Descriptions:
Video Description
We hide our shadow not only from other people but from ourselves, and every group does it too. This second episode in the Shadow Series, from the Conscious Radical channel, asks why a tribe so reliably needs an enemy.
The answer is uncomfortably useful: the person we cannot stand is often doing a job for us, carrying what the group refuses to name in itself. Seeing that does not excuse harm, but it loosens the spell, because a projected enemy stops being so powerful the moment we remember whose shape it is wearing.
Full Video Transcript
just stop for a moment and think about someone you really can’t stand now this could be anyone
it could be a politician an ex-partner someone at work who makes you clench your jaw or even a
public figure who makes you turn the channel over as soon as they appear right if you’ve got them
in your head okay right now i would ask that you consider what the feeling you have is actually
made from because underneath that feeling of dislike is another feeling and it’s a kind of
certainty that you dislike them for a reason and it makes you absolutely certain about who you are
because you are nothing like them. Okay so remember that feeling because we’re going to come back to
it. In episode one of the shadow series I talked about how we carry our shadow in a bag. The shadow
in the bag is everything we were taught wasn’t welcome so either by our others or by ourselves
and we’ve been dragging this bag behind us so think of it as a bag where you put all of the
parts of yourself you’ve learned had to be hidden so maybe it was anger jealousy sadness or even
natural curiosity or ambition for example if you were told as a child that being angry is bad you
you might have stuffed your anger deep into that bag
instead of expressing it.
So although we don’t see the bag,
we still feel it getting heavier and heavier.
Then I left you with the thought
that the reason we hide it is more political than it sounds.
And the reason for this is that we don’t just hide
the shadow from other people, we hide it from ourselves.
And guess what?
You and I are not the only ones who do it.
So there is a difference between suppressing something
and repressing it.
Suppression is a conscious, deliberate choice
to ignore an emotion,
whereas repression is an unconscious, involuntary process
where the mind hides memories from awareness.
So as an example, I could suppress my emotions,
even though I’m fully aware of them,
because I might not have the right head space
to deal with them in that moment.
So perhaps just before I started recording this video,
I had an argument with someone who was close to me
and I’m really upset,
but I’m putting my emotions aside for now
so I can carry on filming.
And it’s a useful tool for the short term,
but if I carried on suppressing my emotions,
I could end up having a physical outburst
or it could turn into stress.
With repression, your brain buries disturbing
or traumatic experiences deep into the subconscious
so you don’t have to feel the associated emotions
of guilt or fear or anxiety.
In this, you’re completely unaware
that you’re blocking these memories.
So for example, you might have had a really heated argument
with a close friend or a family member
that’s left you feeling really upset.
But after a while, the details of what was said
and how it made you feel
just seemed to vanish from your mind.
But later, you might notice yourself feeling uneasy
around that person or suddenly getting anxious
when a similar topic comes up without fully remembering why.
that’s repression at work your mind tucking away something painful so you don’t have to face it
directly the shadow lives in repression which is why when people say well just look at your shadow
self it feels a bit like a useless instruction because how can you know what you don’t know
even exists okay so now i’d like you to think about how you’d describe yourself so you can
think out loud or in your head or you can write it down if you want to perhaps you’re the honest
calm and always follow the rules person no matter who is or isn’t looking and these are just some
examples whatever the words you choose is likely that you attributed them to yourself at a young
age and you’ve been maintaining that persona ever since those words do more to describe you they’re
who you believe you are now imagine getting some feedback from someone who comes with the receipts
to tell you the words you believed about yourself aren’t true perhaps they’ve said you’re cruel
or they noticed that you wanted someone to fail and enjoyed it when they did that underneath the
calm performance you give day in day out there’s something underneath it you don’t like much
rather than treating this as new information you can use to work on you might feel threatened it’s
a threat to your self-image and the image others might hold about you and it rocks your foundations
and not in a good way so the mind does something really clever that’s fast and automatic it
provides an invisible defense it’s so quick and so automatic that you don’t even realize it’s happened
so that’s the personal answer to why we hide it we hide it because the self we built
doesn’t want to see it because the foundations of what we think we know about ourselves could
crumble so how does this work publicly and politically so as some of you may know i spend
much of my working life inside organizations helping them to build an intentional culture
rather than living and breathing in a culture that just happens and i have experienced first
hand on many occasions when working with teams where one particular individual or team is
routinely singled out as the problem in every meeting frustrations spiral about this personal
team and the team would vent they’d list everything that was going wrong and almost unconsciously
pile it all on to that other person or team that individual team become the lightning rod for blame
carrying the weight of issues that are far bigger than any one person or one team could actually
hold please don’t get me wrong though sometimes that person or team is blooming hard to work with
however i have noticed that a person becomes the coat stand for everyone’s anger so everyone can
point out everything that’s wrong with that single person or team all that disowned material from
each team member can now be directed somewhere they’re the reason we’re not succeeding they’re
the reason people are leaving they’re the reason we’re not getting our bonus this year
you get the picture now let’s remove the personal team when they leave or are transferred to another
department, there’s a sense of relief that sweeps through the team. People can
finally breathe again. Huzzah! The witch is dead. But guess what? The deeper issues
within the team persist and before long attention shifts towards a new target.
Experiences like this have shown me just how powerful and subtle these group
dynamics are in shaping our collective view of ourselves and others. The group
needs somewhere to put the blame or the parts of itself it can’t or doesn’t want
to look at so avoiding the shadow isn’t just personal work it’s also a group
project none of us live in a vacuum we become the person we are in relation to
other people so from the moment we are born our identity grows and develops we
make clear decisions of this is me and that is not me it’s almost a clarity
through contrast exercise. I’m not that so I know what I am. Groups are built in the same way. What
defines a group is what lies outside the group. The team is real partly because of the opposing
or rival team. How the nation has more clarity closer to the border or the movement that knows
itself most clearly when it names the thing it’s against. A social psychologist Henri Tachevel
is best known for developing social identity theory and in the 70s he split strangers into
groups on the thinnest grounds imaginable. So for example he would use a toss of a coin to decide
or he would group people into which of the two painters each person slightly preferred.
But other than that there was no shared history between them. But almost at once people started
favouring their own group and marking the others down. What Tashfell was demonstrating is how much
of who we are we pin to whatever group we’re in and it also shows us how fast us versus them
switches on. We lift ourselves but by deciding our lot are better than that lot. When those loose
groups were offered the choice they would even hand their own side a smaller reward as long as
it widened the gap over the others even though absolutely nothing was at stake and the groups
were minutes old and completely meaningless. Because this is what we do. We sort. Now let’s
add the shadow into that. If a group holds its sense of itself by drawing a line between itself
and others, then the others on the other side of the line become really useful. They become the
place to put everything that’s wrong and everything that the group can’t or won’t admit about itself.
a godly town needs a devil the civilized nation needs to be able to point at the savages
that other group that outsider group has all the really bad qualities they’re cruel they’re
violent they’re unable to think reasonably you get the picture the enemy is actually the linchpin
of the group because it’s where all the disowned self gets sent if you were to take the enemy away
then the group has to turn and look at itself so you can see it’s quite essential to have an enemy
the enemy keeps us virtuous it gives us moral clarity it tells us we’re the ones with good
standing and they’re not belonging and superiority are woven in with your principles so although you
didn’t sign up for this you’ve joined it anyway you may have heard of a french thinker called
Rene Girard. He’s known for memetic theory. He’s also known for being Peter Thiel’s undergraduate
philosophy professor at Stanford University. Now Girard claims that human desire is imitative and
inevitably leads to competitive rivalries and scapegoating. That we desire what we see others
desiring and that society unites by projecting blame on a scapegoat. He argues that group tension
is resolved by finding a victim that everyone can agree to blame. So let’s take a look at this
through a geopolitical lens. We tend to explain polarisation as a disagreement about facts that
there are two sides looking at the same world but arriving at different conclusions. The facts sit
on the top but underneath them each side uses the other as a container for everything it doesn’t
want to find in itself. Each side passes its shadow bag to the other and it contains things
that we don’t want to admit about ourselves. The other lot, while they’re racists, they’re
snowflakes, the sheep, the fascists. You can literally take your pick of the decade and from
the inside, well it feels like you’re fighting evil and doesn’t it feel good and righteous and
all that jazz? But actually you’ve handed over your shadow bag to someone else and told them
it’s theirs. But if this is so ingrained in us, how do we stop? Well, one simple way to start is
to pause. So whenever you find yourself strongly judging or blaming someone else, instead of
pushing that feeling away or doubling down on why you’re right, just turn inward for a second and
ask, what might this reaction be telling me about something I don’t want to see in myself? You don’t
have to have the answer. You just need to notice the feeling and see what comes up. The act of
slowing down and observing your actions is a really good first step towards seeing what’s
inside your own bag. Unfortunately it means being a little bit or a lot uncomfortable. You take a
look at your own bag and say the things you really don’t want to say or admit. My side does this too.
this is where we’ve been cruel this is what we refuse to see however be aware that once you say
it you’re on the fastest track to becoming the enemy yourself especially when you suggest the
enemy might be partly us so no it is not easy and i feel the pull to blame an enemy too because
pointing at an enemy gives us some sense of certainty and i think we all want a bit of
certainty in this life. When someone hands you a villain to direct all your visceral anger at
you’ll feel total clarity. That is the shadow doing its work in a group with your full and
willing cooperation but when you do this the bag stays heavy but the gold is still inside it.
There are millions of us dragging around the bag and pointing at another community to blame
so isn’t it time to look at our own national shadow bag in the next episode we’re going to
see how this can happen to a whole society in real time with fire i’ll see you there
Source: The Conscious Radical