What did your biggest stage transition actually look like?

[Joshe]

What do transitions between stages actually look like?

We talk about the stages constantly here but almost never about the transitions. So I'm curious about people's actual experience. Not the theory, the lived version.

Pick whichever transition you consider your most significant and describe it. If you've got more than one, pick the biggest. I've put some questions under each one to give it some shape, but answer however you want. I'll share mine below.

Red to Blue

If you had a phase of impulsiveness, defiance, or chaos and then took on structure, faith, discipline, or a code: what was it? What was life like before, and what made the structure appealing? Was there a person or institution involved? How long did it take to feel settled?

Blue to Orange

For those who grew up inside religion, tradition, strict family rules, or a tight community and left it, or moved toward ambition, achievement, and self-direction. What were you like as a kid inside it, the one who fit or the one who asked questions? Did your siblings, raised in the same house, go the same way, or are some still in? Was there a trigger, or did it erode? How long did it take? What can you do now that you couldn't then?

Orange to Green

For those who were driven, career-focused, competitive, and then shifted toward relationships, feeling, community, or social concern. What did the Orange period feel like from inside, and what stopped working? Was there an event, a burnout, a relationship, a book, a retreat, or did it just fade? Did people around you go through the same shift at the same time? What did you gain, and what did you give up?

Green to Yellow

For those who feel they've made this one. What did Green feel like from inside while you were in it, and what was the first crack? Was there a moment, or was it gradual? What can you do now that you couldn't do at Green, concretely? How would someone else be able to tell the difference from the outside? And how do you experience "seeing all the stages" now: is it something you do, or something you're aware of doing?

Anything else

If your biggest shift doesn't fit these, describe it anyway. And if you feel like you've never really shifted, that you've been more or less the same person with the same outlook since you were young, I'd like to hear that too. A few things I'm especially interested in across all of these: how long transitions take, what triggers them, whether other people in your life moved at the same time, and what specifically you could do afterward that you couldn't before.

Are you able to see clear transitions in your own history, and if so, what did it look like? 

[Joshe]

I'll go first:

I can't really spot the model's transitions in my history. 

I grew up in what the model calls a stage blue family. I went to church every Sunday. I recall from an early age I was the only one asking questions. And I posed serious questions to my elders and they told me to not ask those types of questions. Of course, with my cognition, I couldn't stop asking the questions and I eventually found the answers. Over time I dropped religion altogether and had to keep it a secret.

When I look at it, I was the kid asking questions from the start, and my mind was largely operationally the same at 12 as it is now, IME. 

Then as I got older, empathy came online as a result of maturity. This happens near universally but the model might say that was me going from orange to green. 

[Terell Kirby]

3 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Blue to Orange

Going to college, socializing, losing my virginity. Also working in corporate America.

5 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Orange to Green

Visiting California (specifically the San Fransisco / Bay Area). Also the Pacific Northwest-people live very differently there from the rest of America.

6 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Green to Yellow

Discovering Actualized.org on accident, learning about Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics model, Susan Cooke Grueter model of Ego Development (game changer).

[LordFall]

Orange felt like it was me against the world and I had to ruthlessly master all areas of life otherwise I would be fucked.

Green came as a result of my dad sharing with me a lot of the issues he sees in the capitalist world and its unfairness. Also as I've lived through my 20s experiencing poverty myself led to more compassion since before I had a bit of a every-man-for-himself if you can't make it then you're not trying mindset.

Yellow feels like instead of reacting to unchangeable circumstances of life, reality just offers up a bunch of levers to decide if I want to pull or not. Some levers require more energy or more time than others but it fundamentally feels like unlocking the secrets of the universe. I see stage green people being too stuck in their feelings and experiencing injustice as an absolute where as really they could conquer their country if they wanted to. It's just gonna take a while and some effort but the levers that they'd need to pull to do so are available. 

Turquoise feels like the divine comedy by Dante, what a good name for reality. Before it felt like I was standing in front of the levers being given options to pull and affect reality but then each deeper mystical experience I have I realize I'm made up of levers and it's all a joke that I should appreciate instead of taking too seriously. 

Edited 3 hours ago by LordFall

[Ulax]

Orange

Got real orange in my teens. Was into loads of conservative youtubers like Ben Shapiro and Yiannopolous. Then started watching RSD a lot and self-dev stuff.

Got into one of the best universities in the world and had a mindset of you make your own success. 

Green

Started having mental health stuff and struggles with my academics. People in my life came down HARD on me. Got ostracised by all sorts of people as being a lazy disrespectful person, especially at the university. I saw how fucked up Orange and Blue's rigid ideas of right/ wrong could be. 

My ideas around meritocracy and ability to just make it on my own came tumbling down. 

Also came across epistemic regress argument, which tanked rationalism for me.

Critical legal studies in my law degree also persuaded me on various green ideas, i.e. the nature of ideology, capitalism etc.

Later on I ended up on welfare after having to drop out of university. And that really hammered home the importance of Green to me, and further the fucked up consequences of orange/ blue. Some of the blues and oranges can really love to dunk on you when you're at that point.

Yellow

Came across IFS therapy, and its ideas of determined, systems thinking. People's minds work in systems, so then society must work in systems. 

You can be compassionate and empathetic all you want but unless you understand the system you're trying to change. Good luck not messing up.

IFS lit the match here. Leo supplied the kerosene. 

Turquoise

I don't really understand this stage still.

[Carl-Richard]

When I was 14, I was skeptical at people in my class adopting political party views seemingly at the drop of a hat. I thought they must have not done much thinking or known a lot about each party's position and simply adopted it because whatever (friends, family, happenstance). Then at like 25, I looked back at that same memory and then I contrasted it to how I adopted atheism at the same time (14). And I realized "huh, seems like everybody just adopts shit that they know very little about when they're young".

If you want to pin this to a stage, it's probably post-orange reflecting back at a memory of orange and/or blue reacting to what they perceived as blue and/or purple (but what might indeed have been orange and/or blue, because perhaps the people who subscribed to a particular political view did so based on some thinking and not just pure group-think, just like what I felt I did with atheism).

My late teens (cannabinoided up) I started thinking in real kind of hippie lines of thinking. My plan for life was essentially work an unskilled job and smoke weed with a girlfriend and that's pretty much it. I started literally believing in like 1960s "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" 'philosophy' (Tim Leary, Ram Dass; taking "Drop out" quite literally with respect to school as was allegedly not intended even by those people despite a speech by Tim Leary where he said drop out of school and basically any job that exists), Terrence McKenna stuff, I started believing the ego was somehow "bad" and made some weird decisions and conclusions (e.g. that trying hard to practice guitar to become better is ego so shouldn't do it and also shouldn't go to music school for a year with a friend because then I would practice to become better and that's ego).

I started to believe in determinism / no free will as I was listening to Sam Harris and I started taking it a bit too literally sometimes acting like I had no say in what I did when that is a misunderstanding of what no free will actually is. You could call it Green (but taking everything so literally could suggest otherwise) but I also felt I had to catch up on a lot of Red so that too probably. I also had a moment of clarity where I turned down alt-right rabbit holes because I felt "it wasn't consistent witth my values, where I come from" and embraced my soc-dem roots and later started experimenting with socialist ideas.

And today, I'm apparently some kinda New Age (post-modern, "mix-and-mash your own" smorgasboard spirituality/religion), New religious, somewhat Christian-apologist, somewhat Muslim-apologist, psychic phenomena -entertaining, analytic philosophy -eating, degree guy coding websites and writing academic articles, who believes religion is actually 'based' and we need more of it and that dogmatism is an ubiquitous problem not limited to religious fundamentalists, yaddi yadda.

Edited 8 minutes ago by Carl-Richard