Stages Of Awareness, A Real Life Example

Stages Of Awareness: A Real Life Example

You may have read Portia Nelson's Autobiography In Five Short Chapters and felt confused or unfocused, so I thought I'd provide a simple example of a man progressing through the five chapters in his life:

Man Seeking A Healthy Relationship

Someone I know is getting divorced from his wife. They separated physically 10 months ago after a 8 or 9 year marriage, and there are no children involved. The wife has had an affair yet clearly does not want to finalize the separation into divorce, and is clearly doing everything she can to stay in her ex's life.

There's no way she's signing divorce papers and he's too chicken to even present them to her because of the emotional shit-storm that will erupt. He can't handle the emotional barrage and does anything he can to avoid its wrath.

Stage One

"I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. 
I am lost … I am helpless. 
It isn’t my fault. 
It takes me forever to find a way out."

The husband, in his conversations with friends when she's not around, is very focused on the fact that his now-ex still won't take a "no" answer from him and respect it as a boundary. She barges in on his life at every turn and has countless "emergencies" that she needs his help to resolve, and is relentless. His "no" doesn't mean a thing, he ends up just going along with whatever she says, and he's feeling very powerless.

In his powerlessness, he's feeling vengeful. He's very focused on all the women around him and says he's girlfriend-shopping like mad, with the specific intent of showing the ex that "it's over".

His close friends are watching in shock and dismay as this man wallows around in the first stage of awareness: He's in a hole, it's dark and confusing and he doesn't know how he got there, and it's "not his fault", and he's scraping and clawing at the walls to try to find a way out.

If this man DOES find a girlfriend that sticks with him once she realizes how much he's still involved with his ex-wife, the funny thing is that this man isn't going to get what he's expecting, either! Sure, for a short period of time he'll feel good having a girlfriend who says all the things to the ex that he wishes he could say, but that will wear thin, and that girlfriend will eventually re-direct her attention... to him. It won't be pretty.

Stage Two

"I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don’t see it. 
I fall in again. 
I can’t believe I am in the same place but, it isn’t my fault. 
It still takes a long time to get out."

But, it'll move him solidly into the second stage of awareness: Walking down the same street that got him where he is right now in his current relationship, he'll fall into that hole again because he'll focus on the wrong parts and pretend he doesn't see the red flags. When the attention of the GF changes away from the ex-wife to him, he'll experience disbelief at being where he is again, and probably again think it's not his fault.

It's taking him a long time to extricate himself from ex-wife, it'll take a long time for him to extricate himself from girlfriend, but a shorter period of time this time. There will be improvement.

From here on in, I'm just going to talk about the optimal progression of his awareness - it will depend on focus on healthy behaviors and healthy relationships instead of on dysfunction how quickly he makes it through the rest of the phases, if at all.

Stage Three

"I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I see it is there. 
I still fall in … it’s a habit. 
My eyes are open. 
I know where I am. 
It is my fault. 
I get out immediately."

After Serious Girlfriend #1 and him break up, he'll feel quite a bit differently than he did when he and Ex Wife broke up. He'll be starting to feel his innate instincts about noticing healthy and unhealthy behavior, but his old patterns of behavior and personal programming will still be a strong factor in how he makes his decisions.

Because of his own behaviors and personal programmings, he will STILL attract the same type of women towards him, and because he finds some of their aspects exciting or relieving early on, he'll find himself back in the same thing AGAIN a third time, this time more out of habit than anything.

When the situation starts to take a turn after the honeymoon period, he recognizes it right away and knows - during the fact - that he's there and he's put himself there, and he's got to get himself out.

He gets out of this one very very quickly compared to the Ex Wife or Ex Serious Girlfriend #1, and with much less personal anguish.

Stage Four

"I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I walk around it."

He's made a lot of realizations and learned a lot and learned above all to trust his instincts a lot better by now.

He walks amongst the same women as before, only now he puts value on different aspects of them than he did before.

Say he valued only stunning beauties, or he valued someone with a high degree of education, or he thought sarcasm as a way to deal with the world was "cute" and "funny", but now he pays attention to issues like self-esteem and level of overall happiness in life as a priority...

He'd learn to disassociate his body's physical urges and needs (ie: sex) from the requirement of a relationship (ie: love), and when a stunning beauty with self-esteem issues and a bad outlook on life and love enters his orbit, he wouldn't end up locked in a toxic relationship because of sex and his beliefs about "what it means".

In this phase of awareness, he can duck and dive out of the way of the toxic beauties that used to entice and ensnare him.

Stage Five

"I walk down another street."

The fifth and final stage has our man purposely changing his social circles to reflect his new expectations of the world.

No longer is he happy to hang out at the bar or hit on co-workers to do his relationship "shopping". He doesn't walk down that same road anymore, because he recognizes that he's been doing that forever and it hasn't gotten him anywhere good yet.

Now he makes decisions to expand his social circles with specific goals in mind - to fulfill himself as a priority, to participate in something larger than himself, and to meet someone who is already on a similar life path as he is along the way, as something that will happen when it happens.

He walks down a different road.

Stages Of Awareness, Making Lasting Changes In Life

The most difficult thing about being successful in life is to make and adhere to the personal changes required to both attract success (whether in business or in this context, in a long term relationship that serves to lift all involved and is happy for the majority of its days), and then to allow it in.

As social beings in Canada and the US (and other places too, I just can't speak for their cultures), a lot of the information we receive about how to behave as we're growing up doesn't aim us towards these goals, however. We're not taught to "attract" success, we're taught to charge in after it and to "fight for it". And anyone who allows success into their lives suddenly gets labeled as a "bad guy" in some way, usually by pointing at how the "little people" are doing all the work and the successful one is a societal leech or predator.

The combination of these two modes of thought is a motivation killer, and creates a society of people who talk about working hard for success on one hand (while simultaneously sabotaging their own efforts so they're not REALLY successful) but who actively refuse to accept the benefits of success out of guilt or fear on the other.

Not all people are like this of course, but if you've been locked in between that "rock and a hard place" feeling, you know what I'm talking about.

For me, in the journey towards self-awareness and personal success in being able to keep in a positive state the majority of the time, I've spent a lot of time dwelling on the topic of Motivation, and how it interacts with its opposing forces.

In my growing awareness, this one story has been more useful to me than any other in explaining the inner process we all go through as human beings when we decide to make a change in our lives, to counter-act some motivation-killer or to find a way to augment the motivation we already have. It is a story of the Stages of Awareness, but unlike the rest of the references I see when I search in Google.

It is written as an autobiography, but I did not write it originally. Yet, it can still be used as an autobiography of any of us, because what the author speaks of is the universal truths and patterns behind making a real and lasting change in your life:


AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

by Portia Nelson

I. I walk down the street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I fall in. 
I am lost … I am helpless. 
It isn’t my fault. 
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I pretend I don’t see it. 
I fall in again. 
I can’t believe I am in the same place but, it isn’t my fault. 
It still takes a long time to get out.

III. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I see it is there. 
I still fall in … it’s a habit. 
My eyes are open. 
I know where I am. 
It is my fault. 
I get out immediately.

IV. I walk down the same street. 
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 
I walk around it.

V. I walk down another street.



My next entry will provide a Real Life example of someone progressing through these phases of awareness as he removes toxic influences from his life in favor of healthy, rewarding ones. Getting divorced, recovering, and finding the love of his life who treats him exactly as he wants to be treated.

The Girlfriend Code of Ethics, Dealing With The Ex

Ha ha ha, I asked for more contrast in my life, and I got it!

I'm now beginning to clear out some old cobwebby, socially-programmed habits regarding The Ex (and Ex can be plural, but Exes doesn't look as good), and have also run into an Ex from almost a half a lifetime ago who I've been talking to lately.

First I'll talk about the social programming regarding the more recent Ex, and then I'll delve into information about the Dusty Ex (you know, the one I found up in a box in my attic that I didn't think I'd see again).

Social Programming and The Girlfriend Code of Ethics

What do you think, people?

If you were workmates in a small, intimate company with both sides of a couple who had been married for nearly 10 years and divorced in the last few, and you got involved with the man after he was divorced, what respects, if any, would you extend to the ex-wife?

What if you kept in contact on a social site with the ex-wife (liking almost every status line and making cheery comments on others), and agreed to meet for coffee to "catch up" after many years of not seeing one another?

At what point would you admit to being more than "just friends", and therefore having had access to his innermost deep thoughts ... about MY relationship with HIM?

And why do I even CARE?  Or DO I even care...  I wax and wane between these things, but I really do think that all those questions above come from my social conditioning and from the Girlfriend Code of Ethics that I somehow learned about in my early teen years.

I'm confident that we broke up for good reasons, that it was about the only thing we could really do since counselling failed so miserably (with him giving up or walking out, claiming we had only one problem in our relationship, yet he asked for a divorce from me after that one problem was resolved) and I would have had to have given up my very soul to stay with him.

He's always wanted to "be friends" and every time I've had any contact with him, or heard from others within my social circle who have contact with him, he comes across as a depressed, lonely, self-loathing guy, which repels any interest of mine in fostering a friendship with healthier boundaries than I managed while we were married (moved in together way too fast).

I guess I care because I know that at the end of our relationship, after "the talk", the stuff he was spouting about why he thought I was doing what I was doing was flabbergasting.  Utterly flabbergasting.  I was shocked and speechless that he'd ever think that I'd be that kind of person.

But I realized very quickly that he was just re-writing his vision of me into something that was more in line with the fact that we had broken up and weren't going to be together forever anymore.  He needed to feel like I was the bad guy in order to make the transition.

So I did pretty well at not taking it personally.

Until going for coffee with this old workmate (I'm looking to increase my quota of girlfriends too, not just boys to date), and finding someone who is nice and cheery to my face, but if she's as "tight" with my ex as she claims to be (and oh god, he's her "life coach"! *boggle*) then what lines of BS has she been fed about my part of our breakup?

But again, Law of Attraction... I'm doing my best to focus on what I want, not what I don't want.

As a result, I'm putting more efforts into finding other female friends to fill my Friendtris (like the Mantris, but more for my girlfriend social needs), planning to "squeeze out" this girl from the wee spot she holds.  I'm also not initiating meet-ups where we may talk about what's going on in our lives, because I don't want to feed her anything she can bring back.  If she asks me, I will conveniently be busy.

Oh, and I think I should add... the story she told outside of any interaction with my ex was a scary one as well.   Not thought processes and life habits I want to bring into my close circles that can influence my vibration!  She's not a good girlfriend choice, but she sure has made me think.