2 - Conference on Human Development – March 2010 (pg 2d)
A MODEL OF THE “DEVELOPMENTAL SELF”©
receives little attention and science is not willing to invest in investigating the proper nourishment nor the education and training it should be receiving. Therefore there is no organized schooling for the education and training of Self.
My hypothesis is that Self continues to grow until around 40, after which its full potential is available for education and training. I believe that the phenomenon of the mid-life crisis, which generally occurs around 40 years of age, is not coincidental. It occurs at the stage of human development when the Self begins its need to fully potentialize. We can now look at the mid-life crisis as the beginning of the final stage of human development. The sense of change occurring in us ignites an urge to ask those meaningful questions that reflect the Self. Who am I? How did I get here? What do I really want? What is my life’s purpose? And why am I not getting the love (6) I need from my relationships and why am I holding back giving my love and why is it all so painful?
An Effective Model for Psychotherapy
The last point I want to make is integral to this discussion. When training or healing the physical body/brain we can explain in simple lay terms exactly what a client needs to do and why for either optimal results or healing. The broken foot of my wife needed a cast until the bone healed, after which she needed physical therapy to strengthen the muscles that atrophied during the months she had to keep her leg up and the bone was healing. She understood exactly what was happening because bones and breaks and healing and physical therapy have been defined in lay terms. This helped her buy into the process instead of being skeptical and dismissive.
Whether the objective is a life goal or emotional healing, and whether the client is a parent, an employee, a student, or a couple having each understand how human beings function enrolls them in their own process and takes the mystery and gamble out of it. This is especially important and visible in therapeutic interventions where healing is the goal and having a client who is enrolled because they understand themselves and buy into the process is paramount.
Again, using my cosmology, I devised a process of educating, training and when necessary rehabilitating the Self, which results in achieving both life goals and what we call healing in psychotherapy. But my clients never feel that there is something wrong with them, psychologically or otherwise. There is never a label put on them. What they understand is that their potential for navigating life has not been cultivated fully and they have never been given the life skills and tools necessary which is the reason they are struggling in certain areas of life.
Since my hypothesis claims the Self to be similar, integrated, yet different from body or brain, I hypothesized that the Self also has to have its own unique properties. The ‘facilities’ of the Self need to be educated and trained for optimal development. After the growth of the energetic system called Self, its full potential can only be developed through a unique education and training approach designed to develop its 4 facilities.
