more mystical so you can check those out. I will colse with this one.

The idea is as follows: integrative seems to me like a cognitive understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives. Intra-grative is an embodied and transformative understanding of of other perspectives.

You need yourself to relax into otherness to feel safe doing so.

Being able to relax into other schools, traditions and authors, opens a richer spectrum of skills and experience. Instead of seeing other techniques as interesting, you may experiment with them, try and modify them. You feel free to do so because you are grounded in reliable systems of rules and practices, and you trust yourself out of your own growth.

This whole project encourages people to see this as the goal and, therefore, start taking more action in this direction.

One of the paradoxes of development is that you sometimes can see the roots of many of these higher levels already in children. They are always there, just in a more fleeting way.

When children play with trusted others, they may take roles, be present, look at you curiously, and then return to being themselves. A secure attachment allows a child to experiment with many of the components of inter-individual, as described by Kegan. That makes me wonder if he arrived at it because he had a secure attachment. Therefore, it became his higher level.

Sometimes, I feel that the context we grow up in may already plant seeds of development that keep growing as we do so. If a parent is respectful but close, playful and creative, and, at the same time, responsible and present, they are setting deep structures in a child's unconscious that prove that this is possible and may protect them as they grow up.

Like a serpent that eats its tail, maybe how we teach, parent, and practice is essential to invite others to go further and in healthy ways.

Even more profoundly, the ways we already care for ourselves and others may be blocking or enabling our development in some areas. We may need to be mindful that others may need other paths or question our path.

I was surprised to read Winnicott and Wilber at a similar time, as both discussed the 'non-dual' in different ways: Winnicott discussed the transitional space in children (which for me is a non-dual space), and Wilber discussed the higher levels of enlightenment (when self, spirit and matter are the same).