Episode 8: Ego Development Part 1 -
The Impulsive & Egocentric Stages
Table of Contents
Introduction | History of Ego Development Theory | Why Ego & Cognitive Development are Used Interchangeably | How the Child Experiences the World at Stage 1 | Healthy Expressions of Stage 1 in Adults | Not-So-Healthy Expressions in Adults | Pressures That Push Stage 1 Toward Transformation | Healing & Integrating Stage 1 | Reflection Questions | Compassionate Re-Frames
Introduction
Ego development theory (also called constructive-developmental theory or stage theory of adult development) is a branch of developmental psychology that describes how human beings gradually grow in the complexity of how they make meaning of themselves, others, and the world. The “ego” here does not mean arrogance — it simply means the perspective through which we interpret experience (our frame of reference).
The theory shows that meaning-making is not static; it evolves in a predictable sequence of stages, each stage giving us a wider, deeper, and more nuanced lens on reality. The theory is used in coaching, leadership development, psychotherapy, parenting, spiritual direction, and conflict resolution because it explains why people at different stages can look at the exact same situation and see completely different things.
The model most commonly used today is a synthesis of work by Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Robert Kegan, Terri O’Fallon, and Bill Torbert.
History of Ego Development Theory
The story of ego development theory begins in the late 19th century with Sigmund Freud, who revolutionized psychology by proposing that the human psyche is not a fixed entity but a dynamic battleground. He described the ego as the mediating structure that constantly negotiates between the raw, instinctual drives of the id (our animalistic impulses for pleasure, aggression, and survival) and the internalized social rules of the super-ego (conscience and cultural norms). For Freud, the ego was primarily libido-driven and its healthy growth depended on successfully navigating psychosexual conflicts; while groundbreaking, this view was limited to childhood and heavily centered on sexuality.
In the mid-20th century, Erik Erikson dramatically expanded Freud’s ideas across the entire lifespan. Rather than seeing the ego as mainly sexual, Erikson framed it as fundamentally social and cultural. He outlined eight psychosocial stages from infancy to old age, each defined by a core conflict (e.g., trust vs. mistrust, identity vs. role confusion, integrity vs. despair). Successfully resolving these crises builds virtues such as hope, will, purpose, and wisdom, while unresolved conflicts leave lasting vulnerabilities. Erikson’s work shifted the conversation from libido to relationships, belonging, competence, and meaning within one’s culture, and it is his broader understanding of “ego” that most people mean today when they use the word “personality.”
The true birth of ego development as a measurable, stage-based model came in the 1960s and 1970s with Jane Loevinger, a research psychologist at Washington University. Loevinger wanted to study not just what people think but how they make meaning itself. She created the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (SCT), a projective instrument in which people finish open-ended stems like “When I am criticized…” or “My greatest fear is…”. By analyzing thousands of responses, she identified a reliable, sequential stages of ego maturity that progress from impulsive and self-centered to autonomous and integrated. Loevinger’s genius was showing that the ego is a meaning-making structure that evolves in predictable, hierarchical stages throughout adulthood, not just childhood. Her original model had eight or nine stages (depending on scoring), and it became the empirical foundation for almost all later work.
Susanne Cook-Greuter, Loevinger’s most accomplished student and collaborator, spent decades refining and extending the model. She improved the scoring manual, added greater nuance to the later stages, and documented rare post-conventional and transpersonal levels of development (e (e.g., Construct-aware, Unitive). Cook-Greuter’s research demonstrated that fewer than 4-8% of adults reach a late 4th person perspective, and approximately 0.1% reach an early 5th person perspective. She emphasized that later stages bring not only greater complexity but also greater psychological freedom and capacity to hold paradox.
Working parallel to Cook-Greuter, Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan offered a complementary framework he called “constructive-developmental theory.” In his books The Evolving Self (1982) and In Over Our Heads (1994), Kegan described development as a lifelong series of transformations in what is “subject” (what we are fused with and cannot see) and what becomes “object” (what we can reflect on and control). His five orders of consciousness roughly map onto Loevinger’s stages and made the theory accessible to educators, therapists, and organizational consultants.
In the 21st century, Terri O’Fallon built on Cook-Greuter’s work with her STAGES model, which extends the map into even later “stratospheric” territories and introduces a clear perspectival language (1st-, 2nd-, 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-person perspectives) that makes the abstract stages feel concrete and intuitive. Her dream and movie metaphors have become widely used teaching tools.
1st-person perspective (PP): You are fully inside the dream as the main character — everything feels completely real; no distance or reflection.
2nd-PP: You can inhabit or feel through other characters in the dream.
3rd-PP: Lucid dreaming — you “wake up” inside the dream and see the whole dreamscape, plot, and absurd rules objectively.
4th-PP: You wake up in bed, remember the dream, and interpret it (seeing the subconscious patterns, influences, etc., that constructed the dream).
5th-PP+: Awareness recognizes itself as the ground of all experience — even the “I who woke up” is seen as another arising within boundless awareness (non-dual).
Finally, Bill Torbert and his colleagues translated the entire body of research into practical, everyday language for leaders and organizations. In his “Action-Logics” framework (Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Redefining, Transforming, Alchemist), Torbert showed how a leader’s ego stage predicts their decision-making style, how they handle power and feedback, and how effectively they can transform organizations. His work brought ego development out of academia and into boardrooms, coaching practices, and leadership programs worldwide. In 2023, Torbert’s company Global Leadership Associates updated the average distribution across stages in their GLP report to reflect the significant shift occurring among the corporate population into both early and late 4th PP.
Opportunist (1st PP equivalent) 0%
Diplomat (2nd PP equivalent) 0.1%
Expert (early 3rd PP equivalent) 4.1%
Achiever (late 3rd PP equivalent) 35.2%
Redefining (early 4th PP equivalent) 50.7%
Transforming (late 4th PP equivalent) 9.8%
Alchemist (early 5th PP equivalent) 0.1%
Together, these thinkers created a robust, evidence-based map showing that the way we make sense of ourselves, others, and reality itself continues to evolve throughout adulthood — and that understanding these stages offers profound leverage for personal growth, relationships, parenting, therapy, and leadership.
Why Ego Development & Cognitive Development Are Used Interchangeably
In everyday language we tend to think of cognition as “thinking” or “how many facts you know,” but in developmental psychology and cognitive science the term is much broader: cognition is the entire structure through which we know anything at all. A new ego stage is not simply adding more information or becoming “smarter”; it is a transformation in the fundamental ways we know. This is why researchers routinely treat ego development and cognitive development as two sides of the same coin.
The clearest bridge between the two fields comes from John Vervaeke’s 4Ps of knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory). These four forms of knowledge are hierarchically dependent: each later form rests on the previous ones, and a transformation at a deeper level reorganizes everything above it. Ego-development stages map almost perfectly onto simultaneous upgrades across all four dimensions.
Working from the most familiar (and “highest”) down to the most primordial:
Propositional knowing – “knowing that” (facts, beliefs, theories, arguments, and propositions that can be true or false).
At early ego stages (Impulsive/Egocentric), propositional knowing is almost non-existent — a toddler can barely form simple sentences, let alone handle abstract concepts. By the 3rd PP stage most adults reach, propositional knowing is highly developed: we can reason logically, cite evidence, and build complex theories. At 4th PP and later stages we become meta-aware of propositional knowing itself — we see that all theories are models, not reality, and we can hold multiple conflicting propositions at once without cognitive dissonance.
Procedural knowing – “knowing how” (skills, habits, and embodied know-how that let us do things reliably)
In the Impulsive stage, procedural knowing is limited to immediate reflexes and simple cause-effect actions (grab, throw, run). At the late 2nd PP and early 3rd PP stages we master socially approved procedures and technical skills. In late 3rd PP and 4th PP we can flexibly adapt procedures, invent new ones, and teach skills while (in late 4th PP) being aware of the developmental process required to acquire them.
Perspectival knowing – “knowing by situated seeing” (the lived, felt sense of what the world is like from where I stand right now — what is salient, what the situation feels like, what shows up as real or important).
1st PP (Impulsive/Egocentric) perspective is completely fused — the child literally cannot imagine that the world looks different to anyone else. Second-person stages open empathy (“I can feel what you feel”). Third-person stages give objective context (“I can see the room from a balcony view”). Fourth-person reveals that every perspective, including my “objective” one, is shaped by hidden forces (culture, trauma, ideology). The world now looks radically different because what is figural and what is background has transformed.
Participatory knowing – “knowing by being the kind of person I am” (the deepest and most foundational)
This is the layer that changes most dramatically across ego stages. In the Impulsive stage the infant/toddler is almost completely fused with the caregiver/environment — there is no stable “I” separate from the arena. Each new ego stage is fundamentally a reconfiguration of participatory knowing: a new way of belonging, a new identity, a new relationship between yourself as an agent and the world around you (the arena) in which you operate. When participatory knowing transforms, the other three Ps are automatically reorganized because the person you are has literally changed.
Because every major shift in ego development simultaneously upgrades all four kinds of knowing — propositional sophistication, procedural flexibility, perspectival range, and (most importantly) participatory identity — developmental psychologists treat “ego maturity” and “cognitive complexity” as essentially synonymous in adulthood. A person at every stage doesn’t just have more accurate beliefs; they are a different kind of knower, from the ground up.
How the Child Experiences the World at Stage One
For a very young child centered in the Impulsive and early first-person perspective, the boundary between “me” and “not-me” is almost nonexistent. An infant experiences the world as a blooming, buzzing confusion of sensations with no clear sense of separation: the warmth of mother’s skin, the taste of milk, the sound of a voice, and the feeling of hunger are all part of one undifferentiated field. There is no stable “I” looking out at an external world; instead, everything simply is the child’s direct experience. If a toy is moved out of sight behind the caregiver’s back, it literally ceases to exist for the baby—out of sight is out of mind, because object permanence has not yet formed. Emotions are total and overwhelming: one moment the baby is in bliss, the next in absolute distress, with no capacity to modulate or even name what is happening. Needs are felt as cosmic emergencies—hunger is not “I’m hungry,” it is “the entire universe is wrong and must be fixed right now.” There is no delay of gratification, no sense that waiting might be possible, and no understanding that other people have separate inner worlds.
Around eighteen months to two years old, the child begins to discover “I have a body, and this body is me.” This is the birth of the Egocentric first-person perspective—the famous “mine!” phase. Suddenly everything the child can see, touch, or imagine is experienced as belonging to them. A toddler may grab a toy from another child not out of malice, but because, from their viewpoint, the toy is an extension of their own body. If you cover your eyes, the toddler believes you cannot see them (and will often close their own eyes when caught doing something forbidden, convinced that if they can’t see you, you can’t see them). Cause and effect are understood only magically: “I wished for the cookie and it appeared, therefore my wish made the cookie appear.” Thoughts and reality are fused—if I’m angry at Mommy, I may believe my anger caused her to leave the room. Tantrums are not manipulation at this age; they are the only possible response when the entire felt universe has become unbearable. Time barely exists: there is only now, or not-now. Future consequences (“if you hit your brother, he will cry”) are incomprehensible because the child cannot yet hold two perspectives at once. This is completely healthy and necessary development—the nervous system is learning that “I exist, I have power, I can make things happen, and my actions matter.”
Healthy Expressions of Stage 1 in Adults
When Stage 1 is well-integrated rather than fixated or repressed, adults retain conscious, voluntary access to its gifts without being hijacked by them. The most obvious gift is a vivid sense of embodied presence: the felt knowledge “I am here, in this body, right now.” This is experienced as a reliable inner anchor rather than something we have to chase through achievement or approval.
Healthy Stage 1 gives us the capacity for spontaneous joy, playfulness, and sensuality—the ability to lose ourselves in dance, sport, love-making, or laughter without self-consciousness. It is the root of true assertiveness: the clean, non-defensive “No” or “Yes” that comes from the gut rather than from rules or strategy. In emergencies it supplies lightning-fast reflexive action—catching a falling glass, swerving the car, or physically protecting a loved one before thought kicks in. Athletes describe this as being “in the zone”; artists call it flow.
Integrated Stage 1 is also the source of authentic courage: the willingness to feel fear fully and still act. Rituals, awe at a sunset, the “magical” feeling of synchronicity, and even the capacity for childlike wonder all draw from this layer. When a grandmother lights a candle for her ancestors or a soldier instinctively shields a comrade, that is healthy, mature first-person perspective in action. Paradoxically, the better Stage 1 is integrated, the more life force becomes available for creativity and generativity instead of reactivity.
Not-So-Healthy Expressions in Adults
Most adults have later stages available, yet under sufficient stress, exhaustion, threat, or triggering, every single one of us temporarily regresses to first-person perspective. The difference is whether we notice and can return, or whether Stage 1 remains our center of gravity.
When it is the dominant operating system, life looks like permanent toddler mode armed with adult resources—car keys, credit cards, alcohol, social media accounts, and political power. The world is once again experienced as revolving entirely around immediate needs and sensations. Other people become objects that either gratify or frustrate; empathy is absent because the concept of separate inner worlds never fully stabilizes. Time collapses to “now versus not-now,” so long-term consequences are literally inconceivable—hence chronic impulsivity around food, money, sex, anger, or scrolling.
Road rage is a perfect example: the other driver is not a person with their own reasons; they are simply an obstacle in my way right now, and my nervous system responds exactly as a two-year-old’s would—scream, hit, destroy. Narcissistic patterns, exploitative relationships, addiction, chronic lateness, financial irresponsibility, spiritual bypassing (“I’m manifesting abundance, so I don’t need a budget”), conspiracy thinking, and even certain forms of fundamentalism can all be understood as fixations or over-identifications with first-person perspective. The shadow is not the energy itself (which is pure life force), but the lack of access to later perspectives that could contextualize and direct it.
Pressures that Push the First-Person Perspective Toward Transformation
In Bill Torbert’s leadership development work (particularly the Action-Logics framework he developed with Susanne Cook-Greuter and others), each stage of ego maturity carries within it the seeds of its own transcendence. The very strategies that once made the first-person stage successful eventually become sources of pain, failure, and exhaustion—creating the developmental pressure needed to move toward the next stage.
For someone whose center of gravity is still first-person, life feels like an endless series of immediate threats and personal wins or losses. The world is a jungle of threats and opportunities, and survival depends on speed, cunning, and force. At first this works: the Opportunist (Torbert’s label for this stage of development) can often outmaneuver, outfight, or outcharm others in the short term. But over time the following pressures mount and become unbearable:
The consequences of impulsive actions begin piling up faster than they can be outrun—debts come due, relationships fracture, health breaks down, legal or social repercussions arrive. No matter how clever the evasion or how fierce the defense, the person starts to feel perpetually one step behind an avalanche of blowback.
Constant fighting, manipulating, or hiding is exhausting. The nervous system stays in chronic fight-or-flight; sleep suffers, rage or paranoia increases, and a bone-deep fatigue sets in from never being able to truly relax or trust
The person begins to notice, often in moments of defeat or vulnerability, that they are not the only “I” in the universe. Others have power too, and sometimes those others help instead of hurt. A flicker of “maybe I don’t have to do everything alone” appears
Simultaneously, an aching need to be liked, accepted, and to belong emerges. The loneliness of constant combat becomes palpable
Once the possibility of belonging is felt, the advantages of acting with others become obvious. Strength in numbers feels safer than going it alone; alliances, groups, tribes, and shared rules start to look like smarter survival strategies than solo domination
These pressures do not feel theoretical—they feel like hitting a wall. The old win-at-all-costs approach stops working and starts costing too much, and leaves the person isolated and depleted. When the pain of staying the same finally outweighs the fear of changing, the ego begins to let go of its purely egocentric frame and reaches toward the safety, approval, and belonging that only a second-person, group-oriented perspective can provide. This is how the “terrible twos” eventually (and mercifully) give way to the “follow-the-rules-and-fit-in” stage most of us recognize from early school years. The same dynamic continues throughout adulthood: each stage plants the seeds of the next by making its own strategies progressively less viable until transformation becomes the path of least resistance—and greatest aliveness.
Healing & Integrating Stage One
The goal is never to “get rid of” or transcend Stage 1—doing so would cut us off from our vitality—but to give the earliest parts of the psyche what they needed and didn’t fully receive, so the energy can be liberated and redirected. Almost no one received perfect parenting at this stage; most of us carry some degree of early disruption—overstimulation, inconsistent caregiving, neglect, or outright trauma—that left the nervous system scanning for danger and ready to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn at a moment’s notice. When that happens, the same impulses that were meant to help a toddler explore and claim their existence become the impulses that hijack an adult life.
Healing therefore looks like re-parenting the earliest self with the three core languages this stage understands: (1) safety and bonding, (2) raw power and aliveness, and (3) magic and imagination.
Safety and bonding work addresses the primal question “Is it safe to be here in a body?” Practices include anything that gives the animal body a felt sense of containment and co-regulation: weighted blankets, long held hugs, warm baths, slow rocking, massage, or simply placing a hand on the chest and breathing slowly while saying internally “I’ve got you, you’re safe now.” Many people find that being held by a safe partner or therapist for extended periods without agenda allows the nervous system to complete the attachment cycle that was interrupted in infancy.
Raw power and aliveness work answers the toddler’s discovery “I can make things happen with this body!” Because early shame or punishment often taught us to suppress anger, desire, or “too-muchness,” the body stores that energy as chronic tension or numbness. Practices that safely allow full expression—pounding pillows, screaming into a cushion, vigorous dancing, martial arts, weightlifting, or even playful roughhousing—let the original impulse complete itself in the present moment. The key is pairing the expression with simultaneous co-regulation so the nervous system learns “I can feel this much power and still be safe and connected.”
Magic and imagination work speaks to the pre-operational mind that experiences wishes and reality as identical. Non-dominant-hand drawing, talking to plants or stuffed animals without irony, ritual fire ceremonies, dream journaling, moon bathing, or creating small altars all reactivate the original capacity for symbol and metaphor. One particularly powerful practice is to light a candle and speak aloud to your ancestors or childhood self: “Thank you, I am here because of you.” This reclaims the magical sense of connection that was native to the stage.
A simple but profound visualization used in somatic and parts-work therapies is to close your eyes, bring to mind yourself at age two or three (often a photograph helps), kneel down to eye level, and say slowly: “You are not too much. All of your feelings, all of your needs, all of your energy—it’s perfect exactly as it is. I am here with you now, and I’m not going anywhere.” Then offer the little one a soft blanket, a glowing stone, or a favourite stuffed animal, and simply notice the warmth that arises in your adult chest as you provide the steady presence that may have been missing. Over time, repeating these practices rewires the implicit memory system: the body begins to trust that the world is safe enough to fully inhabit, and the same energy that once caused chaos becomes rocket fuel for creativity, authentic desire, and embodied joy. When Stage 1 is no longer running the show from the shadows, we discover that our deepest life force was never the enemy—it was simply waiting for a loving adult to finally come home.
Reflection Questions
(These are meant to be lingered with slowly, kindly, and repeatedly — perhaps in a journal, on a walk, or shared gently with a trusted friend.)
Where do I most often notice my impulsive self showing up today? Go beyond the obvious (food, phone, anger). Notice the subtler places: Do I impulsively say “yes” when I mean “no”? Do I grab for reassurance, for being right, for spiritual experiences, for productivity, for silence, for noise? Where does my system still believe that if I don’t act RIGHT NOW something essential will be lost or taken away?
When I’m stressed, tired, or triggered, do I tend to shut down like a scared toddler (freeze / collapse / people-please / numb out) or do I power up like an enraged toddler (rage, blame, dominate, control, bully)? Most of us have a default direction, and many of us flip-flop between the two. Noticing the bodily felt-sense that comes right before the behaviour (tight chest, hot face, sinking stomach, spaced-out feeling) is often the first moment we can choose something different.
What situations in my life actually need my Stage-1 energy right now? Sometimes decisiveness, fierce boundaries, unapologetic desire, or childlike play are exactly what is called for. Where have I been shaming my aliveness because I confused it with “immaturity”? Where would a clear, embodied “NO!” or “YES!” or “MINE!” actually be an act of love or truth?
Where might I need to repair harm because I acted from pure impulse and hurt someone I love? This is not about self-flagellation; it is about recognising that when we are hijacked by Stage 1, other people become background furniture. A simple apology — “I see now that I was completely in my own experience and didn’t consider how that landed for you” — can heal both the relationship and the part of us that is still afraid the world isn’t safe.
Who in my life sometimes behaves from Stage 1, and how does it feel in my body when they do? Instead of the habitual judgment (“they’re so selfish / immature / entitled”), try the re-frame below and notice what opens up.
What did my own little 2- or 3-year-old most need that they didn’t fully get? Was it steady physical presence, delight in their bigness, someone to celebrate their “No!”, someone to survive their rage without abandoning or shaming them? Naming this clearly often brings tears — and those tears are the adult’s loving presence finally arriving for the child who waited.
When I feel drained, burnt-out, or “too much pressure to perform,” could it be that my life force is still trapped in survival-mode Stage 1 rather than free to be creative Stage 1? Many high-achieving adults unconsciously use later-stage strategies to suppress early impulses, creating an inner civil war that exhausts everyone. The medicine is almost always more play, more body, more “too-muchness,” not less.
Compassionate Re-Frames
((These are gentle ways to talk to yourself — or to others — when Stage-1 behaviour is on display)
Instead of “They’re so selfish / narcissistic / immature” → → “Their nervous system still believes the world will stop existing if their need isn’t met right now. That’s terrifying.”
Instead of “I’m such a toddler, I should be over this by now” → “A very young part of me just got activated. She’s not bad, she’s scared or starving for something she didn’t get enough of. I’m the first adult who has ever been able to stay with her while she feels this big.”
Instead of “I can’t believe I just exploded / shut down / bought that thing” → “My body did exactly what it was designed to do when it thinks survival is at stake. Thank you, body, for still protecting me. And now that I’m safe, we can try something new.”
Instead of “They should know better” → “From where they’re standing, other people literally are furniture. The part of them that could see you as a separate and real simply wasn’t online in that moment.”
Instead of “I’m too much / too intense / too needy” → “I am exactly as much as a toddler is supposed to be. The problem was never my muchness; it was that no one could meet it yet. I can start meeting it now.”
Instead of “I hate that I still get hijacked like this” → “Every time I notice the hijack happening, that noticing itself is a later stage holding the earlier one with love. That’s integration in real time.”
Instead of seeing impulsivity as a moral failing → “This is pure life force that never got to complete its original mission. When it finally feels safe and seen, it becomes the same energy that creates art, love, courage, and joy.”
When you catch yourself (or someone else) in full Stage-1 meltdown or grab, try whispering inwardly: “Welcome, little one. I’ve got you. You’re safe. You belong here. We’re not going to abandon you for feeling this much.”
These reframes, offered repeatedly with embodiment, is often the beginning of the deepest healing available at this stage.