Seven Rites of Passage with Robin Grille

This map of the seven rites of passage (seven stages of core psycho-emotional development) is a lens of compassion, redefining our dysfunctional behaviours and ‘disorders’ as memory: archival footage of experienced shock, overwhelming loss, violations, denials of our developmental needs.

Modern research in neuropsychology, interpersonal neurobiology and developmental psychology have affirmed and sharpened decades of insight from somatic psychotherapy modalities. The resulting map is the child of this union between left-brained and right-brained traditions.

Why is it important to understand our universally shared developmental map?

The map helps us in two ways:

1. It shows us how we came to be where we are. This releases flows of compassion and understanding. It stops us getting mad at ourselves for our perceived flaws. This alone is already transformative! As we forgive ourselves, we can easily come to accept our clients with their struggles, neuroses and foibles. We thus push less, expect less … but achieve more.
2. It lights the path for forward movement. Specifically, the map helps us to identify natural, organic, psychomotor developmental impulses that we can surf as waves. Healing is a developmental journey. It is specific. It is a completion of what was arrested in one or more of the seven stages of development. The map helps us identify the right developmental nutrient for each developmental wound.

For personal therapy

The knowledge of these seven rites of passage resolves the tension between traditionally opposite camps in psychotherapy. This is where psychodynamic, insight-focused therapies (understanding and compassion) join forces with the forward thrust of behaviour therapy (growth and transformation). The entire process is deeply grounded in somatic experiencing.

In this comprehensive course you will gain profound insights into the developmental causes of all character defences; from dissociation, to avoidance and fugue, co-dependence, seduction, domination, compliance, moral rigidity and overwork.

An essential tool for coaches, counsellors and psychotherapists, the map helps us to locate the key, healing experiences that organically want to happen. For each developmental wound, there are specific developmental nutrients that re-initiate development, free us, heal us, renew our relationships and align us with our life’s purpose.

Inner Child Journeying

The Seven Rites of Passage constitutes the theoretical foundation that my Inner Child Journeys (ICJ) draw upon. Taking this course will be an essential component of our ICJ training for practitioners.

For relationship counselling

Our developmental map makes sense of how embedded psychological defences dovetail between partners, leading to a vicious cycle of mutual triggering.

Familiarity with the Seven Rites of Passage helps us to untie the conflict-knots that partners get enmeshed in, to identify their core needs and how to have these needs met so they can enter the deeper intimacy that awaits behind the screen of conflict.

For social activists and civilizational transition

This course contains a deeper layer that speaks to the part of you that yearns for societal change, civilizational change. Like a hologram, the healing of personal trauma and relational trauma is the micro: a perfect mirror to the macro of societal change.

As we delve deeper into our map you will gain embodied insights about the root causes of each of the gravest civilizational ills. You will get the big ‘Ahas’ about the developmental causes of greed, our abysmal alienation from Nature, our grossly manipulative and transactional relationships, our disposition towards violence, exploitation, domination and punishment, our great addictions to substances and screens, our workaholism, our loss of purpose and our depression.

By implication the map shows us the corresponding developmental nutrients that can move us together beyond our arrested development. This bears specific indications for how we can contribute to the civilizational transition that is called for in our time, pointing clearly to child-rearing reforms, educational reforms, and healing pathways for humanity.

It brings me great pleasure to share this material with you, I’m sure you will resonate with it in a very personal way. I very much look forward to welcoming you to this journey of learning, remembering and discovery.