Five Key Stages to Emotional Growth

Learning how to talk about our feelings can be difficult. For many people, emotions are like an alien language they don’t understand. Learning to identify the signals of emotions to help decipher that language takes time and practice. Try to think of it like a video game, except you're on an adventure of leveling up your emotion game:

Level 1 - Emotional Rookie

You're a total noob when it comes to emotions. You don't think about feelings and are more likely just to share your opinions and thoughts.

For a person at level one, they may feel sensations in their body, but not know what those sensations mean, or they may be dissociated from their body and not notice or feel the sensations we typically associate with emotions. asking them what they’re feeling may get us a blank stare, or “I don’t know,” or they may simply share their thoughts and opinions rather than their feelings.

A person at level one is more likely to learn about their feelings by observing their own behaviors. You may not be aware that you don’t like dogs or children, but you can observe that you leave the room or recoil from dogs or children when they’re near you. 

Also, you may not be aware that you’re angry, but if you observe your behavior, you might find that you have raised your voice or you are standing over someone else with an intimidating body posture. Your behavior will be your best clue toward what you might be feeling.

Level 2 - Feeling Explorer

You start recognizing the emotional prompts people give you and identify what different emotions feel like. You often react to your feelings or those of others, then have to repair the relationships later.

At level two, you’re more likely to feel the sensations in your body that we tend to associate with emotions. You’ll be more in touch with those physical sensations and you may notice heat rising up your neck into your face if you’re angry. You may notice a feeling of ice water in your stomach if you’re afraid. You may notice your heart rate increase or a trembling in your hands. You may notice the knot in your throat that suggests that you want to cry. You may notice many more physical sensations that we tend to associate with emotional states.

At this stage, you will have a general idea of what combinations of sensations go with certain emotion labels. They’re different for each person. Some people feel the heat rising up their necks and into their faces when they’re angry. Some people don’t experience that when they’re angry but will experience a surge of energy in their arms and legs.

Also, at this stage, you begin to be aware of thought combinations that may go with the groupings of physical sensations. You may notice that the combination of a surge of energy into your arms and legs combined with thoughts of judgment against other people are clues that you feel angry at those other people. Sometimes listening to our thoughts can give us really good clues about what we are feeling.

Level 3 Emotion Conductor

You have the self-awareness and self-soothing skills to respond, not react. You reflect on your feelings first, then thoughtfully express them.

At this level, a person can identify what they’re feeling, relatively easily most of the time and use that self-awareness to quickly engage self-soothing skills. Self-soothing skills not only help us to feel better when we are feeling distressing emotions, but it gives us the time to reflect on how we would like to respond.

At this stage, we are not simply reacting to our emotions most of the time. At this stage, we take the time to reflect and choose how we wish to respond.

We will think about who the other person is and what their interests are. We will also think about our relationship with that person and what our interests, values, and goals are. Then, we will choose a response that is reflective of those goals and values, as well as compassionate toward the relationship and the feelings of the individuals involved.

Level 4 - Empathy Elite

You thoughtfully express your feelings, AND you can hear and validate the other person's feelings without being reactive. You are able and willing to co-regulate emotions where appropriate.

At this level, you have all of the skills of the previous levels, and you are able to use your self-soothing skills to put your own needs and interests aside long enough to hear the other person‘s feelings. This is a pretty advanced skill. To set your own interests and feelings, aside and listen to the other person’s feelings with the goal of deeply understanding them so that you can validate their feelings, even if their feelings are distressing for you.

Their feelings may be different than yours, their perspective may be different from yours, and their values, judgments, and goals might be different from yours, but you can validate their feelings and offer them compassion

This level of healthy selflessness may also include co-regulating. That is where we use the state of calm that we are able to achieve through our self-soothing skills as an anchor to help ground the other person. Sometimes this means being the strong, calm, stable person that provides the safety that allows the other person to be dysregulated temporarily and still feel safe.

Level 5 - Self-Validation Succes

By now, you have strong self-validation skills. While honoring your feelings and the feelings of others, you can advocate for your rights and those of others, while also taking responsibility for yourself and setting healthy boundaries so that you don't take responsibility for the feelings or emotional work that belong to others.

This is a true level of mastery. At this level, even if the other person is unable to validate your perceptions, your emotions, your perspective, even your values, and your goals, you are able to validate these things for yourself. It can often be super challenging to validate ourselves in the face of opposition from other people. But it’s an important skill to learn because other people are not always going to agree with us. And we need to be able to self-validate so that we can make decisions about what we need, even in the face of opposition from others.

It’s important to know what are your human rights in a relationship. This is important because when we need boundaries to protect our human rights, it’s important to be able to stand strong in the face of opposition from others. These are the boundaries we need in order to maintain healthy self-esteem and self-respect. If you’re unclear on these, you can check them out in my book Cultivating Connection.

Once you understand your basic human rights, it becomes much easier to advocate for and defend the boundaries you need because you know that not defending those boundaries can harm your mental, emotional, and sometimes physical well-being.

The next step is figuring out what boundaries we need so that we can create and defend them. A great tool for that is the needs wheel.

With this needs wheel, we can look at feeling fear, identifying, that what we need is connection, and it gives the advice to reach out to a friend or loved one, or hold space for someone. If we’re feeling stressed and we need control to feel better, it gives the advice to identify our value-based actions or uphold our boundaries. 

It’s no secret that one of the most difficult parts of creating and defending our rightful boundaries is feeling responsible for other people, their well-being, and their feelings. This is often why we seek their agreement on things. But often they will decide not to agree with us, and we need to be able to self-validate. We need to be able to identify what we need and create a boundary, even in the face of opposition from others. 

Learning how to identify when we are not responsible for other people's feelings or other people's needs is a very useful skill. You can learn more about this in my book Cultivating Connection, including a handy flow chart to help you identify when you’re responsible for other people's feelings and when you’re not.