Weekly Reflection #012
Stages, States, Emotions and the Environments That Shape Us
The Six Stages Framework has always been concerned with movement. Where are we positioned? What helps us move towards greater awareness, understanding and responsibility? What pulls us in the opposite direction? And what happens when pressure, fear, belonging or circumstance challenge the position we thought we occupied? Recently, however, I have found myself returning to another word: state. I am no longer asking only, “What stage are you at?” I am also asking, “What state are you occupying right now?” In many ways, that question — what state are you occupying? — is becoming increasingly important to me, because it helps us notice not only broader position, but what is active in us in the moment. And increasingly, another question follows: Who are you becoming by continuing to occupy it?
I think this matters because human beings are rarely the same everywhere. We may be thoughtful and reflective in one environment and defensive in another, courageous with one group and silent with another. We may express our values confidently at work and find ourselves returning to much older patterns when we go home. Sometimes we surprise ourselves and wonder, Why did I behave like that? Why didn’t I say anything? Why do I always become that version of myself when I am around them? Perhaps the language of states can help us understand some of this. It may also add another layer to some of the ideas I have been exploring through The Mask of Me and other SSF reflections and within the wider SSF work on psychological safety.
Why what state are you occupying is not the same as asking about stage
The stages within the Six Stages Framework describe identifiable psychological positions and patterns of understanding and behaviour. But the SSF was never intended to be a simple staircase. We do not move neatly from Stage One to Stage Two to Stage Three and permanently leave everything that came before behind. Human beings are more complicated than that.
I am beginning to think that states may help explain some of this complexity. A stage may tell us something about our broader or more habitual psychological position. A state may tell us what becomes active when this person, this identity, this emotion and this environment meet at this particular moment. Perhaps we might think of it this way: stage is where I tend to stand; state is what is active in me now; emotion tells me something about how I am experiencing what is happening; environment is what may be pulling, pushing, rewarding, reactivating or restoring me; and agency asks what I do with that pull. This distinction may help us understand why someone can appear to occupy very different positions in different circumstances without their broader development necessarily having disappeared.
What state are you occupying when environments call earlier versions of you back?
Many people recognise the experience of returning to a familiar family environment and becoming, almost without noticing, somebody they thought they had left behind. You may have left home decades ago. You have changed, grown in confidence, established a career, developed different relationships, learned new ways of managing conflict and perhaps even undertaken therapy. You have built an adult identity that feels settled and familiar.
Then you return home for Christmas, and within hours something shifts. You become the peacekeeper again, the compliant child, the sibling whose opinion is never quite taken seriously, the one who stays quiet, the one who becomes defensive, or the one who knows not to challenge Mum or Dad. People often describe these encounters as emotionally exhausting. Perhaps part of that exhaustion comes from negotiating between who we have become and who that environment remembers us as.
Some environments do not simply influence our present state. They can summon states we thought we had left behind. A familiar voice, a particular look, a childhood home, an old criticism or a long-established family role can reactivate something remarkably quickly. Suddenly, we do not merely remember how we once felt. We feel ourselves back there.This offers another way of thinking about non-linearity within the SSF. Movement can be genuine without being irreversible. We may have developed considerably and still find an earlier state temporarily reactivated when the emotional and relational conditions resemble those in which it was first formed. That does not necessarily mean our development was false. Perhaps human beings carry histories of states.
What state are you occupying when the people around you make silence easier?
At a recent My Dear White Friend workshop, a participant shared an experience that has stayed with me. She described being in an interracial marriage and recalled occasions when members of her late husband’s family would make racist jokes and derogatory comments about Black people. What she could never understand was why her husband remained silent. Yet later in his life, she described him as becoming an outspoken ally in the fight against racism. The story reminded me again why the question what state are you occupying? matters.
We cannot know from the outside exactly what was happening internally during those earlier family encounters. Silence does not automatically tell us what somebody believes. Family loyalty, fear of conflict, old relational roles and the power of belonging can all influence behaviour. But the story raises an important question: did that particular environment make silence easier than challenge? Sometimes an environment does not necessarily change what we believe. It changes what we permit ourselves to express, challenge or tolerate. And our states are not experienced only by us. Other people experience their consequences. We might tell ourselves, I didn’t agree with them. I just kept quiet. The person being targeted may experience something very different: you did not stand beside me.
Later, something appears to have changed for this man. His wife experienced him as somebody prepared to speak and act against racism. We cannot know exactly what changed, but perhaps that is precisely why the example matters. What relationships, experiences, reflections or environments make another state easier to inhabit? And when we repeatedly inhabit that state, might it eventually become part of our more enduring position? This feels closely connected to the more personal questions explored through My Dear White Friend, where understanding racism becomes not merely conceptual but relational and lived.
States are social
We are not formed in isolation. Spend enough time within a group and its assumptions can begin to feel like common sense. Its jokes become familiar. Its grievances become understandable. Its language becomes our language. Its interpretation of events can begin to feel less like one interpretation and more like reality itself.
Families do this. Friendship groups do this. Workplaces do it. Online communities and political movements do it too. The people around us do not simply influence what we think. They can influence which states become easiest for us to inhabit. Hostility can be reinforced, as can suspicion, blame, certainty and silence. But curiosity, empathy, courage, reflection and accountability can also be reinforced. This brings me back to the increasingly visible declaration: “I am racist and proud.” How does somebody arrive at a state they are prepared not merely to inhabit but openly claim? Probably not in one leap. There may be many smaller moments of permission, reinforcement, identification and belonging along the way. A state becomes easier to occupy and then easier to return to. Repeated often enough, it may become increasingly familiar. Perhaps eventually it becomes woven into identity. That leaves me with an uncomfortable question: if I continue occupying this state, surrounded by these people and reinforced by these messages, who might I become?
What becomes available to us when emotion takes over?
A few years ago, while staying in a hotel in Scotland, I got into conversation with a man after mentioning the book I had recently written on understanding and dealing with everyday racism. He told me about an incident that appeared still to trouble him. He had returned to his car and believed that three people from ethnic-minority backgrounds had been tampering with it. He became extremely angry. What disturbed him afterwards was his own response. He described racist abuse coming out of his mouth and told me he could hardly understand the words he was using or where they had come from. The incident resulted in his arrest and charges relating to racist behaviour.
What stayed with me was his confusion. Before that evening, he had not understood himself as somebody who was racist. Yet under intense anger, a racialised way of responding became available to him. I do not think this means anger somehow created racism from nothing, nor do I think one episode tells us everything there is to know about a person. But it raises an important psychological question: what becomes available within us when intense emotion reduces our usual restraints? Perhaps states can sometimes reveal tensions between our conscious self-image and assumptions, associations or scripts that remain psychologically available to us. This is also where responsibility matters. We cannot simply say, That wasn’t really me. I was in a state. States may help explain behaviour. They do not excuse it. Understanding the state gives us somewhere to intervene.
Emotional intelligence and what state are you occupying
This is where my earlier work and thinking around emotional intelligence becomes particularly relevant. Environments do not simply push us mechanically from one state to another. We experience them, interpret what is happening and feel. Fear, shame, anger, threat, belonging, pride, resentment, safety, curiosity and compassion may all make certain psychological states easier to enter. Fear may move us towards avoidance or defensiveness. Shame may produce withdrawal, denial or attack. Anger may intensify hostility and blame. A strong need to belong may increase conformity or silence. Psychological safety may make curiosity and reflection easier. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety is helpful here because it reminds us that environments matter profoundly in shaping whether people feel able to speak, reflect and take interpersonal risks.
Emotion may therefore be one of the first indications that movement is occurring. If I can notice, I recognise this feeling. This environment is activating something familiar. I can feel myself moving towards a state I know, another possibility may open. I can begin asking myself: What am I feeling? What has activated it? What state is this emotion pulling me towards? Do I want to remain there? Emotional intelligence does not mean suppressing emotion. Perhaps it gives us more information about the state we are entering and therefore potentially more choice about what happens next. In that sense, emotional awareness may help us notice movement through states — and possibly through stages — before it becomes fully entrenched.
I am beginning to visualise the relationship as a fluid process in which environment and pressure influence appraisal; appraisal generates emotion; emotion can activate a state; the state influences behaviour; and what happens next may involve reinforcement, reflection or movement. But the relationship is not one-way. Our broader stage position also influences how we interpret events, while the states we repeatedly inhabit may reinforce or reshape our broader position. Some of the thinking behind this is now represented visually below in VF012 within the SSF Visual Psychological Formulations series.
VF012 makes visible what I am beginning to think of as a fluid relationship rather than a fixed progression: states can influence stages, stages can shape how states are expressed, and environments can affect movement in both directions.
What happens to our values under pressure?
This may also explain why people’s expressed values sometimes seem to change when circumstances change. Someone may be thoughtful about equity and inclusion when there is time to reflect. Then the organisation becomes busy, pressure increases, targets dominate and suddenly the message becomes, We don’t have time for all that. We just need to get the job done. Have they suddenly moved backwards several stages? Perhaps not. Perhaps pressure has activated another state, and perhaps that state tells us something about how deeply particular values have become internalised.
The same question applies when someone behaves inclusively in a workplace where inclusive values are strongly expected but behaves very differently when those expectations disappear. This does not necessarily mean the workplace behaviour was false. The environment may have been scaffolding a way of being that had not yet become sufficiently internalised to travel with them. Perhaps pressure therefore provides a kind of stress test: what happens to our stated values when the environment stops making them easy to practise?
Sometimes the state helps us survive
But there is another reason we need to handle the idea of states carefully. Not every state is simply a moral choice. I think about my own experience of living in a predominantly White student environment. Looking back, I can see ways in which I adapted. I learned what worked, what was welcomed, what helped me fit in, what parts of myself were easiest to bring into that environment and perhaps what was better left elsewhere. In some ways, John Berry’s work on acculturation and adaptation helps illuminate this, because adaptation and assimilation are not the same thing.
Maybe I occupied a state that helped me belong and survive socially. That connects strongly with my recent reflections on assimilation and conditional belonging. Sometimes the state we occupy is not the state that most completely expresses who we are. It may be the state that helps us remain safe, connected or accepted. This makes the question “Who am I becoming?” much more complicated. Change is not always growth. Sometimes we are becoming the version of ourselves that an environment makes easiest to be, and sometimes that becoming requires us to become less, rather than more, connected to ourselves.
Not every state is chosen
For the same reason, I am cautious about asking only, “What state are you choosing to occupy?” Choice matters, but human agency is not equally distributed across every state. There are states we may reinforce, defend and repeatedly return to, but there are also states people find themselves enduring: depression, poverty, war, isolation and loneliness. It would be psychologically and morally inadequate to tell people simply to choose another state.
Perhaps the developing work therefore needs to distinguish between states we repeatedly inhabit, states that are reactivated, states we adopt in order to adapt or survive, states we endure and states we deliberately cultivate. Even where we cannot immediately leave a state, questions of agency may remain. What helps us retain ourselves? Who helps us survive? What relationships create possibility? What stops the state from becoming the whole story of who we are?
What have I been rehearsing?
I am increasingly interested in repetition. A state may begin as temporary, but repeated states become familiar. Familiar states may become habitual. Habitual ways of thinking and responding may influence our broader psychological position, and eventually they may begin to shape identity. Perhaps the pathway sometimes looks something like environment → emotion → state → repetition → habit → identity → becoming.
But this process is not inevitable. It can be interrupted by a different friendship, an uncomfortable conversation, a person who challenges us, meeting somebody whose experience disrupts what we thought we knew, reflection, curiosity, loss, love or simply entering a different environment. A different environment may make a different state possible. In that sense, the question what state are you occupying? also becomes a question about rehearsal. What are you practising? What are you normalising? What are you strengthening by repeated return?
Matopos: what environments can restore in us
I have been thinking for some time about what I describe as the Matopos philosophy. Matopos, with its ancient rock formations, balancing landscapes and extraordinary sense of scale, has always evoked something different in me: perspective, stillness, connection, humility and a recognition that we are part of something larger than ourselves. As I have been developing this idea of states, I have begun wondering whether Matopos offers an important counterpoint.
Much of this reflection has considered environments that reactivate or reinforce difficult states: environments that reward hostility, encourage conformity, bring old fears back or make silence easier than courage. But what about environments that restore something in us? What environments make curiosity, compassion, humility, connection, courage, hope and perspective easier? Perhaps some environments narrow the states available to us, while others widen them.
This may be one of the deeper implications of the SSF. We should not only ask what environments are pulling people towards hostility, defensiveness, blame or certainty. We also need to ask: what kinds of environments help human beings remain connected to one another? The state of “I am racist and proud” asks what an environment can release, reinforce and legitimise in us. Matopos asks something different: what might an environment restore in us?
Who am I becoming?
Perhaps this is where I have arrived this week. The SSF has always invited us to think about our position and our direction of travel. States add another layer. They ask us to notice what is active in us now, what is being reinforced, what is being reactivated, what we are rehearsing, what we are feeling and what the environments around us are calling forward. So perhaps the questions are no longer simply “What stage am I at?” or “What state am I occupying? ”Perhaps we also need to ask, “Who am I becoming? Who am I becoming in the company of these people? Which environments call forward the person I want to become, and which call back versions of myself I thought I had left behind?”
And perhaps there is one more question that matters just as much: what kind of environment am I creating for the becoming of other people? Because we are not merely shaped by environments. We are part of one another’s environments.
If you are new to the framework itself, you can explore an introduction at Start Here. You can also explore the wider collection of SSF Visual Psychological Formulations and the developing reflections gathered in the resources section.
Reflective question
Think about the people, places and pressures that shape most of your life. What emotions and states do they repeatedly call forward in you — and if you keep returning to those states, who are you becoming?
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