Adult Development: The Return
There is more to discover where you have already trod
Adult developmental stages are sometimes discussed from the perspective of how earlier stages are limited forms of participation in the world compared to subsequent stages. But the converse is also true: each earlier developmental stage has potential that is only revealed in the context of contributing to fullness in later stages. Starting from the peak of adult development, let us explore how each stage illuminates potential in the prior one.
The Flourishing Self: the culminating adult development stage is the capability to create a collectively inhabited lifeworld, most fundamentally a well-composed constitution of roles that creates a way of life. Roles function within the lifeworld as generators of the social and cultural structures. Each inhabitant of a role, when the role inhabits them, ensures an aspect of the lifeworld remains in existence. To be inhabited by a role requires the capability to participate in a relational and behavioral form, the capability that fully appeared as the Organized Self.
The Organized Self: virtuosity here is being able to view the world as a role, communicate as a role, and act as a role. Such strong patterning has the danger of its own momentum not evolving to match changed circumstances. The role serves a lifeworld, but the lifeworld serves people. The Flourishing Self reveals that the Organized Self must evolve as circumstances change. The path of evolution that maintains flourishing is revealed in the field of human intimacy, and so depends on the Intimate Self to guide evolution in a way that maintains service to its participants.
The Intimate Self: intimacy, practiced as attunement, is about virtuosity in skillful and mutually responsive improvisation as a group within shared situations: a hunting party, theatrical improv, an entrepreneurial organization. The Organized Self reveals a container that allows intimacy to build in pressure and potency, with minimal leakage of energy. The foundational aspect of effective social improvisation within intimacy is individual agency, otherwise improvisation collapses into a dead form without the creative spark of individual distinctiveness: vibrant intimacy depends on the Agentic Self.
The Agentic Self: virtuosity here is to both have a refined aesthetic that selects from the raw material of bodily feelings and apply an unstoppable will that realizes these seed movements as actuality in the world. The relationships of the Intimate Self reveal new possibilities for the Agentic Self, not seen in self-reflection. Where does the raw material for the Agentic Self’s shaping come from? The Feeling Self.
The Feeling Self: Virtuosity at this stage is being in touch with the subtlest movement of energies such as desire, emotions, and inchoate urges. These energies move us to action. This sensitivity is the foundation of responsiveness. We may free ourselves from being slaves to impulses by suppression; this is a weak foundation for further adult development. Virtuosity here is being exquisitely sensitive to such impulses, in particular prior to them coalescing into meaning, and letting action potentials be illuminated by them, without compulsion of action. We have arrived at the ground of adult development. The Agentic Self reveals the Feeling Self as a domain capable of conscious development, whereas on the original ascent, it happened outside the realm of agency, an involuntary atmosphere.
As we return back through the adult developmental stages, Flourishing Self, Organized Self, Intimate Self, Agentic Self, Feeling Self, we see how, from the perspective of each subsequent stage, what it means to be fully developed at each prior stage is revealed. If you are interested in your own adult development, do not only look “ahead”. There is always ore found abundantly across the stages of adult development.
This is beautifully expressed and really resonates with how I experience working with patterns. They are something to be seen and integrated, rather than replaced with another fixed way of being.
As you said so eloquently, the developmental stages feel more like landmarks in a multidimensional landscape. The paths we take in relation to them aren’t linear or uniform—they wind, loop, and unfold in deeply individual ways.
Thinking on this and reflecting on my own experiences, I have noticed how my psyche has a trauma-conditioned wiring that goes like this in a rapid+automatic processing flow- triggering of pain+fear (in layer 1, pure feeling) -> gripping of intense resistance in the will, movement of self-protection (in layer 2) -> gripping of mental grasping at neurotic uncertainty reduction (in layer 4. not layer 4 as integrated into the whole stack, which this rendition of the model reflects, but gripping in layer 4 in terms of its stand-alone nature as 'abstracting-cognition' or something like that).
I also think of how, in spiral dynamics, a complementary developmental psychology model, it is noted that each subsequent stage oscillates between an emphasis on self and an emphasis on other. In the kegan model I think that would perhaps map to sthing like this- layer 1/pure feeling (self-other not differentiated), layer 2/will (self-emphasis), layer 3/adaptation to others (other-emphasis), layer 4/abstraction structure (self-emphasis), layer 5/formlessness/undefined (self-other again undifferentiated). and in a traumatised mind configured in a certain way, the self-other undifferentiated layers (1 and 5), are perceived by the selfing poles, of 2 and 4, as threats to the self-boundary, ie as other (as is layer 3). Thus creating a split in the psyche where there is a strong polarisation between 2 and 4, which form a mutually contracting loop, and 1, 3 and 5, which are the potential opening-points (and therefore fear-zones) for the undoing of the rigid 2 <-> 4 trauma adaptation.
I found it interesting how my particular traumatised modification of the functioning of the stack relies on a consolidation around the 2 self-poles, layers 2 and 4, in an attempted self-stabilising loop of will+cognition (or you could say control+prediction), against the chaos/trauma felt in layer 1. It made me curious about other possible traumatic stack configurations that might exist in other people, like is there a typology of specific ways that the functioning of the stack gets split and the information flow (?) re-arranged from its optimal functioning (which is the fluid open interconnectedness of all layers). Curious of any thoughts you have on that Ari! It seems like one could potentially make an entire typology of the types of ways the stack can be pathologically split via adaptation to unresolved trauma, as a way to map this to for example the central recognised categories of personality configuration in the DSM, or in attachment theory, or in enneagram etc. And then perhaps that map could guide targeted inner-tech practice interventions for specifically configured types.