Turn your view back on yourself

Take the perspective you can now hold of others and turn it around so you see yourself from it.

Pourquoi ça marche

O’Fallon’s fourth tenet is that a mature stage opens the next one when its view is turned back on the self. Her clearest example is the child’s move into a second-person perspective: "I see you see me." The same reversal repeats later — seeing others’ projections and then seeing your own, or seeing others as shaped by context and then seeing yourself as shaped by it.

Comment faire

1. Pick something you see clearly in others: how they are shaped by their culture, how they project, how their goals fail to deliver what they expected.
2. Ask the reversed question: "Where is this true of me, right now, in a way I have not looked at?"
3. Ask someone who knows you well the same question about you, and listen without correcting.
4. Write down one instance you can now see that you could not see before.

Données probantes

The fourth tenet and the "I see you see me" example appear in O’Fallon (2020), which connects second-person perspective-taking to Fowler’s stages of faith and Piaget’s operations. Related research on perspective-taking supports turning attention to how others see you, but this exact reversal practice has not been studied as an intervention. (mechanistic)

Proposed mechanism from the model’s author; turning a view on yourself can be uncomfortable and works best with a trusted other rather than alone.

Sources

• O’Fallon, T. (2020). States and STAGES: Waking up Developmentally. Integral Review, 16(1).

Erreur fréquente

Turning the view into self-criticism. Seeing that you project is the point; punishing yourself for it re-creates the same blind spot in a new form.