This blog complements the Dear Niblings YouTube channel and is an way to share thoughts and ideas that either will become videos or that don’t necessarily lend themselves to videos.
One important focus, at least initially, will be the mess of undiscovered chaos in our unconscious mind that cannot be observed but which makes its presence felt every day. Some avoid it or ignore it, some accommodate it, and some justify it and fight against anyone and anything that threatens the worldview it creates.
By trying to avoid or ignore certain things in our unconscious, we can limit our ability to identify those things within us that are most meaningful and might most benefit ourselves and others. If that happens, we lose the ability to nurture, develop, and express that which is truly “us”, and we feel stifled and unfulfilled.
If we accommodate this chaos, we can end up limiting ourselves psychologically, socially, professionally. Sometimes our worlds get smaller as we build barriers around ourselves to protect our subjective psychological frailties from the objectivity of reality. We can become more dependent on the protection of a small world, and fail to build the flexibility and resiliency to be psychologically strong. This makes us psychologically weaker.
Other times, we simply experience more confrontation with a reality that doesn’t play by the rules our unconscious minds have told us do exist or should exist. This just creates more negativity, hurt, defensiveness, and bitterness, for ourselves or others. Finding fault in others, common method to fight back against reality, might be cathartic scapegoating but it doesn’t fix the underlying problem.
To make it that much harder, we have “psychological muscle memory” where we have a habitual way of thinking. And because we feel threatened when our internal chaos is brought to the surface, often by confronting things that contradict our worldview, we tend to silo our inputs to those things which already agree with our (flawed) mental models. So we just re-groove the psychological muscle memory, making it harder and harder to clear up the chaos and learn skills needed to prevent it building up further. By limiting our input, we make ourselves dependent on a curated reality, and the threat is that from time to time we are exposed to things outside the “reality” we have created and are unable to process or handle it constructively or in a healthy way.
And over the years, not only do we allow our own negative thoughts and emotions to build up, but we internalize other people’s chaos. We internalize them, take responsibility for them, and make them part of our own unconscious chaos. Because so many of us are so very unskilled in working through our own chaos and in preventing our venting on others, everyone is just adding to everyone else’s internal misery.
Perhaps the only truly healthy thing is to clear out the unconscious chaos. This requires dedication, habit, perseverance, and skill, while learning to think in a new way to break the mold of our old way of thinking. It might take a long time and effort, but learning about the chaos and working to clear it out should feel empowering, like we’re finally standing up to our ‘dark selves’.
Welcome to the Dear Niblings blog.