Heal Thyself: How to Repair Interpersonal and Cultural Injuries

The Buddha had it right with “life is suffering”! We all regularly feel injured by other people, our own interior struggles, cultural events, or random chance. Repairing these injuries is a big deal! Luckily, Integrally informed psychology can help us recognize and repair injuries. In this upcoming episode of Live with Dr. Keith we’ll talk about how we all become injured and the steps we often need to take for effective repair. Injuries happen when intersubjectivity is wounded, leaving a subjective sense of threat and disconnection. In relationships, the painful rupture in the intersubjectivity is experienced in the lower left as the other hurting us through malice or selfish/uncaring thought, action, or inaction. In the lower right we create and instinctively maintain conceptual structures explaining our lower left experience–with enough distortion to make our level of subjective injury feel proportionate to the level of objective wrongness. Culturally, the injury is experienced in the lower left as cultural others behaving in immoral or unwise fashion in ways that hurt and outrage us. In the lower right we create and instinctively maintain conceptual structures explaining and justifying our lower left experiences–again with enough distortion to make our level of subjective injury and outrage feel proportionate to the level of objective wrongness. Attribution theory is the study of how humans instinctively shift their impulses and beliefs in response to emotional and instinctual demands. On the individual/interpersonal level, this means we amplify or numb emotions and distort beliefs to make our amplified emotions proportionate, and our destructive impulses to attack, flee, or submit seem like the right things to do. On the cultural level this means objectifying groups in pejorative ways that justifies us avoiding, attacking, or dismissing them. Both these responses are part of our instinctual social programming. When experiencing threat (often associated with otherness or difference, we have instincts to avoid or attack. For instance, areas with high parasite loads tend to be more authoritarian, have less travel, and have more fear of strangers–perhaps a genetically based social immune response. We can’t eliminate drives, but we can integrate them into more mature, world-centric consciousness where we unconsciously experience more and more people as related, or part of our tribe. Time matters: The longer an injury continues, the deeper the separation and defensive conditioning. Individually there are thresholds of intensity or durations where we temporarily execute the other psychologically–reject them as people. This is quicker, more intense, and more rigid (with more black and white hostile stories that resist influence), the less mature we are on the integration-of-defenses line of development. This is slower, more compassionate, and more flexible (more able to receive caring influence and be soothed into compassionate understanding) the more mature we are on the integration-of-defenses line. Culturally, the longer the injury continues, the more we pathologize and dismiss despised other groups as less worthy human beings. Eventually the dismissal becomes part of the mythic structure underlying the amber aspects of the social structure leading to pathological nationalism, racism, sexism, and other forms of culturally sanctioned dismissal and oppression. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict and racism in America are examples. Repair is taking a stand for cocreating a shared human intersubjectivity of compassion and connection–essentially a sense of shared humanity of me and other(s) as well-meaning but flawed human beings.