A recurring reaction can reveal a capacity you have not yet learned to use. Virtology turns that observation into a practical question: where should your work begin?
By Isabella Becker · 14 min read
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
The word “virtue” can sound like the beginning of a sermon. In Eduardo Casarotto's Virtology, however, it names an internal capacity: something that can change how you perceive, feel and respond.
That shift makes a different question possible. When the same reaction keeps returning, which capacity might help you respond with greater freedom?
The answer need not be a verdict on your character. It may be a place to begin. This essay explores how Casarotto organizes that work, from the 33 virtues to a small practice in ordinary life.
Consider these patterns as possibilities to investigate, rather than a test that assigns a virtue to every kind of pain.
A pattern you recognize
A capacity to explore
What the distinction means
Constantly comparing yourself and checking your position
Humility
Your worth becomes less dependent on being ahead. Humility does not mean making yourself small.
Fighting with something that has already happened
Acceptance
You stop spending all your energy on what cannot now be changed, while retaining the ability to act on what can.
Giving up at the first obstacle
Perseverance
Staying with a manageable difficulty becomes something you practice before relying on it in a larger challenge.
Exploding, regretting it, then repeating the scene
Humility, with Gentleness as support
Casarotto looks beneath the harsh response to the importance a person may be defending. An apology can itself become another performance of being right.
Being unable to loosen an old resentment
Forgiveness
Working with resentment does not require approving the harm, restoring contact or abandoning accountability.
Organizing everything around how you will appear
Individuation
You begin to distinguish your own considered direction from the expectations you have learned to perform.
Scroll horizontally to compare all columns.
These are prompts for reflection. Similar reactions can have different causes, and a useful interpretation should remain open to the person's circumstances.
A different question about suffering
Casarotto proposes that some recurring suffering can be understood through capacities that have not yet developed sufficiently. Where acceptance is difficult, a person may remain in prolonged conflict with an unchangeable event. Where agency is weak, they may wait for someone else to make every next move possible.
Within this framework, pain becomes information about work that might help. It is not punishment for being insufficiently virtuous.
A capacity you have not yet developed is not a verdict on who you are. It may be the next thing your life is asking you to learn.
The book's emphasis shifts attention from naming a difficulty to asking what could be built. That is a developmental question, not a substitute for clinical assessment. Illness, bereavement, violence, deprivation and unsafe conditions cannot be reduced to missing virtues. Sometimes the needed change is protection, treatment or a different environment.
The useful question is therefore specific: is there a capacity that could give me more room to respond within this situation?
Thirty-three virtues, with an intended sequence
The list has an architecture. Casarotto arranges the 33 virtues in three blocks, giving the sequence a practical role in his method.
Block in the model
Number
Its intended role
Treatment Base
8
Humility, Selflessness, Acceptance, Forgiveness, Individuation, Responsibility, Faith and Perseverance provide the proposed foundations.
Development
20
Capacities such as Gentleness, Patience, Good humor, Gratitude, Truth, Honesty, Nonjudgment and Flexibility extend the work into everyday responses and relationships.
Transcendence
5
We are all one, Fraternity, Love of neighbor, Helping others and Equality form the upper horizon of the model.
Scroll horizontally to compare all columns.
The source connects its emphasis on practice and formation with Aristotle. The particular pyramid of 33 virtues belongs to Casarotto's framework; it is not Aristotle's own list.
Casarotto's argument is that an advanced practice may be unstable if capacities supporting it remain fragile. His proposed sequence is a guide within Virtology, not an independently established clinical rule that everyone must acquire virtues in one fixed order.
It asks a useful practical question nonetheless: have you been demanding an outcome from yourself without developing what would help sustain it?
The capacity your situation calls for
“Be more grateful” can be well meant and still too vague to guide a difficult afternoon. What would gratitude change in this situation? What prevents it? What would practicing it actually involve?
The same questions apply to patience, perseverance or forgiveness. The most attractive virtue on a list may not address the pattern causing trouble today.
In Virtology's reading, a particular capacity can affect several responses that share an underlying difficulty. Humility, for example, might change how someone receives correction, listens to a partner and responds to another person's success. The situations differ, but defending relative importance may connect them.
That possibility does not mean one virtue explains an entire life. It means choosing a concrete starting point can make practice less scattered.
Why calling virtue a competence matters
The source describes competence through three elements:
Knowledge: understanding what the capacity means and recognizing when it is relevant.
Skill: having attempted it in real situations, noticed errors and made adjustments.
Attitude: being willing to act on it when doing so is inconvenient and no one is applauding.
Knowing the definition of patience does not establish that you can listen when you feel accused. Reading about swimming is useful, but it is not the experience of entering the water.
In the same way, understanding a virtue provides a starting point for practice. Small, repeated actions give the idea contact with reality. An attempt that goes badly can become information about the situation, the task or the support needed.
The proposal is more demanding than a positive slogan, but also more concrete: name the response you want to develop, then create a realistic occasion to practice it.
Why the method does not train a virtue in isolation
One of the distinctive features of the source is its insistence on alignment. Casarotto links four elements within the same exercise:
The virtue being practiced.
The human need involved in the difficulty.
The task or responsibility associated with the person's current life phase.
The person's functioning as interpreted through the Evolution Bands.
Life phases and Evolution Bands are different maps. A birthday does not establish an Evolution Band.
The book illustrates alignment with a person around forty-five whose life phase calls for consolidation, whose need for importance dominates, and whose experience of deep connection is limited. The proposed work combines Humility with nurturing a bond: a daily conversation with a family member, with deliberate listening and without turning the exchange into a performance.
For a real person, the relationship would need to be safe and the other person willing. Reconnecting with a harmful relative is not a requirement. A trusted, consenting person may provide a more appropriate setting.
The method organizes this initial practice into fourteen days. The shared theme matters: the virtue, the need and the action concern the same part of life, rather than becoming unrelated tasks on a checklist.
Casarotto expresses this interdependence through his Law of Flow, using multiplication to convey that a weak factor can limit the whole arrangement. That is the model's formulation, not a validated calculation of treatment effect. An unsuccessful exercise can also reflect poor timing, overload, an unsuitable task or an interpretation that needs revising.
Reduce domination while making room for another need
The source describes a two-sided movement. Identify a need that has become dominant through excess or acute deprivation; work to reduce its control while supporting other needs in the proposed sequence.
For someone preoccupied with importance, the example pairs Humility and Acceptance with experiences of aesthetics, creativity and deep connection. The aim is not to extinguish the need to matter. It is to stop that need from directing every situation.
Reducing domination should not mean depriving yourself of something essential. A person lacking safety, rest or companionship may need more access to those things, not an exercise in denying them.
Casarotto calls the intended balance homeostasis and uses a four-to-seven window on a zero-to-ten scale. In this context, that is a reference within his framework. It should not be presented as a clinically validated normal range or a physiological measurement.
The practical distinction is simpler than the number: can a need have a place in your life without taking over the whole of it?
Acceptance concerns resistance to what is real. Casarotto associates that resistance with patterns of anger, sadness and anguish. Acceptance does not mean these emotions are wrong, nor that someone should tolerate injustice. It means distinguishing the event that cannot be undone from the action still available now.
Forgiveness brings the inquiry into resentment and relational hurt. In the framework, it can help loosen a cycle in which an old injury keeps organizing present responses. It does not absolve wrongdoing, require reconciliation or remove the right to set boundaries. Nobody owes an unsafe person renewed access to their life.
Individuation concerns dependence on the gaze of others: fear of criticism, exclusion or disapproval. It asks whether the purpose you pursue is one you have considered, or one you inherited from the people whose acceptance you fear losing.
Responsibility concerns agency: identifying a next action that is yours to take. It should not turn into blaming someone for having been harmed, or pretending that resources and power are equally available to everyone.
Individuation and Responsibility are closely related in this reading. One loosens the command of other people's expectations; the other helps you use the room that opens. Their value appears in a decision or response, not merely in agreeing with their definitions.
Choose from experience, not from an ideal self-image
Two choices can make practice unnecessarily difficult.
The first is selecting the virtue that sounds most impressive. A noble aspiration may have little connection with the reaction you keep regretting.
The second is beginning several demanding practices at once. Some people can sustain multiple changes, but dividing attention can make it harder to observe what is happening and repeat one action consistently.
A more concrete starting point is the last three occasions when you regretted your own response. Describe what happened before explaining it. What did you say or do? What felt threatened? What response would have been more helpful?
The recurring feature offers a hypothesis to test. It is stronger evidence than an ideal portrait of yourself, but it is still a hypothesis. Leave room for discovering that the situation, rather than the chosen virtue, needs a different kind of attention.
Why Humility comes first in the model
Casarotto places Humility at the beginning of the Treatment Base. His argument is that the search for superiority can enter practices that otherwise appear virtuous.
Acceptance can become a performance of spiritual elevation. Forgiveness can become a way of placing yourself above the person you forgive. Individuation can become insistence that nobody else matters. Responsibility can become an attempt to control everything.
These are possible distortions described by the model, not diagnoses you can make simply by seeing someone behave confidently or set a boundary.
The question is subtle: has the practice increased your freedom to respond, or has it supplied a more flattering explanation for needing to be above someone else?
The SNO and SNE article explores the wider theoretical account behind this emphasis on pride and selfishness.
Match the practice to the proposed Evolution Bands
The source also relates virtues to the Evolution Bands. Humility and Selflessness appear early in the proposed work, from Primitive through Pre-development functioning. Acceptance and Forgiveness help support the movement from Sensation toward greater awareness.
Much of the Development block, including Gentleness, Patience, Gratitude and Truth, is associated with work between Partial awareness and Feeling. Other virtues in that block, including Purity of heart, Eternity and Detachment, are placed at Feeling in the source's table.
For Casarotto, this sequence explains why a practice might remain fragile when its foundations have not been developed. An exercise in gratitude, for example, may repeatedly become comparison if recognition and relative position still dominate the situation.
That is the framework's interpretation. It does not establish that a person in a particular band is incapable of gratitude, or that failed practice proves a lower band. Fatigue, unsuitable expectations and the demands of the environment also deserve attention.
The useful response to difficulty is investigation. You can simplify the practice, revisit the interpretation or seek guidance without turning a map into a permanent judgment about your potential.
What progress might look like
Casarotto distinguishes effortful restraint from a response that has become more readily available. If you always have to fight yourself into listening, the capacity is less reliable than when listening is your natural first move.
But restraint can still be progress. Pausing before an impulsive response is not worthless simply because it takes effort. Skills develop unevenly, and pressure can expose difficulties that are less visible on a quiet day.
One practical marker in the source is an increase in the interval between stimulus and response: the moment in which you notice that more than one action is possible. This is a description for reflection, not a physiological test of whether a virtue has been installed.
Look for a pattern across real situations. Is the pause more available? Are repairs easier? Does the response depend less on someone reminding you? One good day does not establish mastery, and one bad day does not erase development.
Practice and the claim about change
The book explains training through a proposed chain: repetition establishes a neural pathway, the new pathway changes what directs the response, perception changes, and behavior follows.
This is Casarotto's mechanistic account. General research on learning and plasticity should not be treated as proof of every step in his virtue-specific model, or of a fixed fourteen-day period for establishing it.
The practical invitation does not require that leap. A repeated, observable action can be attempted, adjusted and reviewed. Different people may need different timescales, conditions and forms of support.
The initial fourteen-day cycle is a way to organize the first attempt. Mature capacities, in the source's own account, involve months and sometimes years of practice in actual situations.
A place to begin, without another demand for perfection
The 33 virtues are not a scoreboard for ranking people. The upper block offers a philosophical horizon, not a daily performance target.
The point of this reading is to make a crowded question smaller. Instead of attempting to improve an entire personality at once, you identify one response, one capacity and one situation in which to begin.
Finding Humility repeatedly in your notes is not a sentence about your worth. It may mean that defending importance has become an expensive habit in those situations. That gives you something concrete to explore.
The three-regret map — with alignment
Write down three recent occasions when you regretted a response. Include an approximate date and describe what you actually did.
Beside each, name a capacity that might have helped: acceptance, patience, humility to ask, or the ability to listen without needing to win. Treat the name as a working hypothesis.
Circle one recurring capacity. Choose one area of life where it matters and identify a need that seems neglected or dominant there.
Consider what that area currently asks of you. Choose a practice that fits your circumstances and available support, rather than assigning yourself an Evolution Band as a diagnosis.
Turn the idea into an action you can observe. For example: in one daily conversation, let the other person finish and check what you understood before giving your view.
Try the action over fourteen days, recording the setting, what happened and what you learned. Adjust when necessary. This is an initial practice cycle, not a promise that a virtue becomes established in two weeks.
At the end, ask whether the practice helped, what made it difficult and whether the original interpretation still fits. A useful exercise makes room for correction.
From a personal response to a cultural question
The need to appear important does not develop in isolation. We learn which achievements deserve applause, which lives seem desirable and what being successful is supposed to look like.
In God Bless America, Casarotto examines those cultural expectations through structural Americanism. The English translation is available. The book invites a wider inquiry into the standards we may be using before we have chosen them.
If the difficulty involves a recent loss, violence or persistent distress, an exercise may not be enough. Seek appropriate professional support and protection where needed. If you are thinking of harming yourself and may act on those thoughts, contact a local emergency or crisis service immediately. Care does not depend on successfully completing a virtue practice.
About this English edition
Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay; original artwork retained.
