Four stages of Growth / Community

 

Stage One – Passive Dependency

We experience a dream, a vision, something beyond ourselves. We obey someone else’s law.  They have worked out the conclusion or given the answers.  However, it isn’t our own because we’ve not gone through the process or struggled to find our own answers.  Stage of blind obedience, blind listening, stage of great passion, desire, infatuation, honeymoon period, but a necessary stage – important to experience it.

 

Stage Two – Negative Dependency

Disillusionment, non-listening, disobedience, reaction stage love/hate relationship, can’t live with people, but can’t live without them. We hurt; we feel rejected, it’s the stage where groups, communities, relationships usually break down, or get divorced from one another.  Most people don’t know when they are in Stage Two, won’t face their inner illusions, use excuses that it’s everyone else’s fault.  Again, this stage is necessary, we can’t jump over it, it’s emotional not intellectual.

 

Stage Three – Positive Dependency or Healthy Independence

We accept our limitations, our imperfections, we see ourselves in relationship with others and we can give freely of ourselves when we know who we are. We love others, stop trying to change them and let them be.

 

Stage Four – Inter – Dependence

We choose to be in relationship, we choose to do things not because we have to, but because we want to. We are not governed by rules and fears.  It is a stage of radical obedience and inner freedom.  We find joy in being with people and letting them be with us.  It is a stage of radical trust.  Often we do something that won’t make any sense; we won’t gain anything from it, but we know we have to do it.

 

These are four general kinds of movements; we move to and from them, change is constant. The problem is when people become ‘stuck in a rut’ in one of the stages.  From the outside Stage One and Stage Four look the same, but they are radically different.