Notice when the self you authored starts defending itself

Watch for the moment a challenge to your principles lands as an attack on you, and name it.

Pourquoi ça marche

At the fourth order the self-authored system is still subject: a challenge to the system is felt as a challenge to the self. Susanne Cook-Greuter describes the ego as laboring to create and maintain meaning and vigorously defending against dissonant information. Catching the defense in the act — the heat, the rehearsed rebuttal, the urge to discredit the speaker — marks the place where the system is still being lived as identity, which is exactly what the fifth order is said to see through.

Comment faire

1. List the three or four convictions you would most hate to have challenged.
2. For a week, note each time one of them is questioned and what happened in your body and your speech in the first ten seconds.
3. In the moment, say to yourself: "This is my framework being defended, not my life."
4. Then ask one genuine question about the challenge before answering it.
5. Afterward, write whether the challenge contained anything true that your defense would have kept out.

Données probantes

Cook-Greuter (2018) describes the ego as "the tireless organizer, interpreter, and synthesizer of experience" that defends vigorously against dissonant information, and places the recognition of this narrative function at her Construct-Aware stage. Bauger and Bongaardt (2018), drawing on Kegan (1994), describe the fifth order as the point at which a person is no longer blind to their self-authored identity. The noticing practice applies both descriptions and is untested. (mechanistic)

Cook-Greuter’s ego development stages and Kegan’s orders are related but separate models, scored with different instruments; their later stages are not interchangeable.

Sources

• Cook-Greuter, S. (2018). The Construct-Aware Stage of Ego Development and its Relationship to the Fool Archetype. Integral Review, 14(1), 300–310.
• Bauger, L., & Bongaardt, R. (2018). Structural developmental psychology and health promotion in the third age. Health Promotion International, 33(4), 686–694.
• Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

Erreur fréquente

Treating every defensive reaction as proof the other person is right. The point is to see that the defense is happening, so you can listen; the challenge may still be wrong.