How Change Works: Supporting Vertical Development

Dr. Keith Witt Cognitive, Defenses, Intrapersonal, Psychology, Video, Witt & Wisdom: Live with Dr. Keith

Become a supporting member to watch the full conversation

Humanity is entering the Transformation Age, a new era of human civilization, with Integral Consciousness rising at its leading edge. Our members don’t use Integral Life as just another media subscription they use weekly or discard. Instead, most stay with us for years, using Integral Life to learn Integral Philosophy and build an integral mind slowly, methodically and when they need it. We’re here to help you shape the future that’s emerging no matter where your life takes you.

Get Full Access For $1 (30 days)* Or explore all membership plans → * Trial price for the first 30 days, then $20/month. Cancel or switch plans in 2 minutes at any time.

Dr. Keith and Corey explore some critical strategies to help support ongoing growth to increasing wholeness in ourselves and in other people:

  • Finding a psycho-spiritual framework to help organize our knowledge, experiences, and practices (e.g. Integral metatheory)
  • engaging in change work (psychotherapy, coaching, consulting, etc.),
  • Seeking communities of people who we recognize as more developed than ourselves.

How to Support Vertical Development

by Dr. Keith Witt

What is vertical development?

  • On the self, values, interpersonal, moral, psychosocial, and psychosexual lines vertical development is more compassionate understanding in an area plus some behavioral change.
  • Someone can progress on other lines, but not necessarily on the above by enhancing skills like gymnastics or dancing. This is horizontal health.
  • Someone can appear to progress on another line, but actually stay at their current elevation or regress. For example, someone can appear to progress on the interpersonal line by becoming more adept at social manipulation (two books illustrating this are How to win Friends and Influence People, and Exactly What to Say). If the social manipulation has no component of more compassionate understanding, then it doesn’t constitute vertical development.

How to support vertical development?

  • Change work of all sorts—therapy, coaching, or consulting—seeks to enhance compassionate understanding and support positive behavior change.
  • Psychoeducation—workshops, systems, developmental frameworks—that teach vertical development while inviting and helping participants to embody the work. Integral and Spiral Dynamics are good examples of teaching stages and inviting changed perspectives and behaviors. Terri O’Fallon’s Stages system suggests that inhabiting gross, subtle, causal, and nondual stages of a particular vMEME leads someone to progress vertically to the next tier.

The process of change work

In any given session, change workers look for confusion, conflict, and yearning and intersubjectively press those points, searching for more compassionate perspectives and adaptive behaviors.

  • When there are no resistances or defenses, this is mostly straightforward education.
  • In the presence of resistances and defenses—usually the case to some extent—this involves a vast array of psychotherapeutic approaches, Shadow Work, and relational cross validation.
  • Even therapies that focus on symptom reduction, like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and assertion training, are designed to support a new sense of a wiser and more agentic self—more compassionate understanding and changed behavior.

Interface with Wisdom traditions

In Theravada Buddhism, Right View and Right Conduct are essentially more compassionate understanding and more adaptive behaviors. The six other parts of the 8-fold path, Right Speech, Right Resolve, Right Livelihood, Right Intent, Right Mindfulness, and Right Samadhi can all be subsumed under Right View and Right Conduct.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is essentially reinterpretations of Right View (cognitive) and Right Conduct (behavioral).

Complexity and vertical development

Dynamic systems like individual consciousnesses and relationships are composed of groups of linked parts, capable of chaotic behavior, energized, arranged hierarchically, and not lost in rigidity or chaos. These systems produce repeating fractal patterns of change, that eventually create a new organization that appears simpler but are actually more complex and energy efficient. This results in a phase change to the system, which in people is generally vertical development, often experienced as a form of transcendence.

Change workers go to the fractal interfaces, often marked by yearning, conflict, or confusion, and intersubjectively help generate new fractal patterns until a phase shift occurs and the client shifts into more compassionate understanding and more energy efficient behaviors—which appear simpler but are actually more complex.

Post-issue relationships are highly complex dynamical systems that appear simple and are enormously energy efficient.

Previous Episodes of Witt & Wisdom

Mastery, Collaboration, and Finding Your Unique Healing Style

Mastery, Collaboration, and Finding Your Unique Healing Style

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith Witt and Corey deVos explore the multifaceted nature of integral psychotherapy, emphasizing the importance of therapists finding their own healing style and the role of personal cosmologies in shaping therapeutic practice. They delve into the complexities of blending different integral systems, highlighting potential blind spots in integral cosmology and the challenges of extending beyond one's mastery. The conversation also touches on the impact of generational events and the internet on mental health and societal norms.
What Makes Us Happy? Growing Toward Anti-Fragility

What Makes Us Happy? Growing Toward Anti-Fragility

Dr. Keith Witt
Join Keith and Corey in this enriching dialogue, as they bring forth an integral perspective on the pressing issue of mental health and resilience among youth, and explore the transformative potential of anti-fragility and the happiness strategies that can empower us to create a brighter future for ourselves and the generations to come.
How Self-Hatred Can Lead to Self Transformation

How Self-Hatred Can Lead to Self Transformation

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey explore how feelings of self-hatred and self-loathing, when combined with compassionate self-awareness and the natural resilience of Witness consciousness, can help us overcome our resistance to change and put us back on the path of increasing wholeness, happiness, and self-acceptance. It’s an incredibly powerful discussion that we hope will help you better navigate some of these darkest corners of your own psyche.
How Attachment Theory Can Improve Your Relationships

How Attachment Theory Can Improve Your Relationships

Dr. Keith Witt
As Dr. Keith often reminds us, “Everything is relationships.” And the earliest relationships we form in our lives often set the tone and cadence for all the other relationships we will ever form in our lives. The coping strategies we learn in preadolescence become our inner compass later in life, and our efforts as grownups can often be seen as expressions, compensations, or substitute gratifications for the sense of security we may or may not have felt as children.
Escaping the Comfort Zone: Motivation, Shame, and the Will to Transform

Escaping the Comfort Zone: Motivation, Shame, and the Will to Transform

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey explore the complex psychology of motivation — the various sticks and carrots we use to get out of bed in the morning and keep ourselves moving forward in our lives, sustaining the inertia we need to push us through any number of hardships, setbacks, and growth opportunities.
Psychedelic Therapy and the Politics of Consciousness

Psychedelic Therapy and the Politics of Consciousness

Dr. Keith Witt
In the recent 2022 midterm elections, Colorado joined the state of Oregon in its decriminalization of psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. Here Dr. Keith and Corey explore some of the major implications of this profound legal shift, both in terms of our overall emotional, psychological, and spiritual health, as well as our rapidly evolving “politics of consciousness” — those states of consciousness that are sanctioned by the state, versus those that are not.
How Healthy Relationships Manage Conflict

How Healthy Relationships Manage Conflict

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey discuss "post-issue relationships" — relationships where both partners have the awareness and skill to stay connected in warmth and acceptance all the time, where challenges such as irritation, anxiety, doubt, guilt, and frustration can be transmuted into problem solving and warm feelings towards each other.
Personality as the Base Note of Change Work

Personality as the Base Note of Change Work

Dr. Keith Witt
Watch as Dr. Keith offers a "Psychotherapy Masterclass" that helps us work with various personality types as a foundation for healing, change, and self-actualization. While intended for other psychotherapy professionals, this discussion offers valuable insight for all of us, and can be immediately applied to our personal transformational work, whatever that may be.
Making Sense of Madness: Personality Disorders and Mass Formation Delusions

Making Sense of Madness: Personality Disorders and Mass Formation Delusions

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey explore an Integral understanding of personality disorders, and how they fit into the mass formation distortions that currently seem to be happening all around us in our culture.
Authoring Your Life Story: The Hero’s Journey and You

Authoring Your Life Story: The Hero’s Journey and You

Dr. Keith Witt
Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey take a deep dive into the human superpower of self-authorship, and how we can use that superpower to construct a more resilient, more forgiving, and more integrated sense of “self”.
How to Teach Kids About Sex and Gender

How to Teach Kids About Sex and Gender

Dr. Keith Witt
What exactly are “developmentally appropriate, age-appropriate” ways to teach kids about sex, gender, and identity, not only for kids in kindergarten through third grade, but throughout the rest of childhood and adolescence? Which aspects are more appropriate to teach at home, and which are appropriate to teach at school? Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey share their thoughts.
An Integral Understanding of Narcissism and Gaslighting

An Integral Understanding of Narcissism and Gaslighting

Dr. Keith Witt
In this episode, Dr. Keith and Corey take a careful look at the strategies and intended results of gaslighting (the effort to make you question your very sanity by convincing you that your memories and perception of reality are somehow incorrect, inconsistent, or unreliable) in our personal and professional relationships, as well as in media, marketing, politics, and society at-large. How can we can better inoculate ourselves from this pernicious form of psychological manipulation? Watch to find out!
The Awakened Brain: The Neurobiology of Spiritual Experience

The Awakened Brain: The Neurobiology of Spiritual Experience

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith takes a close look at the physiology of spiritual experience. What parts of the brain are being activated when we are having one of these powerful state experiences, and what does this tell us about the critical intersection between growth (both biological and psychological development) and awakening?
From Codependence to Interdependence

From Codependence to Interdependence

Dr. Keith Witt
Codependent relationships — those relationships where one person needs another, and the other person needs to be needed — are surprisingly common in our lives, regardless of our overall stage of development. In fact, there is a good chance that you have dealt with codependent relationships in the past, or are maybe even struggling with one right now. This discussion will help you to transform those relationships into genuinely interdependent relationships that can transcend and include both healthy dependence and independence.
Transforming Trauma Into Resilience

Transforming Trauma Into Resilience

Dr. Keith Witt
Watch as we take a look at several different kinds of trauma — micro-traumas, big traumas, “pre-verbal” traumas, generational traumas, etc. — and explore how we can shift into a “post-traumatic growth” mindset which, like the kintsugi vase in the image above, allows us to remake ourself into a more resilient, unique, and elegant vessel.
Finding Resilience in a Flood of Disinformation

Finding Resilience in a Flood of Disinformation

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey explore multiple strategies to help us maintain our mental and emotional well-being as our informational terrains become increasingly disrupted and distorted by a constant flood of disinformation.
Honesty, Humility, and Reality Distortion Fields

Honesty, Humility, and Reality Distortion Fields

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey discuss “the H Factor” — a variation of the Big 5 personality typology that adds a critical sixth trait, honesty and humility. Watch as we take a deep dive into the psychological benefits of honest self-reporting, a healthy epistemic humility, and the sorts of “reality distortion fields” that seem to emanate from certain personalities.
How to Manage Passive Aggression

How to Manage Passive Aggression

Dr. Keith Witt
Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey explore the many ways passive aggression, anger, and codependence create more separation between people and degrade our capacity for love, while assertive processing of anger creates more intimacy and safety. Learning how to take a pause before aggressive or passive-aggressive action gives the opportunity to cross-validate through all four quadrants, and to take our overall kosmic address into account.
Martial Arts and Psychotherapy

Martial Arts and Psychotherapy

Dr. Keith Witt
Dr. Keith and Corey explore the fertile intersection between martial arts, psychotherapy, and integral living. Watch as Keith shares the deep wisdoms he has received from his own lifelong martial arts practice, and how those wisdoms directly inform his approach to his own psychotherapy practice and the various healing strategies he draws upon.
Escaping Narcissism

Escaping Narcissism

Dr. Keith Witt
In this episode of Witt & Wisdom we take a careful look at these narcissistic tendencies and how they express themselves in all four quadrants, and at every major stage of development. We hope that this discussion will help you identify whatever narcissistic traits you may be carrying with you, and to consciously wield your positive self-esteem without being seduced by our own self-importance.
Into the Dreaming

Into the Dreaming

Dr. Keith Witt
Our dreams are often drenched in meaning, significance, and symbolism. But it is often very difficult for us to make sense of our experiences in the dream world, and to hoist these treasures out of the surreal and into the real. Our dreams typically communicate to us in the language of the bizarre, and more often than not we need some guidance in order to better understand them and extract whatever wisdoms they may offer us. Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey explore the murky depths of our own unconsciousness, and try to shine some light upon some of the...
Dr. Keith Witt

About Keith Witt

Dr. Keith Witt is a Licensed Psychologist, teacher, and author who has lived and worked in Santa Barbara, CA. for over forty years. Dr. Witt is also the founder of The School of Love.

Corey deVos

About Corey deVos

Corey W. deVos is Editor-in-Chief of Integral Life, as well as Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for Integral Institute/Integal Life since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. Corey is also a professional woodworker, and many of his artworks can be found in his VisionLogix art gallery.