Treat the stages you outgrew with respect when you meet them in others

Notice contempt for people who see the world the way you used to, and treat it as a sign of exclusion rather than growth.

Por que funciona

If each stage includes the essential capacities of the ones before, then the views you have moved past still carry something your current view depends on. Contempt for those views — in your parents, a younger colleague, your own teenage child — suggests the earlier stage was split off rather than integrated, the move Wilber calls morbid negation. Looking for what that way of seeing gets right turns the encounter back into inclusion.

Como fazer

1. Notice the moment you feel superior or embarrassed when someone talks the way you once did — about faith, ambition, loyalty, rules.
2. Name one thing that way of seeing gave you when you held it, or gives them now: certainty, drive, belonging, safety.
3. Ask whether you still use that thing somewhere in your own life, even under another name.
4. In the conversation, respond to what they value before you say where you differ.

Evidência

The principle that later levels include earlier ones is set out in Esbjörn-Hargens’s overview of integral theory, which illustrates it as sensations held within impulses, impulses within emotions, and so on to concepts. The reading of contempt as a sign of exclusion is an application of Wilber’s (1984) account of morbid negation, not a research finding. (anecdotal)

Stage language can itself become a tool for looking down on people. Nothing here says your current view is higher, or that views you left were wrong to leave; it only says the earlier way of seeing carried something worth keeping.

Fontes

• Esbjörn-Hargens, S. (2010). An Overview of Integral Theory: An All-Inclusive Framework for the Twenty-First Century. In S. Esbjörn-Hargens (Ed.), Integral Theory in Action: Applied, Theoretical, and Constructive Perspectives on the AQAL Model. SUNY Press. (First circulated as Integral Institute Resource Paper No. 1, 2009.)
• Wilber, K. (1984). The Developmental Spectrum and Psychopathology: Part I, Stages and Types of Pathology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16(1), 75–118.

Erro comum

Using “they are at an earlier stage” as a more polite form of contempt. If the frame makes you feel above someone, it is being used the wrong way round.