We Need Post-Church Spaces, Part 9: Personal Growth Is Not Optional

Upward spiral staircase, created by Stable Diffusion 1.5

Here we go! The third and final pillar of what Post-Church Spaces need: personal growth. In the last two installments, I laid out what I think are the best frameworks and practices for the first two pillars of PCSs, community and transcendence. For community, I believe that Authentic Relating and Circling provide the best set of ideas and techniques for nurturing and growing PCS communities that are fundamentally diverse and dynamic. For experiences of transcendence, I argued in the last installment that ecstatic/conscious dance, group singing, and group holotropic-style breathwork offer the best practices that allow for moments of transcendence that are also communal, non-sectarian/religious, and encourage greater self-awareness and growth.

So, let’s talk about this growth. First, I define personal growth as made up of two parts: emotional healing (i.e., seeing oneself in ever more accurate and nuanced ways) and psychological development (i.e., seeing the world in ever more accurate and nuanced ways). I’ll elaborate on these below, but the important thing to note up front is that neither component of personal growth is optional for modern WEIRDOs. As I argued in part 6:

In our WEIRD world, we are all forced to grow beyond Tribe and into Adulting (and then eventually into Wisdom). Some of us make our way through in fits and starts, and some of us get stuck. But all of of us are making the journey alone.

We need post-church spaces that are built with an awareness of this need for personal growth in the modern world. Growth is not optional.

I believe personal growth is the necessary third leg of the PCS stool because, like community and transcendence, modern humans need it, but we don’t have modern institutions that are built to support it. First, let me briefly outline why personal growth is so important in modernity.

Three reasons personal growth is necessary in modern WEIRD contexts:

1. We are all forced out of the “Tribe” level of psychological development when we begin interacting with large, diverse, bureaucratic institutions. For most of us, this begins in childhood if we went to public schools, but got super-boosted when we went away to college and eventually entered the corporate world. This move into diverse, modern bureaucracies encourages us to see our childhood family/religious/political tribe as just one arbitrary tribe among countless others. And this pushes us into creating our own self-identity. This is the psychological-developmental move from Tribe to Adulting that I wrote about in part 6. It’s not optional for anyone who wants to live a materially secure, socially adequate life in the WEIRD world.

2. We’re all wounded by being raised in the modern world. Humans did not evolve to grow up in isolated nuclear families. We evolved to be raised in large, extended kin networks that ensured we were constantly cared for by a variety of caretakers. This level of care and communion cannot possibly be shouldered by one or two people. Throw in the demands of work and the emotional wounds people carry into their parenting, and we are virtually guaranteed a load of our own emotional burdens from childhood. This is no one’s fault. It’s just a byproduct of modernity.

3. If we’re lucky enough to leave the Tribe level of development and begin to consciously do our healing work, then we begin to notice an intrinsic mechanism in the human heart/mind to continue growing and healing. From a developmental lens, as we expand our self/other awareness, we become more sensitive to the contradictions and paradoxes that are trailheads into the next levels of our development. And from an emotional healing lens, the more we excavate the burdens and liberate the exiled parts of us inside, the easier and more attractive it becomes to heal subtler wounds and experience an even greater sense of liberation.

You might be thinking, “Hey! We have therapy and personal development retreats that handle this. What do we need PCSs for?” Yes indeed. But both therapy and retreats (which I love and am currently involved in!) are missing critical ingredients. Therapy usually only touches on the healing side of personal growth (and mostly individually) and rarely on the developmental side. And retreats have the virtue of being done in groups, but they’re usually one-off weekend-long events that can feel transformative, but rarely support sustainable, long-term change.

What we need from PCSs are rooted places that provide frameworks, practices, and actual physical space for us to connect, heal, and grow together, week after week, month after month, year after year. PCSs wouldn’t be focused on individual healing or one-off transformations (everyone should still go to high-quality therapy and awesome retreats), but rather on emotional healing and psychological development that slowly follows the arc of our lives.

So, what would this actually look like? Below I’ll offer two conceptual frameworks and two practices that could support personal growth (i.e., healing and development) in a PCS. At the outset, I want to add that neither conceptual framework needs to be taken as doctrine or dogma, but I rather offer them as a few potentially helpful conceptual tools that allow us to make sense of the structure and practices that would be most useful for modern personal growth. Also, I’ll add that the community-building and transcendence-producing practices I’ve already mentioned (like Authentic Relating, holotropic-style breathwork, etc.) also support personal growth.

Conceptual framework #1: Kegan Stages of Adult Psychological Development

This one deserves at least a couple thousand words to do it justice, but I’m going to attempt to do it in a couple hundred. Robert Kegan is a developmental psychologist who made his greatest mark in developmental theory. He argues first that human psychological development doesn’t end in late adolescence, which is where most well-known developmental theories end. We don’t just achieve logical reasoning by age 18 and stop there. Kegan argues that humans continue to develop throughout their lives in the way they make meaning of the world.

What’s important for us is that Kegan’s developmental stages (he argues for five stages beginning at birth and progressing throughout our entire lives) fit perfectly into the challenges and opportunities of the modern WEIRD world I’ve outlined. For our purposes we can zero in on two aspects of Kegan’s model: first, the way humans grow from earlier stages to later stages, and second, the key stages 3 and 4 in Kegan’s model.

Kegan notes that when we’re born, we don’t differentiate between self and other. We come out of the womb, and we and the world appear to us as the same thing. As newborns, we begin to differentiate self and other as we grasp objects (mother’s breast, a rattle, our toes, etc.). He shows how we continue to psychologically grow throughout childhood and later adulthood through the same process: turning what was our subjective self (what we “are”) into objective other (what we “have”). In childhood we “are” our feelings; as we mature, we “have” feelings that we can reflect on and talk about. In adolescence, we “are” our family’s or friend’s values/rules/culture; as we mature, we “have” values, rules, culture that we can reflect on and talk about.

It’s this move, from being fully enmeshed in a social group (friends/family/religion) to reflecting on the social groups of which one is a part, that is the crucial transition from Kegan’s stage 3 (“Social Mind”) to his stage 4 (“Self-Authoring Mind”). In previous newsletters, I’ve referred to stage 3 “Social Mind” as Tribe and stage 4 “Self-Authoring Mind” as Adulting. The move between these stages is, in my view, the most important developmental move facing everyone today. And we don’t have adequate institutions helping us make this move.

The process of growth from stage 3 to 4 is the same fundamental process between all stages. It’s a process of expanding self-awareness. And I believe PCSs can play a crucial role here by supporting practices and providing social containers for expanding self awareness. At each new stage, the person has a greater awareness of what is their “self” and what is “other.” One of the most important personal frameworks for gaining this awareness is psychotherapy. And one of the most powerful psychotherapeutic models around is Internal Family Systems. Which leads us to . . .

Conceptual framework #2: Internal Family Systems Model of Emotional Healing

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a psychotherapeutic model created by Richard Schwartz. It maintains that each person’s mind is made up of a system of parts or sub-personalities. There’s a long history of parts in psychology, from Freud’s Id-Ego-Super-Ego to Gestalt and many other approaches. What sets IFS apart is its systems protocol for working with different types of internal parts and also its recognition of a spiritual core inside each person, which IFS calls “Self,” but could be referred to as spirit, essence, soul, core, inner knowing, and so on.

IFS should be a key framework for PCSs, in my view, because it provides a clear and systematic way to think about gaining greater self-awareness, which leads to psychological development. I think of my personal journey with IFS as giving me a 4k hi-def view of my internal system (before doing any therapy, I’d say I had a fuzzy 1950s TV-with-a-broken-antenna view).

IFS is also a powerful emotional healing therapy, which is the second aspect of personal growth. A few therapist friends refer to IFS as the precision surgery of therapy. I’ve been through hundreds of hours of IFS training, I’m an IFS coach, I’m a client in IFS therapy, and can vouch for this. It’s powerful stuff.

What makes it even more impactful as a framework for PCSs is that it can be incorporated into all the other practices. I bring IFS into my Authentic Relating work, my conscious dance facilitation, and breathwork. It plays nicely with just about every modality a PCS could hold.

Personal growth practice #1: Psycho-spiritual-education (TED-style talks, i.e., post-church sermons)

So, how would these conceptual frameworks actually be practiced on the ground in PCSs? First, I think they would be woven into every other practice. But more explicitly, they would guide the types of talks (don’t call it a sermon!), panels, seminars, etc. that PCSs would hold. We can think of these presentations as “psycho-spiritual education.” PCSs would invite a diverse range of authors, speakers, practitioners, and public figures to talk, but it wouldn’t be an endless diversity. The presenters would have to demonstrate, in their work and public speaking, an alignment with PCS values of diverse community, non-sectarian modern spirituality, and flexible personal growth frameworks. Examples of ideal speakers at PCSs would include (just to name a few off the top of my head): Gabor Maté, Brené Brown, Richard Schwartz, Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia University, John Vervaeke, and Loch Kelly.

Personal growth practice #2: Therapeutic group circles (healing circles)

Perhaps PCSs would have onsite individual therapist offices, but I don’t think this would be the best use of the space. We already have individual therapist offices in our communities (and many more online) providing one-on-one therapy. I think that PCSs would fulfill their mission (and an unmet need) by developing and supporting therapeutic group circles or “healing circles.”

These groups would be limited in size (no more than 10) to keep it intimate and manageable, with each group being a cohort that would meet together once a week over 4-6 months. They would be led by therapists or trained coaches, and would use IFS and AR to help members gain greater self-awareness, heal emotional wounds, and develop an even deeper sense of social connection.

In my view, there would be dozens of healing circles throughout the week, at different times, and also created for different affinity groups.

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In our WEIRD world, the choice to grow really isn’t a choice. To ignore the modern demand to grow beyond Tribe (Kegan’s stage 3 “Social Mind) and heal one’s childhood and adolescent emotional wounds is to be left confused, frustrated, and with limited options in every aspect of life. PCSs would be a shining light for those not only ready to grow and heal, but ready to be a part of a community of others stepping fully into modern WEIRD life, ready to “build a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible” (in the words of one contemporary WEIRDo).