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.
Why it works
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.
How to do it
- 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.
- Ask the reversed question: "Where is this true of me, right now, in a way I have not looked at?"
- Ask someone who knows you well the same question about you, and listen without correcting.
- Write down one instance you can now see that you could not see before.
Evidence
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
Common mistake
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.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES Model, Made Practical
- Notice what your attention treats as real objects
Sort a day’s concerns into concrete, subtle, and awareness-level objects to see which tier you mostly live in.
- Find the confusion your stage is working on
Use O’Fallon’s list of stage-specific confusions to locate the blind spot that is currently live for you.
- Shine a new capacity on the old confusion
Use whatever you can newly do — reflect on your thinking, notice context — to look straight at the confusion instead of around it.
- Practice the orientation your stage is not leaning toward
If your stage leans individual, deliberately practice the collective view, and the reverse.
- Walk an idea through four ways of holding it
Take one hard idea from receptive, to either/or, to both/and, to seeing how the two sides define each other.
- Use a scored assessment instead of self-typing
If you want to know your stage, take a sentence completion test scored by a trained rater rather than matching yourself to descriptions.
- Expect fallback and meet it without judgment
Plan for the times you make meaning from an earlier stage under stress, and treat them as information.
Related concepts
- Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
Moving from being run by your assumptions to being able to examine them
- Spiral Dynamics, Made Practical
Understanding how value systems develop and how to navigate across them
- Self-Authorship: Moving From the Socialized to the Self-Authored Mind
Kegan’s stages, subject-object moves, and authoring your own life
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