#9 Learning Not to Kneel: Reclaiming the Power I Never Developed as a Kid: Spiral Dynamics CHAPTER 3

What happens when you become exceptionally good at being good, but never quite learn how to be yourself?

In this deeply personal chapter of Deep Play, we move from Frank Sinatra’s swaggering declaration of “My Way” into the complicated question of what happens when the developmental capacity for power, ego, anger, boundaries, and self-assertion never gets a chance to fully develop.

Growing up Mormon, I learned the virtues of obedience, sacrifice, service, harmony, and putting something larger than myself first. But I also internalized another message: anger was dangerous, conflict threatened connection, disappointing others meant I was doing something wrong, and being a good person often meant suppressing what I wanted. Over time, belonging became more important than authenticity.

I became very good at accommodating other people and much less skilled at recognizing and defending my own boundaries. My internal compass increasingly pointed toward the expectations of authority, family, community, and the people I loved rather than toward myself.

Then that entire structure collapsed.

Leaving Mormonism forced me to confront surprisingly basic questions as an adult: What do I want? What do I believe? Who am I when nobody else gets to give me the answer?

In that context, reclaiming some of the supposedly “lower” Red stage of development began to look less like regression and more like unfinished developmental work. Creativity became part of that process. Writing, acting, singing, podcasting, questioning authority, expressing anger, setting boundaries, and risking disapproval all required something I had spent much of my life distrusting: an ego strong enough to believe that my voice deserved to exist.

And then, on a flight home from vacation with my kids, I watched Better Man and heard Robbie Williams sing “My Way.”

I cried.

Not because I wanted to become Frank Sinatra or Robbie Williams. But because for the first time, the song sounded like permission to stop kneeling and just be me.

This episode explores the messy difference between selfishness and selfhood, between healthy and unhealthy anger, between disagreement and contention, and between boundaries and cruelty. It asks whether some behaviors that look like regression from the outside might sometimes be the painful work of developing capacities that were skipped the first time around.

Because the goal isn't to replace compassion with power.

It is to give compassion a backbone.

And perhaps that's what healthy Red ultimately offers us: the ability to love, serve, sacrifice, and care for other people not because we're frightened of what will happen if we don't, but because we're finally free enough to fully choose them for ourselves.

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