Theory of Emotional Development (MOST RECENT)

March 22, 2015: MASSIVE UPDATE. Greatly expanded descriptions for Stage 3 and 4, slightly expanded 5, and added examples of characters representative of each stage beneath each stages’ descriptions.

May 3, 2014: Slight change in pronouns.

April 24, 2014: This is the most recent update. The first half is unchanged. Differences begin from the “Let’s Review Each Stage" section.

Emotional Development

There are 5 stages to development and they are as follows:

Co-dependence
Counter Dependence
Group-dependence
Independence
Transcendence

All people move through their lives hopefully developing from one stage to the next. The ideal scenario is that you are dependent as a child, counter this dependence as a teen and young adult, become comfortable with shared responsibilities as a young adult/adult, shed your need for obligatory gestures to become truly independent (best stage for parenthood), then transcend and become greater than this. What that looks like I’m not too sure.

Unfortunately, many things in our lives can halt our development. A lot of these things come from early childhood experiences. Example: Abandonment. Your father could have ran out on you and never returned, or you could have been forgotten at Disneyland for a few hours. One will hurt you more than the other, but both can be sufficient to impair your ability to develop emotionally.

Abandonment is a form of betrayal and it instills in people a great anxiety, a fear that all future relationships will mimic this first betrayal. People who’ve been abandoned tend to hover around stage one or two. You’ve probably heard of them. Stage 1: The clingy, “crazy”, obsessed Significant Other that drives her potential mates away. Stage 2: The aloof, apathetic Significant Other that seems to “not care” when his mate learns he’s cheating on her. (For more on this and much more, try The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck).

At this point I’d like to say that a person can exhibit All Five Stages at the same time. People tend to revolve around a certain stage and this explains why perfectly reasonable people can suddenly commit terrible acts or why completely terrible people can say some enlightened words.

So, how would someone go about changing himself? Going up a stage? By the process known as "Grieving”.

Grieving is the process of releasing pain and pent up emotion. The reason that people remain stuck in stages is because they have yet to grieve. It requires that you search out what exactly caused your emotions to bottle up, confront it, and let it all come out in a torrent of emotional release. All the pain, all the misery, all the frustration and anxiety, let it out.

This is what Psychologists, i.e. therapists, are trained and paid to do. Help you search for what’s pained you, bring it to the surface, help you confront and release it without judgment.

Notably, this is a painful process. You will face inconvenient truths, shatter former god-like figures (e.g. your parents), and you will wallow in an ocean of your own misery, pain and frustration. But when you survive, and you will, you will feel a weight literally lifted off you. Seemingly, this weight is real, and it is made of pain, guilt, shame and frustration. It is the drag of depression. (I was diagnosed with Chronic Depression early March of year 2013).

And when this weight is lifted off you, your behavior will… tilt. Not change immediately, for it is usually a long process. I say tilt because the phenomena is called a “Pendulum swing”. See how stage 1 Co-Dependence is opposite to Stage 2 Counter Dependence? And stage 2 is opposite to stage 3? And stage 1 is similar to 3, while stage 2 is similar to 4? Emotional development is like the swinging of a pendulum. To develop properly, you need to swing between extremes so that you can gain the full understanding of each stage and understand why you can move beyond them. It is imperative that you do not attempt to skip a stage, because a) it’s impossible and b) you’ll miss the point.

And the point is this: emotional development is not a change in what you know. It is a change in how and why you feel, no matter what you know. This is why married couples can argue so much despite being perfectly intelligent, rational people.

Stan can’t see why his wife doesn’t understand that he needs to work late to impress the boss and bring in more money for them. Mary can’t see why Stan can’t spend less overtime, especially considering she, too, has a job and would like to see him more. Are either of them stupider than the other? No, but they’ll call each other stupid for not understanding each other. Fact is, both of them have perfectly rational, reasonable arguments, but they will never understand each other because they exist on different emotional stages. A stage one person can never understand a stage two person just as how a one dimensional being can never comprehend a two dimensional one. Only people at stage 4 and 5 can begin to understand stage 1, 2, and 3.

So a lot of strife, a lot of mistreatment, murder and mayhem occur not from a lack of intelligence but from emotional immaturity.

Now how can someone restart his development? Start by thinking of something he’s been hiding. Something he’s been suppressing for a long, long time. Something he’s never told anyone, is so afraid to tell anyone because of how painful it would be to admit it, how shameful, how degrading. Then let it out to someone you can trust to listen without a) giving advice nor b) making judgment.

A psychologist would be the best place to start.

Let’s review each stage.

Co-Dependence
Counter Dependence
Group-dependence
Independence
Transcendence

Stage 1 Dependence is most prominent at the child age. Children are dependent on their parents for everything, and we expect them to be. But it becomes a problem when people cling to this stage in to adulthood.

It will be difficult for them to leave their parent’s house. If she can’t live with her parents, then she will find something else to cling to. It could be a hobby, and while hobbies are generally good, it will be bad if she’s using the hobby as a distraction rather than as a form of enjoyment. Substance abuse is very very common in stage 1 people. Drugs and alcohol help numb the suppressed pain. She will be distrustful of people, even her spouse and children because she can’t ever expect other people to be independent.

She will tend feel wrathfully angry and despair. She will tend to feel frustrated because nothing she does seems to fix things. She will feel ashamed because she’s failed to fix herself. She will tend to despair and she will tend to blame others for it. She will tend to be prone to violence and quick to judgment.

She will tend to see things in black and white. She will tend to never admit a mistake. She will tend to put others on pedestals, as well as herself. She will tend to think that when she is hurt by other people, those people hurt her intentionally.

A stage 1 individual has no boundary between herself and loved ones. If her child, or brother, or friend is hurt, she is hurt. An attack against someone she is dependent on is an attack on herself. Thus she will tend to be overprotective and suffocating, yet contradictorily violent and abusive.

A Stage 1 person is marked by Lack of Agency, i.e, she feels as though she has no control over her life, that she is at the whim and mercy of forces outside of her control. Thus she is always afraid that everything she loves and cares for could be at once whisked away, never to be felt nor seen again. There is no foundation except that which she can forcibly establish.

She will tend to obsess over Safety. Because she has no boundaries, she tends to feel constantly at threat from anything and anyone. All important things in life are matters of Life and Death to her.

S1 Examples: Steven during the beginning portion of Steven Universe, Oliver Queen in season 1 of Arrow, Malcolm Merlyn from Arrow, Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, Boromir when he tried to take the ring in Lord of the Rings, Agatha Prenderghast, the zombies, and the townspeople from Paranorman (“All you wanna do is burn and murder stuff, burn and murder stuff.” I love that line), Emmet during the beginning of and Bad Cop in The Lego Movie,

Stage 2 Counter dependence is something everyone should do as a teen and young adult. It is when everyone figures out that they can have a will of their own and can take responsibility for their own successes and mistakes. It is rebellion and it is healthy. But it is a problem if someone carries it in to adulthood.

A Stage two person tends to run from his problems. He is afraid of becoming dependent again, so he challenges and fights and flees. He will leave the house of his parents as soon as he can. He will distrust authority and challenge authority’s values. He will want to reject everything about his authorities, even if what he is rejecting is a good thing.

He will tend to be consumed with frustration and shame as his pent up emotions hold him back. He will tend to obsess over not being his parents to the point where his parents control him. Anything his parents say can make him instantly upset, angry and sad. That is because he is still emotionally dependent on them.

He will tend to be excessively logical. His rebellion causes him to express a lot of counter-dependent emotion, good as well as harmful. If he is unable to find a means to properly vent these emotions, and if the people in his life are unable to help him relieve these emotions, he will tend to suppress them. He will tend to seek out tools to aid his fight against authority. He will tend to seek out mental techniques to combat the feeling of these suppressed emotions, as well as techniques that allow him to conquer over others. Unfortunately for him, the mental techniques he will find are inherently temporary. They do not relieve emotional suppression, only mask it. They are to be used only a couple of times during periods of great busyness, until one manages to get enough time to properly Grieve. I know this from personal experience.

He will tend to obsess over Status and Achievement. Because he is attempting to establish his own identity, he tends to try and demonstrate his value. A very common way to do this is to make others feel less valuable. All important things in life are matters of winning and losing. To him, all the world’s a game and all are players and pawns.

S2 Examples: Amethyst from Steven Universe, Jeff Winger, Britta Perry, Troy Barnes, and Annie Edison from season 1 of Community, virtually every character of significance in the movie Birdman, Hugh Jackman’s character from Real Steel, Gru from Despicable Me, Tim Allen’s character from Galaxy Quest, Darth Sidious from Star Wars, Hans from Frozen, Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon, Tony Stark during the beginning of Ironman, Aragorn until he finally comes to terms with his lineage and takes his rightful place as king in Lord of the Rings, Scott Pilgrim and Romona Flowers up until the end of the book series/movie, Wildstyle in The Lego Movie, Sterling Archer from Archer,

Stage 3 Group-dependence Stage 3 is when you’re ready to start taking on responsibilities. Everyone would hopefully reach this stage by 20s adulthood. You are now OK with sharing burdens without feeling you are too dependent on anybody. You are now OK with doing things independently because you can trust people to support you. This sounds pretty good, but the major problem with Group-dependent people is obligation and expectation.

Basically, a Stage 3 person is someone who takes on the burdens of others. They are emotionally stronger than Stage 1 and 2 folk, so they won’t react as strongly negative, but they still have a problem with grieving. They still accumulate negative emotion.

A person who is Group-dependent tends to expect other people to be Group-dependent. When a stage 3 person does something as a favor to you, she will want you to return that favor but she will “understand” if you don’t return it. A stage 1 person might force you, guilt you, threaten you, ignore you if you don’t return the favor. A stage 3 person will tend to not, but she will still feel hurt over it. She will accumulate negative emotion.

When I put “understand” in quotations, I mean she is able to more capably process what is going on emotionally and logically in the head of the person giving them grief, and in “understanding” they are more capable of compromising and sharing responsibility. But they take in a bit more than they can handle each time. They do a little more work than they should, stretch themselves a little farther than they should. Because they don’t fully know their limits yet; knowing your limits fully comes at Stage 4.

She will grow frustrated that nobody does what is expected of them. She will be able to cope with their “weaknesses” and “failures” for a lot longer than a Stage 1 or 2 person, but she will tend to vent her accumulated negative emotion in a way that doesn’t help other people to grow as well they could. She will tend towards using guilt, disappointment, expectation and obligation to attend to the “weaknesses” of others, not because she desires to punish them but because these are the primary yet inefficient ways she can release negative emotion; she doesn’t really understand how else she can help.

Since she does not understand Stage 1 and 2 people, she will tend not to give them mercy when they betray her expectations too much. When they do, she will tend to either yell at them or abandon them. She will think, “They are not worth my time”. She will become resentful. If the blame is on herself, then she may yell and abandon herself. What does it mean to abandon oneself? It means to belittle one’s self value, i.e. she will suffer a Stage 2 identity crisis.

She will tend to grow cynical. She will tend to share only with people who share with her. To her, what binds a group together is what each member does for the group, and so she cannot allow herself to not do those things. The group is her burden and she is the group’s burden. She needs to care and she needs to be cared for. Thus she tends to be obsessed with notions of Obligation and Duty. While these notions of Obligation and Duty do not always result in unhealthy behavior and feelings, they do inherently cause difficulties that tend to harm one’s and others’ emotional development. Notably she will have the most difficulty in handling Stage 2 people, as folks in Stage 2 will inherently desire to rebel against the obligations and duties a Stage 3 person conjures for herself and others.

A stage 3 person might have the tendency to say, “I am doing this for your own good”, “You don’t know what you want”, “I don’t want you making my same mistakes”.

Because a Stage 3 person is past Stage 2, they are no longer concerned with their self-image; they are comfortable in their own skin. So they are comfortable with their “Self”. The experiences they’ve accumulated allow them to be Assured that what they understand about their “Selves” is correct and good. But the mistake Stage 3 folks often make is they tend to extend their personal experiences which apply only to them on to others without bothering to see if their experiences actually do apply to the lives of others.

“Because I’ve figured myself out to a pretty good extent, it feels like its the case that everybody else just needs to do what I did to fix their problems.”

They are Self-Assured. Certain that what applied to their lives naturally applies to others. Stage 3 is when Emotion and Logic fuse. And what do we call that fusion? Morality. Morality first emerges in Stage 3. Stage 3 is the minimum stage a person should reach before they consider marriage.

S3 Examples: Pearl from Steven Universe, Claire Dumphy from Modern Family, Javert from Les Miserables, Michael from Arrested Development, Captain Cal from Lonesome Dove, Oliver Queen by season 2 of Arrow, Tenzin from Legend of Korra, Obi-Wan Kenobi prior to fighting Anakin in Star Wars, Hiccup by the end of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Tony Stark during the rest of Ironman, Scott Pilgrim and Romona Flowers by the end of the book series/movie, The Man Upstairs (Will Ferrell) in The Lego Movie, Lana Kane from Archer, Valentine (the villain) from the movie Kingsman,

Stage 4 Independence Not many people get to this stage. The characteristics that most describes this kind of person is charitable, communicable, confident, and collected. A truly independent person is someone who can give of himself without feeling hurt when other people don’t give back. A person at Stage 4 has come to fully understand his limits.

To understand your limits is to understand others. As you become more aware of your own bubble, you begin to see the bubbles that surround others, and being able to do so allows you to better predict their behavior, thought process, and feelings. You begin to see what would irk them, plague them, enliven them, inspire them. Stage 5 is when I imagine a person can not only see these bubbles, but dive in to their depths, to really see and understand the core of people.

A primary emotion of Stage 4 is Sorrow. Sorrow is a type of sadness, a type that facilitates pain-free grieving. The higher the stages you reach, the less painful grieving can become. Sorrow is Sadness for the unfortunate circumstances that have allowed for trauma to arise. A stage 4 person can have sorrow for the murdered and the murderer. The persecuted and the persecutor. They understand at an emotional level the bullying cycle, that the bullied often (though not always) become bullies themselves to cope with the pain and trauma.

He can see why people act the way they do. He will tend to be able to predict what people will say, do, and think next. He will take up burdens seemingly on a whim and may drop those burdens just as quickly. He will offer up his home, pick up hitchhikers and volunteer at soup kitchens without anyone knowing he does, because he wants to. He will also choose not to offer up his home, reject hitchhikers, and not volunteer even when there is social pressure to do so. He will help people because he wants to, and he will not help people because he wants to.

And most significantly, he will actually know what he genuinely wants in his life because he fully understands his limits. Understanding his limits allows him to see where he cannot go, and understanding where he cannot go allows him to see where he can go, and that is where he will go. Thus a Stage 4 person acquires an incredible degree of Confidence due to being able to do things he precisely understands that he can do.

This is a great stage to be at, but it does have some problems. For one, people tend to get dependent on him. Two, He being sympathetic doesn’t mean he understands what exactly he can do for them. His generosity could be insulting to them if they are stage two. He can be frustrating to people in Stage 3. He won’t mind if they are insulted, though, because that’s their problem, not his. The greatest limitation of Stage 4 is that while he is able to predict human behavior, he does not necessarily know what he needs to do to help people. He tries his best, but that doesn’t mean he will necessarily do the right thing.

Stage 4 is the ideal minimum stage for people to begin to raise children.

S4 Examples: Garnet from Steven Universe, Augustus “Gus” McCrae from Lonesome Dove, what the human boy Finn represents in The Lego Movie, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings,

Stage 5 Transcendence A stage 5 person is someone who has mastered Empathy. Empathy is a step above sympathy. Sympathy is shared feelings. In the original Greek, sympathy means sharing of pain. Empathy is beyond that, it is understanding.

A stage 5 person has complete access to the full range of her emotions. In having access, she is less prone to ever being dominated by any particular emotion, allowing her to freely choose which emotion, which mix of emotions, is key to the situation at hand.

She can be sympathetic when someone needs her to be. But when the situation calls for righteous anger, she can be righteous and angry. She can be forgiving when she needs to be forgiving, stiff when she needs to be stiff. She can know when to separate herself from others and when to sacrifice for others. She can know when to punish, when to give mercy.

Interestingly, the more emotionally mature one is, the more one feels human, smaller, limited, and less knowledgeable about the world and its inhabitants. It is in acknowledging that she has increasingly less knowledge and understanding that makes her more eager to learn, hence why Stage 5 folks can be some of the most learned people and yet sincerely feel that they haven’t learned all too much.

So it is not the case that she actually knows for 100% certainty what to do/how to act. Truthfully she merely acts to the best of her ability, understanding the limitations of her own understanding. But in being emotionally mature her actions tend to flow out in proper response to most any situation. Sympathetic when she should be. Angry when she should be. Forgiving when she should be.

She is Transcendent. Beyond human understanding because stage 1, 2, 3 and 4 cannot understand her. But she can understand all of them.

S5 Examples: Iroh from Avatar the Last Airbender, Rose Quartz from Steven Universe, Vitruvius from The Lego Movie (maybe), Mr. Rogers from real life (maybe),