Ego Development

What led to me rediscovering this page is trying to register so I could reply to someone else's post and then realizing that I already had an account.

Anyway, lately I've really been into ego development. I started with Dabrowski and then Kohlberg and then I found Spiral Dynamics and Cook-Greuter and all that. Oh, by the way - the Clare Graves vision of SD is really quite useful but Ken Wilber is a cult leader stuck in orange (as are most of the people who post on integral sites - come on, their definition of "second-tier" is "hates green and really sees the value in orange") and most of the Wilber stuff is crap.

So the post that I replied to is this one, on The Mouse Trap.

http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2007/12/ego-devlopment-nine-stages-theory-of.html

I had been wanting to take the sentence completion test but obviously $300+ is a bit steep. And this little mini-version of it just finally solidifed what I'd been thinking all along.

Oh, and a little more Googling turned up a book on Google Books named Measuring Ego Development. It features more examples of sentence completions. I think it's from the 70s. Good lord, I am so happy that I wasn't born until 1980. The examples drip with extreme sexism and rigid gender roles, even in responses that are supposedly at the highest end of development.

The book mentions a lot of people at the higher levels being in psychotherapy. Maybe that's why - it's hard to deal with a world created by people at lower stages of development.

Anyway, I guess the point is - well, I don't care if people see this as bragging or not. All signs point to me being at the "integrated" stage. Yeah - the one that the book says is so rare that it can be eliminated for practical purposes. The one that is supposedly reached by less than 1% of adults in the US. But if that number was from Loevinger's research in the 70s - does she have more current information that would include numbers from people like me who grew up in a much freer and less oppressive and repressive society?

I've seen that figure in relation to myself before - like the letter from Duke about my SAT score in 7th grade being in the "top half of the top 1%." And in fifth grade my school gave me an individual IQ test and the results came back "often working at college level and above" "has the ability and temperament to go far with her life."

So in the last couple of years I've been researching intellectual giftedness, and using those things as criteria to guess where I fit in - guess what?

My husband refers to me as his "statistical anomaly", and I guess it's true. But the thing is - I can't really talk about it. I need to talk about it. I need to understand it. But when I try to talk about it - first of all, it's impossible to find a community in which it would be appropriate and accepted. I've been trying to find "integral" forums, but they're almost all the orange masquerading as second tier boring selfish materialistic capitalist yuppie crap. And the few threads that seem interesting were posted in 2006 and last replied to in 2007. I guess I missed the fad by a year or two?

So I try on the forums that I already hang out on, but it threatens the fragile egos of all the conformists on the gifted forum and/or bores them the way that their threads about activities for SAHMs bore me and on Sims 2 forums I get flamed and my stories get downrated.

I tried a Buddhist forum once. Yeah - that didn't work either.

It's just - I always assumed I was normal, so I held humans up to my standard. And now it's really sort of starting to settle in that I am very much the opposite of normal and I need to talk about that if I'm ever going to be able to accept humans.

I don't know, I really need to go back to work.

OMG, I looked at Measuring Ego Development closer and apparently it's a revised edition from 1994! Damn. I'd still like to see something more recent, though.