The Developmental Experience Inventory (DEI) is a tool designed to support community members on our journey of self-knowledge and understanding. It was written with the belief that much of how we move through and see the world is based on our childhood experiences and the ways of being that we internalized as we were learning and growing into the humans we are now. The DEI is one of the resources in The Choreography of Conflict – a conflict transformation framework that reimagines justice and steers us away from carceral logic and cancel culture.
The Choreography of Conflict as a model operates with the understanding that children are a vulnerable population with limited control over their surroundings. In childhood, we are under the supervision and guidance of adults, both in our home environments and in the social systems in which we participate (schools, neighborhoods, religious spaces, etc). It is those adults who provide us with information about what is acceptable, healthy, and desirable behavior, as well as how to express, process, and manage our emotions. From our repeated controlled experiences, patterns are formed and stored in our bodies, and it is these patterns that we carry forward into adulthood.
Because of the power dynamic that exists between children and adults, and the way that children must rely on adults in order to meet their basic needs (food, clothing, shelter, dignity, belonging), the ways of being that we learn as kids are deeply encoded in us as necessary for our survival as small and helpless humans. As a result, these lessons and patterns become a big part of who we are and how we interact with others—they are the very things that kept us alive into adulthood. When we seek to be in community with and relate to other people, these patterns are the automatic template that we use, and play a major role in our ideas about how others should behave, and how we expect to be treated. These patterns are directly connected to emotional and physiological responses in our bodies, and provide us with real-time information about what we believe is safe or unsafe, what makes us feel seen and validated, or invalidated and under attack.
The colonized western societies that we have all grown up in give us the impression, from a very young age, that the way that we behave is who we are. We are taught that behaving in ways that are deemed bad, unacceptable, or undesirable means that we are bad, unacceptable, or undesirable people. In childhood, when we are powerless and helpless, it is crucial that our caregivers continue to see us as good and acceptable because we need the support of the adults in our lives in order to get our basic needs met. A challenge or criticism of our behavior gets encoded as a challenge to our safety and a threat to our survival.
When we interact with others, and our different patterns and templates intersect, we often experience conflict in moments where our patterns don’t align. Because society does not teach children to distinguish between “You’ve done something bad” and “You ARE bad,” feedback on and criticism of our patterns of behavior often feels like an attack on our “goodness” and “desirability” as human beings. This registers in our bodies as dangerous to our survival.
Adding to our hypervigilant patterning in childhood is the either/or thinking that teaches us the concept of right vs. wrong. Beginning in our infancy, we are taught about the world around us in terms of dichotomy–light and dark, up and down, in and out, good and bad. As we age and begin to encounter the societal concept of morality, the good/bad labels shift into right/wrong–right/wrong being a powerful social tool of control once physical control becomes less and less possible.
When the right/wrong concept is applied to interpersonal connection, though, it quickly pits community members against one another. As children encounter disagreement, misunderstanding, and general conflict, their oversimplified right/wrong programming steers them toward a win/lose model of interpreting situations. Very common human experiences like losing one’s temper and yelling, forgetting to complete a task, or misunderstanding someone’s words suddenly become a competition where one person is deemed the rightful winner, leaving the other person with the conclusion that they are wrong in their existence and the fault and thus the task of changing/bettering themself lies with them, the loser.
When our societal patterning is constantly telling us that we must be demonstrating our goodness and rightness, and that, at any given moment we might be labeled as bad, a criminal, wrong, and unacceptable, we struggle to focus on the fundamental goals of human interaction–connection, understanding, belonging, learning, sharing, building, growing, et cetera. Our compulsory participation in this ever-present competition to prove that we deserve the care and support that we need as humans has thus turned what are meant to be meaningful and fulfilling exchanges into tests, gauntlets, and trials.
The DEI as a tool aims to help community members identify and be present with our patterning, and understand the formative events and social norms in our childhoods that created and solidified our patterns of behavior. With greater understanding of how we came to be the way we are, and acknowledgement of the fact that our pattern formation was largely out of our control, the goal of the DEI is to support us in being gentle with ourselves as we work to deconstruct the unhealthy fears, ideas, and rules that we have developed around human interaction and community. This tool is a part of the path toward self-love and a return to our mistake-making, uncertain, brave, soft, nervous, caring selves. It is an invitation to the fullness of our humanity.