How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage?
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.”
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)
How’d you learn to yell at people/firmly defend boundaries/etc. in the absence of a feeling of outrage? I couldn’t find anything but car dyno tuning when googling for “Levin Stage 1.” The only person I know to have taught himself that skill spent months working as the “mugger/bad guy” in a women’s self-defense course.
It’s not like I tried to learn that as a skill, specifically. What I learned were subcomponents of that skill, which included such things as noticing that I needed something, the need wasn’t being met, it being okay to have needs and to be upset they’re not being met, etc. etc.
(Being more assertive came about as an unplanned, but natural side-effect of having the building blocks available; I simply noticed that I’m automatically behaving in a more assertive way, rather than trying to behave in a more assertive way.)
I’m referring to Pamela Levin’s developmental cycles model, described in “Cycles of Power” and heavily used in “Recovery from co-dependency.” Stage 1 (called “Being” by Levin, and “Bonding” by Weiss & Weiss), is the stage where infants (zero to six months) learn how to respond to their internal physical state, and more or less set their basic emotional tone for responding to themselves and the world.
There are some online resources about the stages at behaviourwall.com—they appear to be selling some sort of courseware for teachers in the UK to address student behavioral problems through remedial skills work.
The complete model (as described in the books I suggest) includes both developmental tasks or goals (skills to be learned) and “affirmations” (signals sent from parent to child to establish the child’s outlook or attitude), as well as typical patterns of dysfunction and distortion occurring in the skills and attitudes.
Btw, don’t be fooled by the pretty charts on behaviourwall.com… there’s not enough information there to actually do anything. In general I have noticed that if a given “affirmation” or task is one you haven’t successfully acquired, you will not really know what it means from a brief description; examples of healthy and dysfunctional people’s thoughts and behavior relevant to that task or affirmation is essential to being able to even grasp what a real problem is, let alone how to address it.
Without this information, the task and affirmation descriptions sound like nonsense or trivialities, especially since they’re phrased for comprehension by children!
For example, the stage 3 affirmation, “you can think about your feelings” sounds stupidly obvious, but the actual skill meant by this phrase is not so simple or obvious! It really means something more like “you can think about your goals while in the grip of a strong emotion, while considering what you really want, without first worrying whether what you think or say is going to embarrass your parents or get you in trouble, and without needing to suppress what you actually want because it’s not allowed… ”, and, well, a much longer description than that. ;-)
(And of course, it’s not just the idea that you can do that, but the actual experience of being able to do it that matters. The “can” of actually riding a bicycle, not the “can” of “of course it’s possible to ride bicycles”.)