Interesting personal anecdote about spiral dynamics

[electroBeam]

Note: Even if it comes across this way, I am not trying to gain sympathy. My vivid descriptions are as vivid as they are here simply to try and strongly convey the insight I am sharing.

Because everyone on here is buzzing about spiral dynamics, I wanted to share a personal story that I found very interesting, which relates directly to spiral dynamics.

In junior school, and parts of middle school I was bullied deeply, so bad that I developed pretty much all of my neurosis that I currently have today. My shadow work journey(which I have been doing adamantly for 2 years now, and which has still a long way to go) has purely been solving the issues I developed in junior school alone. I had at the end of high school deeply low self esteem - to the point of wanting to suicide on a weekly basis, a personal identity associated with stupidity, lack of morality, evilness, monstrous, clumsy, fat and ugly. I had strong doses of OCD type experiences of fear of being left by myself with other people I did not know, and a strong resistance to trying to stride for anything good for me in life. I had deep guilt and shame running through my veins on a daily basis. Let me assert again that this all stemmed from at most 3 years of my secondary level of schooling.

But the most interesting thing about my memories (and they are vivid and accurate just due to the fact that you never forget traumatic experiences) is how my bullying experiences related to spiral dynamics.

I will simply copy and paste a small section of my journal I wrote down 3 years ago (end of year 12 for me) about what I remember of secondary school. I will then comment on this journal from a spiral dynamics perspective.

2.3 Bullying experiences of Secondary School

The social aspect was extremely scary and soul crushing.

2.3.1 Year 7:

1st encounter with bullying:

3 week prior I attempted to develop a platonic bond with a student that seemed friendly. During the bonding stages, from my perspective (which in hindsight I now know was inaccurate) we were involved in friendly conversations about gossip about teachers, other students and the content the other student seemed like he was enjoying the intercourse with me and off his own volition would in the mornings sit next to me to speak about further topics. We also played board games together which both of us seemed like we were having fun and enjoying each other's company. We would constantly sit next to each other and make jokes. To me, I felt like I found someone who I could trust to serve me friendly company, and someone who would be worth being loyal to in heated events. 3 weeks later at lunch time I decided to try and be in his company. He told me with a laughing face to leave, back then I didn't really understand most jokes student said or why they were funny, so I just laughed back for politeness and ignored it and continued to join in with whatever he was doing. He then walked off. Being confused but again ignoring it I walked with him, he then told a teacher that I was stalking him and that I was harassing him, weirdly again with a laughing face. The teacher was confused and then told him to put up with my company, but I walked away angry.

I was deeply afraid and worried of the teacher that he spoke to of thinking that I was a 'bad person'. Being a bad person elicited deeply shameful, guilty and painful thoughts to me, maybe the most pain I could ever feel, and this person brought them up for me. 

The next day this person acted normal and attempted to socialize with me. Of course I reacted negatively to this person. This went on for a while and escalated to the point that I had to be moved from the classes that he was in to another set of classes. The teachers thought that I was gifted, so I was moved to a special class that had intellectually 'gifted' people in it.

2.3.2 Year 8:

I was moved to this new class afterwards but suffered bullying problems again. During the bullying events I went through, being a lover of science, I noted down certain social phenomena that was unconceivable at the time for further investigation. These notes are from the mac computer you had in 7th grade, inside the folder 'intellectual timecapsule': (picked at random)

2011, may:

- people in the group are very bad to me. They took my pencil case threw it in the bin. They took it because the other ones in the group liked it and gave them brownie points for it.

I deleted some for sake of shortness of this post and also some are very personal. I kept the relevant ones

- "The other people in the group are very selfish. they have no limits. "

- "The group is (not sure but seems true) being held together by being selfish. The person who seems the coolest and toughest is the leader. The person who is harder to mess with is the leader. Everyone does what the leader says because they don't want to be messed with."

- "They use me to show off how tough they are. When they mess with me and win the group values the bully as being the highest. I am a social status farm"

- "In sports class, no group wanted me and told me that I am too dumb and clumsy to be in their group and that I would make them loose."

- "Miss had a paper to pass around, and the group leader told me that I should be thankful for him giving me the paper because of how dumb I am"

- "I am very scared of miss not liking me. No one likes me"

- "my friend who liked me betrayed me to look cool in front of the group. He took my pencil case and threw it in the bin like the others, now the group loves him and he doesn't talk to me anymore"

Other things I remember:

I would have no group to go to during science class because all the groups would tell me to not enter their group, and when I tried to they would yell at me to go away and push me away.

They would do nasty acts purely for the group's satisfaction. Like throw my pencilcase in the bin or melt my ruler with a Bunsen burner

One account was when one group member (not me) was being bullied by the group and how they reacted. This member had his bag took off him by the group without him knowing. He asked all of the group members where his bag was and then said ok then if none of you will give me back my bag I'll take tristan's in return. And took my bag when I went to the toilet. This is not how I reacted, but if I did I might have mitigated the problems with the group more effectively.

The group would constantly assert dominance by doing micro bullying acts. I noticed that this is how the clique and group maintained itself. Each act of microbullying kept their social status in place.

At the end of year 9, I gave up on trying to stop the bullying myself and just (know this is wrong in hindsight) assumed that I was the problem, because I was the only one with the problem. I felt very guilty about being the one that everyone hated. I felt like a moster from a different planet. I felt like I didn't belong. I suffered a lot of pain from thinking I was the bad evil guy. In the end what stopped me was the fear that the teachers would see me as the bad one in all of this mess. Slowly though the bullies seemed to mature and the sorts of comments they made in earlier years were condemned by them in later years. The bullying sorted itself out through maturity, but my traumas are still with me.

Commentary of this diary:

Back then, when I had these experiences, I just assumed that I was a socially awkward nerd who had these bullying problems as a consequence of being weird and different. While that is slightly true, the bigger reason as to why I went through so much bullying is now very clear to me. I was at a different stage of spiral dynamics then what the other group was at. I was clearly at blue, and they were clearly at red/orange. I'll illustrate my point through examples:

How I was blue(from quoting from my journal):

"I was deeply afraid and worried of the teacher that he spoke to of thinking that I was a 'bad person'." Blue appealing to authority. striving to be the good guy.

"I felt like I found someone who I could trust to serve me friendly company, and someone who would be worth being loyal to in heated events" Blue - being loyal to someone

"I felt very guilty about being the one that everyone hated. I felt like a moster from a different planet." blue again -> right vs wrong.

The diary (understandably) doesn't talk a lot about me back then (which is like 8 years ago), so I'll speak a bit more about that. I was very obedient to teachers, I loved being the good person. When looking for friends I looked for people I could be loyal to and people who were 'good people' who had morals. I also liked the security of having people I could trust. Having people who were selfish was a big fear to me because I didn't feel secure.

Now over on the red/orange side:

Pretty much all of the quotes in the May 2011 section. They are all acts of mild red or extreme orange. How about how the group used selfish acts as a way to assert their dominance? At the time of writing (3 years ago) I didn't know about spiral dynamics, but try reading the journal with the value systems in place. It all makes sense as to why I went through so much bullying.

I was a blue staged guy in a group or red/orange staged people, and I didn't fit in. My value system was completely different to theirs, and I had absolutely no understanding at all of how to deal with it, because back then understanding social dynamics was totally over my head.

And look at how I dealt with the bullying. Did I tell myself "these people are bullies and I shouldn't feel bad about it"? Nope. Did I try and approach them diplomatically about the situation? Nope. What did I do? I did the stereotypical blue move and felt guilty about it and kept all of my guilt inside until I purged them all out again several years later.

 

Why is this important?

Bullying is a huge problem in schools right now, and teachers are approaching it from a psychological perspective. But maybe the problem with bullying isn't a psychological problem? Maybe the problem is a sociological one? See maybe spiral dynamics can be used help understand bullying at a deeper level. Maybe America wouldn't have so many shootings if they thought about things from a spiral dynamics perspective?

Another interesting thing is that what you will notice is that humans move through the stages as they grow older. By observing how kids interact with other kids in early development, we can analyse and understand how different stages of spiral dynamics interact with each other. Maybe we can use this to understand conflicts between countries and how to rectify them?

 

[White]

@electroBeam I like shadow work.  The ability to take an adult perspective on childhood events and reframe them in a positive light. Nice work dude! 

[Ayilton]

This is good fam ! Never thought about spiral dynamics in this way . 

Bulling could be a result of people being in different stages interesting hammmm....Keep doing your shadow work and remember to always love your self ! Peace