Where Are You on The Artful Love Continuum?
As someone who’s been on a personal growth path for the last thirty years, I’ve worked with many different models of growth and consciousness. Recently, I came up with my own while on a call with one of my coaching clients. I named it The Artful Love Continuum, since I often work with creatives around how they feel about themselves, their craft, and their relationships.
Note: As you read this article, notice what strikes you. Which stage feels most familiar to you right now? Which ones have you visited, though they aren’t home to you yet? Is there a stage you’d like to experience more fully than you do now?
Keep in mind that you may be in one stage in one area of your life and in a different one in another. Growth isn’t a linear process, nor is there a final perfect destination to attain. If you choose to keep growing throughout your life, you’ll continue to spiral through these stages in ever-deepening ways.
After the description of the stages, you’ll find an example of how these stages show up IRL, so read through to the end to catch it.
The Artful Love Continuum
Stage 1: Abdication
You want to eliminate the parts of yourself you don’t like. You’ve heard about killing the ego and wonder if that would bring you the happiness and freedom you want. Your desire to cut off parts of yourself comes out of a lack of self-acceptance and the belief that you have to become someone better than you are now to have what you want.
Here’s the thing: abdication is where the journey begins. What you try to abdicate slips into the background and runs your life from behind the scenes. It comes back with a vengeance when you’re under stress to muck things up for you at the worst possible time. Self-sabotage, anyone?
What you’ve abdicated also tends to show up in the people around you. For example, if you’re in denial about your anger, you’ll wonder why you’re surrounded by angry people.
You begin this stage in self-denial. Your work lies in finding where you’ve denied parts of yourself so you could conform to who you were taught to be by your family, culture, education, and possibly religion.
A useful practice here is to notice what you tend to criticize in others and use that as a doorway into seeing what you’ve denied in yourself. This stage is about excavation of what’s been suppressed, rejected, or otherwise cast aside and choosing to initiate the process of choosing to reclaim it.
Stage 2: Awareness
You’re seeing more of who you are and learning tools and strategies to enhance your strengths and manage your weaknesses. A lot of coaches teach these strategies, including me. Having tools to use in the face of challenge is an important survival skill.
But managing yourself doesn’t get you all the way to thriving in your life.
Awareness gets you to a functional baseline, and can get you to great success, but as long as your frame of reference is still focused on compensating for and working around what you don’t like about yourself, you’ll limit your ability to fully thrive in your relationship and the rest of your life.
In this stage, you’re in self-discovery. You’ve moved from rejecting parts of yourself to curiosity about what actually makes you tick. You’re learning how to work with the good, the bad, and the ugly in yourself, so you can show up more fully in your life.
Awareness is key, but it’s not enough. All the tools and strategies in the world are no substitute for real, grounded comfort in your own skin.
As you learn to skillfully work with the parts of you that give you a hard time, you also start unhooking yourself from any beliefs you’ve internalized that push you to perfect yourself as a way to deserve love.
Stage 3: Agency
As your relationship to yourself improves, you’re able to make new choices. Agency is about having true power and choice in your life.
You still react how you react, but you start to build a gap between that reaction and how you respond to it. You see your habitual reaction and, without shame or fanfare, simply make a new choice that supports who you are now.
You know your old reaction comes out of well-worn neural pathways and you’re developing new ones with your new choices. Over time, the new pathways start to fire faster than the old ones. This is a time of practice and repetition until your new choices become your new normal.
In this stage, you’re developing self-acceptance. Once you know you’re worthy and lovable no matter what, you can reveal more of your true self to others. With agency, instead of twisting yourself into the old knots to fit in, you learn to calibrate yourself to any situation you’re in while also staying true to yourself.
Stage 4: Artistry
You’ve become an artist in your dance with the glorious and painful aspects of yourself and life. What you survived has become an invitation to grow as an artist of life and love.
Where you once had shame and felt lack, you now access your power to thrive no matter what. Like a bonsai that’s beautiful because its branches twisted to grow around the wires that constrained them, you now see the ways you twisted yourself to grow beyond your life’s constraints as part of what creates your unique beauty and, dare I say, even your superpowers.
In this stage, you begin to directly experience limitless love. You see life for what it is: a series of experiences designed for you to access your own growth and freedom.
You play freely with what life throws your way, both shaping and being shaped by your experiences, because you’ve anchored yourself in self-trust and creative freedom by developing your artistry.
How does this continuum work in real life?
You go into the kitchen and it looks like you don’t have what you need to make a meal.
Abdication: You complain that you have no food. You beat yourself up for letting your supplies get so low. You blame yourself, and others, for the lack of food in your kitchen. You want it to be different and you’re ashamed and mad at yourself because of how it is.
Awareness: You consider your options to fix the situation. You may go grocery shopping or order takeout, but you’re still mad at yourself for messing up mealtime. You secretly believe that not having food in the house when you needed it means that you did something wrong.
Agency: You pause and ask yourself if it’s really true that there’s nothing to eat in the house. Without self-blame, you assess if you can throw something together or if you have to run to the store or order in. You don’t spend time ruminating or beating yourself up. Instead, you recognize that you messed up and get on with remedying the situation.
Artistry: You see the apparent lack of food as an opportunity to get creative with what you’ve got on hand, and even how to source a crucial ingredient you need in a creative way. Maybe it’s a chance to ask a friend to bring the ingredient in return for a home cooked meal! You roll up your sleeves and create a fabulous meal you wouldn’t have otherwise made, precisely because your choices were so limited. The constraint of your mostly empty fridge and pantry activates your creativity and has you make a surprising meal that makes you proud.
In conclusion
As I said before, you’ll notice yourself shift between stages all the time, depending on your stress level and your ability to stay clear and centered. Don’t judge yourself!
Just notice where you are and ask yourself what you’d do if you were in Agency or Artistry, assuming you already have the tools you need. And if you discover you don’t already have the tools, get yourself some!
While it may seem like there’s an end zone to reach, a perfected place where you’ll be in Artistry in every area of your life at all times, please know that believing that is a setup. What’s real is that as you continue to grow, you’ll tend to revisit increasingly subtle aspects of the first two stages while expanding your capacity for Agency and Artistry when life throws you its next curve ball.
Want to know where you fall on The Artful Love Continuum? Take the quiz here!
About the author:
Marie-Elizabeth Mali is a Relationship Artist who helps creative entrepreneurs and CEOs resolve the tug-of-war between their work and their relationship, so they can create the optimal work-life integration that expands their joy and success in every area of life. Marie-Elizabeth is also a published poet with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an underwater photographer who has a thing for sharks.
