119/Unveiling Perspectives: A Journey into Value Levels and Spiral Dynamics (Part 1/2)

Greetings, beautiful soul! 🌟 

Welcome to the heart-centered haven of the BTG Podcast, where I, your guide Jen Febel invite you to embark on a transformative journey from your head to your heart.

In this episode, embark with us on a thought-provoking exploration of the silent forces that shape our lives: value levels. Discover how these unseen guides not only influence our personal interactions but also mold the societal constructs we navigate daily. We start by dissecting the differences between personal and societal values, unearthing the importance of recognizing what truly matters to us—not just what we like, but what we deem worthy of our energy and commitment. This is more than just an intellectual exercise; it's a journey to align our deepest emotions with our understanding of ourselves and the world.

You are invited to join us in Circle!

Each episode of The BTG Ppodcast is recorded LIVE during my virutal Healing Circles. These free virtual gatherings that take place twice a month. Each Circle we begin with a beautiful candle meditation followed by a deep dive into a diverse discussion on mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.  We then embark on a journey with a sacred circle casting, grounding meditation and energetic shielding, breath-focused practice,  and ending with a soul-inspiring gratitude meditation.

If real-time connection calls to you, explore more at www.btgwellness.com/circle and join my free Circle membership.

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Embrace the episode, and let the journey within begin!

Warmest regards,
Jen ✨ 

Chapters

• 0:02 Understanding Value Levels and Ideologies
• 10:48 The Spiral Dynamic Theory Explained
• 20:54 Levels of Value and Personal Evolution
• 31:46 Understanding Value Levels and Self

Transcript

Jen Febel: 0:02

Hello and welcome to the BTG Podcast. I am your host, Jen Febel of BTG Wellness and LiveLifeUnbroken. com. BTG stands for Bridge the Gap and it's inspired by my own healing journey. After receiving seven different mental health diagnoses by the age of 19, I quickly realized that there is a massive gap between what I believed and understood in my head and what I truly felt in my heart, and no matter how many therapists I went to, I couldn't seem to bridge that gap until I found the tools and information that I share in my one-on-one private sessions, trainings and right here on this podcast. My goal is to help you begin to bridge that gap by bringing you different topics related to mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. And in case you didn't know, this podcast is recorded live during my bi-monthly virtual healing circles. These are virtual gatherings that are 100% free and no RSVP is required, so you're welcome to come whenever you can and stay as long as you want. Each circle, we open the space with a candle meditation, after which I will share with you my favorite grounding practices and lead you through a circle casting guided meditation and breath work, followed by a soul-inspiring gratitude practice. If you are interested in learning more about how you can continue your journey and experience my virtual healing circles in real time. Please visit www. btgwellness. com/ circle and join my free circle membership. If you like what you hear in today's episode, please also remember to leave a review and share the love by sharing this episode with your friends, family and social network. And, as always, if you have any questions about anything at any time, please feel free to reach out to me through either of my websites, either www. btgwellness. com or by coaching website, livelifeunbroken. com, or through email or social media. Enjoy the episode. Welcome to the virtual healing circle with Je n Febel, of BTG Wellness and LiveLifeUnbroken. com.

Jen Febel: 2:27

And tonight I want to talk to you about value levels. Now, this is part one of two. I originally was going to do it all in one and then I realized there's so much to talk about, so I decided to split it up. I'm really excited to talk about this because right now in our world, we are seeing a lot of clashes of different value levels and ideologies, and when you don't understand how this all plays out, it's really easy to get sucked into all the drama that's out there. So I'm really excited to get you this information tonight. So why is this important? This is important because understanding the general paradigms, understanding the general ideologies that are running in your personal life and in society as a whole, helps give you some insight into how you're showing up in the world and how the world is showing up for you. This is important, because knowing what's important is important. It just is. And this is important because, without this information, it's really easy to feel disappointed, to feel disillusioned by a lot of the conflicts we're seeing in all levels of society.

Jen Febel: 3:40

So I talk about values. What do I mean? Values are what's important to us. Now I want to distinguish that this is not necessarily what we like. For instance, if you go to church every Sunday but you hate it, but you know you should go, so you go, then it's important to you, you value it, even if you still don't like it. So values are what's important to us, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's what we like. It's what we're willing to invest time, money and energy into.

Jen Febel: 4:10

Generally speaking, your values are these massive generalizations that are about our deepest belief systems. It's how we categorize our world and it's the lens through which we view it. Values are extremely unconscious filters that we use to sift through all the data that our neurology picks up. So all the information that comes into our five senses. There's way more than our actual biology can handle. Values are one of the ways that we filter that information, because if it's not important to you, it's not going to make it through, because it's how we view the world. It has a huge impact on our behaviors. It impacts how we respond to our environment and therefore how our environment responds to us. What you value governs all aspects of your behavior. It is the criteria by which you evaluate all of your actions and the actions of those around you. So values are really, really important and, again, they run mostly out of our awareness.

Jen Febel: 5:14

It is said that one of our values impacts somewhere around 25 to 50 different beliefs. I've seen that number fluctuate depending on the publication. Each one of your beliefs then impacts again around 25 to 50 different behaviors. So one of your values is going to impact a lot of your behaviors, and we often have multiple values. If I said to you what's important to you about a relationship, you're probably not going to say one thing. It's probably going to be a list like love, friendship, fun, sex, intimacy, connection. These are things that we value about relationships, or don't Doesn't mean we like some of these things. Sometimes we have trust on our values list, not because we like to look for betrayal in our environments, but because it's important to us Now.

Jen Febel: 6:03

We have our personal values, and then there's also external values, so our personal values are our own unique perspective. It's the lens through which we, as an individual, govern our life. It's about what is directly important to us in our individual existence, and my personal values will contribute to a society's ideology, but less directly. You can determine someone's personal values by listing them directly, such as asking what's important to you about relationships. External values are ideologies that are shared by a team or a collective. If you've ever worked in a large corporation, you've probably talked about values during an HR seminar where you had to sit and come up with mission statements and value statements and you write them and you frame them and you hang them on your wall and this becomes the shared ideology of the team of the organization. But you will also see this in societies or any kind of collective. This value of the society of the collective is the underlying framework on which everything else is built. It heavily impacts the values of the individual, but the individual still has free will. You can determine someone's external values, or an organization's external values by watching how they operate, by examining how they interact with each other.

Jen Febel: 7:22

Now, if you ever looked at or studied Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then you've evaluated some form of values. Maslow was the first psychologist to look at healthy adults and how they showed up psychologically, and he believed that self-actualization represents the highest level and value provided in a healthy person's prime motivation. He published some books and he determined that there are five different levels of values or needs that an individual has to go through. First they have to get their physiological needs met. They have to then get their safety needs met, followed by love and belonging, and then their esteem, and culminating in self-actualization. And he believed that we moved through these as individuals in a linear fashion and we would build one upon the other.

Jen Febel: 8:12

Now, in 1952, a professor of psychology named Claire Graves came up with something that eventually became known as spiral dynamic theory. While Maslow's hierarchy of needs was a linear process that evaluated the values of an individual, spiral dynamic theory now looked at how these values operated in a collective, in a group, in a society. Spiral dynamic theory believes that human psychology transitions throughout time, that we evolve as human beings, that as life gets more complex, we get more complex. Whereas in Maslow's hierarchy you hit self-actualization that was it. This is now looking at how we evolve past that, how we evolve to fit into a society. So, rather than it being a linear journey from survival to self-actualization, what Claire Graves found was that we actually repeat cycles where we vacillate between the expression of the self and the denial of the self. Each of these levels doesn't leave behind the previous levels, but encapsulates them so that we move forward with them. It is an evolution, not a linear process.

Jen Febel: 9:25

Now, before we get into this, it's very important to understand that none of these value levels are better than others. They're strictly developed to respond to environmental conditions and changes. So let's go through these one by one. Value level one is all about survival. It's all about the self. It's about a focus on the self for the purpose of survival, of living long enough to reproduce. In this value level, an individual uses their instincts to survive. They don't have a self-awareness that they are individual, purely instinctual Life concerns are about food and water, some sort of shelter, some sort of reproduction and perpetuation of the species, and the basic response in this level is fight or flight. Nowadays you don't really find this value level on our planet, except potentially in the Amazonian jungle, if they're still even present. You will see this type of value level in newborn infants, where it's all about the survival, as well as in people who suffer from degenerative type processes, such as Alzheimer's or someone who's under the influence of an extreme drug dependency. They will flip into value level one survival. They will be all about themselves and about getting their basic needs met.

Jen Febel: 10:48

Value level 2 now goes back to the other side. Remember that the spiral dynamic theory is about oscillating between being about the self and about denying the self. In value level 1, it's all about me, me, me and my own survival. Value level 2 we now start to recognize the importance of community, of loyalty, of inclusion. We start to see the emergence of a power structure between two or more individuals, and this level consists of collections of people that live together. This is all about the tribal influences. The power and authority is concentrated into the hands of a very, very small number, frequently one or two people.

Jen Febel: 11:29

And at this point people have been around long enough to notice different cycles, different systems. They've noticed the sun always comes up. There's always this big circle in the sky that we call the moon. The leaves turn colors. Certain times there They've had an opportunity to experience different cycles, but because they don't have an understanding of the logic behind it, they explain it through supernatural occurrences. So in this value level, everything is about good and evil spirits. There's sacred symbols, there's totems, there's protection, there's magic, there's omens and predictions of the future.

Jen Febel: 12:04

At this level, the biggest threat to survival is safety for the group in a very threatening world. It's us against them. As long as there are no droughts and famines or epidemics or wars with other tribes, this tribe stays safe. It's all about knowing your place in it. If you've ever seen the movie In Canto by Disney or Moana, everyone has a place on the island. Everyone knows what they do. We all look to one person to lead us and that person is appointed or it's handed down to them. That is very much the tribal influence. About 10% of the world population exists mostly at this level. In modern society you'll still see whiffs of this in things like sports, firefighters, the army all for one, one for all, strong family units. If you have, like an Italian background, portuguese background, you know that the family unit is extremely important and comes before all else. Some organizations still have this loyalty to a dominant leader. So we do still see this in our modern society, just in different ways.

Jen Febel: 13:12

In this value level, it's all about being communal and collective. It is the us, it is the family, it is our kind versus their kind. Kinships and bloodlines are the binding elements Once we know where we belong in a greater society. Now we get to the Osloite, back to the self. Once we know our place within the community, we start to ask what about me, what about what I want? We start to rebel, we start to say no. And that's when we start to move up into value level three, which is all about power. Again we've oscillated back to the other side. This is all about the self. Now again, but this time it's the self, and to hell with others. And value level one is about self for survival. Now it's about self over others.

Jen Febel: 14:03

This level is very egocentric, it's very exploitive. It's about the all powerful self in a jungle of a world where only the fittest survive. This is the first value level where the individual becomes aware of themself and that they are separate from their clan and their family and their tribe. This value level is very impulsive. It's very concerned with immediate satisfaction of all desires and all ways of thinking. Think about that predator, sociopath who doesn't care about the consequences, who can kill without guilt or with impunity. At this value level, the life's concerns are about immediate satisfaction, about power, about dominance, about intimidation and the exploitation of others. It's about succeeding and winning respect and avoiding shame at all costs. We'll see this value level showing up in the terrible twos in childhood, in some form, rebellious youth who's breaking from their family tradition. You'll also see value level three in prison systems, both of the prisoners and of the wardens. Very much it's about control and domination and respect and avoiding shame. This value level is extremely important because it's the first one where we ask what about me? But because it's to the expense of others, it comes with a lot of control, a lot of power and a lot of intimidation.

Jen Febel: 15:29

Right now, what we are seeing in certain parts of the world is a society that is living on a value level three platform, and so for them this is fine. We are seeing clashes of ideologies, clashes of values, where people from different value levels, starting with three, are starting to be able to communicate in a way they never could, because we have social media now. Before word outside the tribe didn't really go outside the tribe. Then we ended up with borders and we were able to impact the immediate people around us. But now our borders don't exist. Now we have people from all walks of life, from all value levels, communicating with each other and we're seeing clashes of this. And some of those clashes happen because some of them are still at a value level three. Now, again, there's no right and there's no wrong. There's no better value level. But when you're in this value level, it is completely okay to exploit others for personal gain. It just is. And that clashes when you get up to different value levels.

Jen Febel: 16:31

Once we have explored the self to the exclusion of others, once we have gained that power and that respect, we've realized that everything is an utter fucking mess. We have to come in with rules, we have to start to create a society, we have to go back to being about others. But now we're sacrificing our self for salvation later, which brings us to value level four. So in value level two, we sacrificed our self for the clan. Now we're sacrificing our self to get rewarded later. If I follow the rules now, I will get something later. If I work hard for 50 years, I'll get a gold watch. If I do what I'm told, I'll go to heaven.

Jen Febel: 17:10

There's a right and a wrong way to do things. All requirements is to obey authority. Your job is to be obedient and to be compliant, because rules make a society stable. And, coming from a value level three where you didn't have that stability, value level four brings in the concept of justice. It's being back about the community. It's about order. It's about maintaining that stability and punishing anyone who tries to rock the boat. Rewards come from working hard now and then you get your reward later on.

Jen Febel: 17:42

About 40% of the world's population is in this value level. We still see a lot of this in North America. Our school systems are built on a value level four platform. Our government is placed on a value level four platform, with a lot of value level three running in the background. Our hospitals and healthcare are based on a value level four system. There's a right and a wrong way to do things and you have to do what you're told, otherwise you're going to be punished in some capacity, you'll be fired, you'll be written up. So value level four is all about fairness. It's all about making sure that we know what is right and wrong and how to run a society, and this is wonderful. But in this value level, behavioral freedom is severely restricted. You have to toe the line, otherwise you get punished. So behavioral flexibility, freedom of thought, is not encouraged in this system. At some points some free thinkers come along and that's when you start to get the development of value level five.

Jen Febel: 18:41

Value level five again swings back to the individual, but now it's about expressing yourself, specifically for material rewards. Now, when we're asking what about me? We don't want power, that's value level three. We don't care about the respect. Now we want money, money, money, money makes the world go around, and that's where power lives.

Jen Febel: 19:02

On the value level five platform. This value level is all about achievement. It's all about being your best self. It's about living to your fullest potential. It's about being optimistic and taking risks and going for it, shooting your shot. Value level five everything's replaceable at this level. It's very much a materialistic type of value level, and about 30% of the world's population is here. This is the value level where things like NLP start to come into play, where psychology can start to come into play how to be your best self.

Jen Febel: 19:38

Value level five because it's all about the self, without the power and control issues of value level three. This is the level where we are meant to learn about things like boundaries. We need to learn where our boundaries are in order to be able to achieve on all levels. If I don't know what is me and what is not me, then how can I be the best me that I can be? A lot of people arrive in value level five because they want the money, they want the success, they want the car, they don't want to work the nine to five for some schmo in value level four anymore. But they don't know how to be in this level and know who they are, because when you're in this level without boundaries, then all that success is meaningless and hollow, and that's where we start to get people showing up with what we call fraud syndrome. Value level five is something that a lot of us reject, because we're taught that money is evil, money is bad, money is the root of all our problems, and so a lot of us try to skip this value level, because the value level after this is value level six, which is where we start to explore the land of love and light, and we're going to wait until next time to get into that, because that one's big.

Jen Febel: 20:54

A lot of us don't like value level five. We have names for this one, like selfish, bitchy, egotistical, narcissistic. We like to try to label this value level as bad, likely because we still have too much of our neurology in value level 4, where those are right and wrong way to do things. So we can exist in multiple value levels at a time. You can be one value level at work and another value level at home. So at work you can be all about value level 4 and following the rules. At home you can be value level 6 and hanging crystals off your nostrils, like that is totally okay. You can also regress into different value levels when faced with any kind of trauma or any kind of deeply challenging situation.

Jen Febel: 21:47

So as we're evolving forward, as we're moving through, remember this is not a linear path. Even though all levels are accessible to us neurologically, some of us won't ever get to any higher ones. There are many people in the world who stay at 3, liver 3, diet 3, and they're fine with that. So evolution through these system is not guaranteed, but it is accessible. Each new level that you achieve allows you greater access to choices, both at the individual level and the societal level. The more we continue to evolve as individuals, the more we contribute that to society. Truly, I shine my light so bright I ignite the light in others. As your values change, you contribute that to the society, and vice versa. Now, clairgraves believe that most people span about two or three levels most of the time, so it's very likely that you hang out in 3, 4, 5, or 4, 5, and 6.

Jen Febel: 22:45

Evolution is not related to age. There are some individuals who will spend a lifetime wrestling the challenges of a specific level, playing the victim, not knowing how to evolve any higher, and that's part of their journey. And transition to a higher level can only occur when a person or a society encounters a situation that they can't deal with at their current value level. When raging and warring and threatening don't work, that's when you're willing to come to the table and talk about rules. When rules stop working, that's when you're willing to come to the table and talk about individual needs. So it's only when what we're doing won't work anymore, and before it stops working, we will try it with all our might, as hard as we can, and when it stops working. That's what elevates us. So these crises that we encounter in our lifetime serve to give us the neurology to move us and evolve us forward. So when those show up, we go. Yay.

Jen Febel: 23:51

So some key concepts to remember. Remember that there are no good value levels and there are no bad value levels. There's only an understanding of the values of each level and how they're contributing to the building of that next level. This allows you to view things going on in the world through a different lens, to experience it not through our own self-judgment or fear, but through, oh, value levels. Of course this is how society evolves. Of course it would show up this way, even if it's uncomfortable. Remember that you can exhibit different value level thinking in different areas of your life. So don't be dismayed when you go into power struggles with your mother, but you're totally fine to follow the rules at work.

Jen Febel: 24:32

And remember that progression through the levels requires you to walk the walk. You can't just think about it abstractly. You have to actually live it. You have to encounter the challenges that come along with it. You have to move through those challenges. That is what actually changes you.

Jen Febel: 24:46

That's what allows you to expand your perspective, to get to a different level and, as always, I want to remind you to decide that you want it more than you're afraid of it, knowing where you are, identifying where you are in different areas of your life, wishing it were somewhere else, fearing that it might not be. All these questions come up when we have the courage to look at ourselves and say how am I showing up in the world and therefore, how is the world showing up for me? So just decide that you want that more than you're afraid of it. That's always the decision that will take you to the next step and, as always, if you have any questions about anything from tonight's Circle or Podcast, please know you can always reach out to me through either my websites, either btgwellnesscom or livelifeunbrokencom, or through email or through social media.

Speaker 2: 25:35

Really really cool topic. So value level one is self sort of individual. How does trauma then play into that? I mean, does it then knock you off kilter?

Jen Febel: 25:52

for all the following levels it doesn't knock you off kilter, but it means that some of your neurology will remain in a lower level. So let's say that. So you're not going to see a lot of injury in the value level one, but you'll see value level two, family injuries, family trauma. Hollow who doesn't have family trauma from their upbringing right? So a lot of us will have stuff there.

Jen Febel: 26:16

So it doesn't mean that we get stuck in that, but it doesn't mean that some of our neurology does. So I might move out of value level two and I might be like you know what forget about the family, I want to move on to self and I'll reject the family. That rejection is the wounding part we are meant to evolve beyond, not reject the one behind us, but to take the lessons of that value level and move it with us to the next level, not say screw you to the clan, I'm going to be myself. So trauma shows up in a rejection of the value level that we're moving off of and we hold on to that rejection versus evolution of. Thank you, family for all you've given. It's now time for me to fly the nest kind of thing that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 27:00

Yeah. So then how do you transition from one value level to another if you haven't really dealt with what happens in certain like you're an individual, and then your family and then your societal? I mean, everyone wants to have this uprising and they want to have a voice, but sometimes that voice can just be anger and not rational sort of being in that value level.

Jen Febel: 27:24

So irrational, compulsive about the self. That's value level three. So when we come from, it's all about the family, it's all about giving to the family, and your family comes first. Then, yeah, there is massive anger on value level three. That's why there is this need for respect, there's this need for dominance, there's a complete avoidal of shame and avoidal avoidance of shame. So when we are evolving through, we are meant to learn the lessons and take them with us and we don't, and we have that rejection. Then it will show up as anger. It will show up as I can't be with my family. Fuck them, they're horrible. That's not a healing. A rejection of the family unit for the sake of individuality is a rejection. It's not a healing. We are meant to gain those lessons of how to be part of something, because we're going to need that information. Come value level four, where we get back into systems. If we haven't resolved in value level two, then when we go into the systems of value level four, we're going to hate it and we're going to rebel.

Speaker 2: 28:32

How do you know when you're authentically showing up, then, and not just you are authentically showing up and all those value levels.

Jen Febel: 28:38

It is you authentically showing up. It is you through a value system that is supported by your environment and that is fed by your environment. So our value level as a society is not just something we decide upon internally. It's supported, it's something that we see in a society that's all about the clan and tribal. And when I say, well, I just want to be myself, and that's rejected, I might turn that off and say nevermind. Or I might say, fun, I'll be that one explorer who goes in search of a new land, but I'll be rejected by my clan potentially. And so it's always our authentic self. It's just our authentic self at greater and greater levels of complexity. The higher up we go, the more abstract we get in concepts and therefore the more expansive our perspective becomes. In order to be able to handle that perspective, we need to have dealt with the complexities of each level, and so all of them are our authentic self. Thank you, my pleasure. My pleasure when you show up with your mom and you rage out of control and flip into value level three. You don't like to admit it, but that's part of our authentic self too. We reject it, we reject it, we don't want it to be there anymore. But that is, in that moment, our authentic self in relationship to that person. So it's all our authentic self. Everything we do is our authentic self, even when we hide who we are to fit in. That is, in that value level, an expression of our authentic self in that system. In a value level four system, you have to erase yourself to fit in, and so that becomes your authentic self because that's what gets supported. Yeah, great question. I think this stuff is the coolest, right. It is so easy to look at society and say, ah, we're fucked. No one, no generation ever, has possibly ever had these challenges. Humanity is doomed, we're all screwed. It's really easy to go to that place. It's really easy to go to that place but when you understand what's happening through the lens of its value level. Systems and different ideologies carry with them different rules and in one value level it is totally okay to murder for a just cause, even if that's not okay in another value level. Neither is right or wrong. But it's important to understand how that's operating and where in yourself you've rejected aspects of that that you didn't evolve through.

Jen Febel: 31:15

In the next Healing Circle and Episode of the Podcast. We're going to get into value level six, seven and eight. We're going to talk about this idea of having a value level six idea in a value level four neurology. Remember, I said that people like to skip value level five. What we're seeing a lot in the world is people who rejected five and tried to hop into six without getting the information, and so their neurology is stuck at four, even though they talk the talk of six.

Jen Febel: 31:46

It's really interesting. It's really interesting how the value levels relate to each other. To me, this is just a fascinating way to understand self and where I am and society, understand the world, because it's confusing out there right now. Thank you again for joining me for this episode of the BTG Podcast, which stands for Bridge the Gap With me, jen Fable. Remember, if you want to experience my virtual healing circles in real time, visit wwwBTGWcom. And, of course, if you have any questions at any time, please know you're always welcome to reach out to me through social media or through my websites at wwwBTGWcom or through my coaching website, livelifeunbrokencom. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.