Discovering yourself through others
How can we know ourselves if we can't make direct observations of the self
Surfing the internet (as many but not all do) one runs into all the flavors of self-help and personal advice that range from obvious scams to lure you into selling some low quality product in a pyramid scheme to ideas that seem like they could plausibly improve your life. A saying in in this second category that I have encountered recently is some variant of “we (humans) are all one and negative feelings about others are negative feelings about ourselves.” At first this idea almost pushed me completely away. What do they mean? How could I be the same as someone else, I’m clearly different than (insert person I deeply disagree with) for instance.
Around the same time I came to have a surface level understanding of the total psyche as defined by Carl Jung the analytical psychologist. Roughly (and specifically as I have interpreted it) the total psyche is the collection of psychological parts that make up you. It encompasses the whole including the parts that are very difficult to directly observe and has two major parts, the conscious and the unconscious. And a major stumbling block to knowing yourself is that you can’t come to know your unconscious by thinking alone. Nor having some internal dialogue conclude with a firm determination about your life.
The fact that the unconscious was elusive was intuitive to me but it was not an immediately concrete fact which I could easily integrate into the way I view the world. Then I saw this quote which legitimized the idea that came to me out of the sea foam of the algorithmic web.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962).
I won’t comment on what it says about me that I needed to see this quote for my intuition’s insistence that I pay attention to this idea to be validated in my conscious mind.
When we interact with another, we are moved in some way. That is because as social beings, we are literally embedded in a social fabric and each action by one is felt and reacted to by the others no matter who much stoic training or indifference we can muster. Each interaction gives rise to some kind of reaction within us whether we choose to act on it or not. And it is this reaction that gives a measurement of your subconscious. How we respond to the actions of others in our social network (both the online and in-real-life one) is exactly the kind of information that we can’t find just by conscious introspection. It reveals what we really value.
Suppose you have a negative reaction when you hear someone else receive a compliment. Now even if you completely carry on with your conversation and no one from the outside would have noticed your hint of a negative feeling, it is still valuable information to your that you shouldn’t discard. If later you can determine the reason for your reaction that is where you will have gained an insight about yourself. Easier said than done.
Was your reaction because of jealousy? Perhaps you would have preferred the compliment giver point to you when offering praises? Or was it because you dislike the feature of the other that was being praised for and think that other’s ought not further encourage that feature. Or maybe something else. Our reactions are also not entirely our own. Depending on the circumstances of our upbringing and ingrained worldview can often surface in social settings even when we have intellectually distanced ourselves from that part of our life’s journey. Are you reacting negatively due to your conditioning? We are also biological beings without direct control of many of the mechanisms that have powerful influence over our emotions. It could be that there biological factors in a given moment (such as hunger or a hormonal imbalance) that are having an outsized impact on your reaction which you may otherwise may be able to suppress with your conscious mind.
Getting to the bottom of it may be hard. But the signal and path to dig deeper into your reaction would not have been possible without you existing with in a social world.
The things that one likes and dislikes are a reflection of how one (the whole not just the conscious part) believe the social world should be or how humans should be.
Since my initial reaction to the presentation of a related idea was negative, one may ask what I have learned about myself through this reaction. What does the observation that a new-age-ish social media post stirred a negative reaction on my surface but also strengthened an intuition to dig in deeper into the idea mean? I may be wrong but I think it points to the desire I have to relate the world using intuition and reasoning in balance. To let myself ease up on having neat, rigid, and mathematical interpretations of everything. But the nice thing about such signals is they give you multiple chances to reinterpret them and find other ways to express the new found insight. So even if I’m completely off the mark, I have embarked on a process toward integrating new ideas. When next I bump into an idea for which my reaction is discomfort, I hope that soon after I see a through line to what it says about me.