Level One: Basic Emotional
Responsibility
They learn to drop expressions from their speech that show disownership of feelings and a helpless or victim attitude towards their feelings. Expressions such as: "They made me feel . . . , " "It made me feel . . . ," "I made them feel. . . ," and any others that denote external emotional responsibility are first changed into "I" statements as opposed to "You" or blaming statements. They are, for example, changed from, "You make me so mad when you do that," to "I feel mad when you do that because . . . ."
People learn at this level to regularly use the following expressions: "When you did . . . , I felt . . . , because . . . ." "When . . . happened, I felt . . . , because . . . ."
As time and maturity advance, they begin to use even more accurate statements that inhibit the Blame Game such as: "I chose to feel . . . when I did . . . , because . . . ." "I choose to feel . . . whenever . . . happens, because . . . ." "I chose to feel . . . when he, she, it, did . . . , because . . . ." "I am in the habit of choosing to feel . . . whenever my/your . . . says anything to me, because . . . ."
Level Two: Emotional Honesty
Emotional honesty concerns the
willingness of the person to know and own their own feelings.
This is a necessary step to
self-understanding and acceptance.
The issues of resistance to
self-discovery are dealt with at this level.
They are related solely to the
person's conscious and unconscious fears of dealing directly with the
critical voices they hear inside.
In the past, they have typically
lost all interactions with this internal adversary, so their fears
are justified. Now, however, they know how to choose to feel so that
they can keep from being destroyed, or they can choose not to
interact with their accuser at all.
The realization of the old maxim,
"To thine own self be true," is the primary goal at this
level. This means that we are always true to what we feel: we do not
hide, stuff, suppress, or repress what we feel, but honestly
experience it at this level of maturity. Here, you are at least
honest with yourself about how you really feel.
As a secondary goal on this level,
people learn to locate others with whom they can safely share their
real feelings, their real selves.
Level 3: Emotional Openness
This level concerns the person's
willingness and skills in sharing their feelings in an appropriate
manner and at appropriate times.
Persons at this level experience and
learn the value of ventilating feelings, and also the dangers
involved in hiding feelings from self and others.
Self-disclosure is the important
issue at this level of work. Yet, it will never be as important as
the willingness of the person to be open to experiencing all of their
feelings as they arise without the critical voices they hear inside
trying to change, control, or condemn them.
The dangers of suppressing feelings,
and the values inherent in exploring and allowing all feelings
internal expression are investigated further.
At this level, one has the openness,
the freedom to experience any emotion without the need, the
compulsion to suppress or repress it.
The person at this level of work
enters a new era of positive self-expression.
The primary goal here is to be able
to ask for and to receive the nurturing that one needs and
wants--first from self and then from others.
As a secondary goal, persons should
learn how to express any feeling appropriately in any situation,
i.e., without aggressive overtones.
This person makes time for their
feelings--they prize and respect them. Such understand the connection
between suppressed feelings, stress, and illness.
Persons on this level understand the
actual cause and effect process of emotional responsibility and
irresponsibility.
Self-concepts are known as "the"
problem. They realize that it is not possible to have a so-called
good self-concept without a complimentary bad self-concept.
Such experience firsthand, that
because of the nature of knowledge and the formation of
self-concepts, that all self-concepts contain their opposites.
Knowing that though we may hide one half in darkness
(unconsciousness) it is still active in us; they begin to regularly
leap beyond the pitfalls of self-concepts, self-images, and
self-constructs.
This knowledge of the Unity of
Opposites (of self-concepts, of knowledge) is applied to new
situations daily. Other understandings at this level include the
following: attempts to capture a moment of self can only kill the
self as the self is a living process and not knowledge or memory; to
reduce self to knowledge is literally to kill it; one either has
their self and is alive and experiencing, or one has found their self
as knowledge and lost it.
Self-concepts are always externally
referenced by their very nature, and thus forever the perfect targets
and hooks for the Blame Game.
Knowing that self-concepts are the
only hooks that can be used in the Blame Game, people at this level
remember to work on seeing their own self-concepts and finding
release from their own.
Self-knowledge is used to free the
self from self-concepts on this level rather than to form them and
imprison the self in them.
The main work here is a total shift
from identifying with any self-concepts to identifying only with the
true self.
Level Six: Emotional Detachment
At this level the person lives
without the burden and snare of self-concepts, self-images,
self-constructs, and all group-concepts and thing-concepts.
They are only aware of self as
process, as a sensing being, as an experiencing being, as a living
vessel, as unknowable and untrappable--because it is alive and not
static or fixed.
They have died to the life of self
as self-concepts. True detachment from all self-concepts has
occurred.
Thus true detachment from others has
also occurred, which means that absolute emotional responsibility has
been achieved (actually discovered).
Not having self-concepts to defend
or promote, this person can remain unaffected by the Blame Game, and
even experiences unconditional love for their enemies.
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