The worksheet which composes the main part of this exercise provides a way to work with the movements of our lives, enabling us to see the changes and continuities in our important relationships, commitments, and experiences.  Please take a moment to look at the worksheet, letting it address your mind and imagination.  After you have looked the chart over for a moment, then turn back to this page for some explanation of the categories across the top of your sheet.

1. Starting from the left, number the first column from the calendar year of your birth to the present year.  If there are a
    substantial number of years in your life, you may choose to number the intervals of two, three, or five years.

2. In the second column titled “Place” we are interested in your recording your sense of place in several different dimensions:
        a. The physical space, including the geographical area in which you lived at various periods of your life.
        b. Economic and social place, in the sense of social class and a position of economic and political power or vulnerability.

3. The third column, “Key Relationships” refers to those relationships at different points in one’s life which have important
    impact as regards self image, self worth, and the maintenance and restoration of the self.  This could include family members,
    friends, sponsors, teachers, bosses, etc.  These persons need not be living presently and you need not have known them
    personally (i.e. grandparent who died before one’s birth).

4. The fourth column we call the “Uses and Directions of the Self.”  This may seem a peculiar way to get at this area, but what
    we have in mind is this: at the various points in your life you are spending and being spent in a number of different ways.
    Some of these might include attending school, acquiring skills, discovering and developing talents, undertaking new
    responsibilities or the initiation of projects.  It also may include roles that you have taken on or created and the foci of
    preparation or learning in which you are engaged.

5. The next column simply asks you to record your age by year.  This is simply to provide another chronological reference
    point for you.  Fill it in with the same intervals you used for the calendar years on the left hand side.

6. The column “Marker Events” asks you to record those events or times in your life which are turning points for you.  These
    may include moves from one place to another, the death or loss of loved ones, separation or divorces, changes in your
    status— economic, political, social, catastrophes or emergencies, graced events, conversion experiences, loss of faith,
    major decision or choices that you have made.  Marker events occur and things are never quite the same again.

7. “Events or Conditions in Society” is a column in which we ask you to register what is going on in the larger world beyond
    your family or small circle of friends which has an impact upon you and your way of seeing and being in the world.  Such
    events as wartime, depression, the civil rights struggle in the 60s, the assassination of a president, or the launching of
    Sputnik, might be such events in the outside world.

8. “Centers of Value” refers to the one or two relationships or roles or institutional involvements, or objects which had the
    most value or worth for you in a given period.  Put another way, we are asking what persons or things or causes were of
    such importance to you that they exerted an organizing power on the other values in your life?

9. The final column, “Authorities,” asks the question who or what constituted authority for you at a given point in your life.
    Another way to put this: to whom or to what did you look for guidance or for ratification of your decisions or choices or
    values at a given time in you life?  Where were the times of shifting from one source of authority to another?

    As you work on the chart, make brief notes to yourself, indicating the insights or thoughts that you have under each of the
    columns.  It is not necessary to fill out the columns in great detail.  You are doing this for no one but yourself!

Some Things To Do After You Have Completed Filling Out The Chart:

1. Spend some time reflecting upon the development of your life taken as a whole.  Feel its movement and its flow, its
    continuities and discontinuities.  For now, forget all that you know about developmental theory, psychological or otherwise.
    As you look at the developmental process of your life, let yourself think of it as a large drama or play.  Thinking of it this
    way, let yourself feel where the division between acts of your play would naturally fall.  You may have as many acts as you
    need to make the proper divisions between the movements of your life.  When you get a feel for where the divisions
    between the acts should be, place a line at these points in the chart all the way across the page.

2. Now take some time to think about each of these acts.  Let the feelings you have about that period of your life come to the
    surface.  If there are feelings of pain or anguish, regard them for what they are, do not judge them or evaluate them or
    identify with them, but just see the feelings for what they are.  After you spend a time thinking on each of these acts,
    try to find a metaphor for each one, or a symbol, or a title, which will portray for you what you feel that act of
    your life was really about, and what it means.  When you have done this to your satisfaction, you will have
    finished your work with the chart.  WRITE WHAT YOU HAVE SELECTED ON THE CHAPTER LINE.

3. Remember: Do not disclose anything in class that you will regret afterwards.  You, define your personal boundaries.

4. Write a one page paper on the most significant fact or insight you achieved.
 

Info for finding “Events in Society” for the Developmental Life Process Sheet:

Open your browser

In the URL (address) type     dogpile.com

In the search box type     information please 1972   (or whatever year you were born)

click Fetch to begin search

Scroll until you find “information please:1972" as a heading

Double click it

From there every time you are ready to go to the next year, go into the URL and

CHANGE ONLY THE YEAR

Then click GO on your browser