A New Way That Works For Everyone
Dr. Daniel Siegel explores the neural mechanisms beneath social and emotional intelligence and how these can be cultivated through reflective practices that focus on the inner nature of the mind.
The American education model was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model designed to create docile subjects and factory workers.
nytimes.com/2012/03/23/opinion/brooks-the-relationship-school.html
🌱 IFS & Peace 🌿 See Chat
🌱 IFS & Projection 🌿 See Chat
Question: Why do we humans project our unconscious “parts” onto other human beings, while not even seemingly noticing that we are doing that?
Answer: This phenomenon touches right at the heart of human psychology and our relational patterns.
From an IFS perspective, we project our unconscious parts onto others because these parts carry burdens that feel too painful, threatening, or overwhelming to acknowledge directly.
Think of it like this: when we have an exile carrying deep hurt or shame, or a manager/firefighter working overtime to keep us safe, these parts operate beneath our conscious awareness.
They become like shadows that we don’t even realize are there.
Here’s the fascinating part – our psyche is actually trying to protect us!
When we can’t bear to hold certain feelings or beliefs about ourselves, our system “outsources” them onto others. It’s much easier to see these qualities in someone else than to face them in our own inner world.
This creates what we might call “psychological blind spots” – we genuinely aren’t aware we’re doing this because the parts doing the projecting are themselves unconscious.
The process is almost like our internal parts are constantly asking: *”How can I keep this person safe from pain?”* And sometimes their answer is: *”By making sure they see the problem as ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here.'”*
This is where the beautiful work of making unconscious beliefs more conscious comes in – as mentioned in approaches like Coherence Therapy. When we develop what we might call a “harmony mindset” rooted in empathy, we begin to question our automatic judgments.
We start asking ourselves: *”What am I protecting myself from seeing? What part of me is being triggered right now?”* Carl Rogers’ concept of active listening becomes crucial here – when we truly listen to others (and ourselves) with curiosity rather than judgment, we often catch glimpses of these projections.
The key is approaching both our inner experience and others’ with genuine compassion.
The good news?
Every time we recognize this pattern, we’re reclaiming our projection and bringing it back into our own system where it can be witnessed, understood, and eventually unburdened.
It’s like taking back borrowed energy that was never ours to carry in the first place.
🌱 IFS & The 8 C’s 🌿 See Chat
The 8 C’s in IFS represent qualities of the Self – your core, wise essence that naturally emerges when you’re in Self-leadership:
1. **Curiosity** – Genuine interest in understanding your parts without judgment
2. **Compassion** – Deep caring and kindness toward all your parts
3. **Calm** – Peaceful, centered presence even amid inner turmoil
4. **Clarity** – Clear seeing of what’s happening inside
5. **Confidence** – Trust in your ability to navigate internal experiences
6. **Courage** – Willingness to face difficult feelings and memories
7. **Connectedness** – Feeling linked to others and something greater
8. **Creativity** – Access to new solutions and possibilities When you lead from Self rather than from your parts, these qualities naturally arise.
For example, instead of being overwhelmed by an anxious part (which might make you act from fear),
Self-leadership allows you to approach that part with curiosity and compassion.
These Self qualities are essential for healing – they create the safe, trusting environment parts need to share their burdens and eventually let them go.
They also model how we might approach global conflicts: with curiosity about different perspectives, compassion for all involved, and the courage to find creative solutions together.
“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the seed of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is already dead.
~Albert Einstein
..::”For me, the Jewish religion, like all others, is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions… And the Jewish people have no different quality for me than all other people”. ~ Albert Einstein
Einstein viewed the “cult of individuals” as unjustified and often in bad taste, noting that it was unfair to select a few for “boundless admiration” while ignoring everyone else.
(He explicitly stated he could not see anything “chosen” about Jewish people)
~Marshall Rosenberg
Imagine living on the only known planet in the infinite universe, where the mortified rich get richer by colonizing the people to follow debunked dogma, repeating an ancient doctrine of war, projected onto innocent children, again and again, the rich get richer, and the children inherit a brutal indoctrination instead of Living Sacred Life. https://empathymatters.org/armageddon/
The phrase “Domination leads to Ritual Sacrifice” bridges the gap between historical sociology and ancient anthropology.
Throughout history, domination—the exertion of control, barbaric power, or authority over others—has frequently been inextricably linked to ritual human sacrifice.
This connection manifests in both structural power dynamics and ancient religious practices.
The transition from domination to human sacrifice is essentially the barbaric projection of unhealed guilt onto other human beings, often innocent children.
What’s #memoricide ?
It’s time to save our stories, our history, our truth.
#emmaswords #wordsmatter
via Brad Blinstrub ” Amen. What we are seeing is the march of the Khazars. A disaster renamed Israel.
via EnterTheUnseen ” If you truly understand the bridge between Spirit & psyche, you’d NEVER condone forcing religious beliefs on others &/or disempowering people’s spiritual decision making. It’s abusive behavior that breeds religious trauma, which creates fear-based neural associations to divinity.
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Insula (island)
Insula is the Latin word for “island”
The insula is an underestimated brain area because it acts as a crucial hub, integrating bodily sensations (interoception) with emotions, cognition, and decision-making, linking our inner world to external reality. Often called the “fifth lobe,” it’s vital for self-awareness, feeling feelings (like hunger, pain, or disgust), emotional regulation, and learning moral/social rules, yet its deep location made it historically overlooked, though modern neuroscience now reveals its central role in mental health and addiction.
Key Functions of the Insula
Interoception:
Maps and interprets internal body states (heartbeat, gut feelings) and brings them to conscious awareness, forming subjective feelings.
Emotional Processing:
Generates emotional feelings, linking bodily states to emotions like disgust, fear, or empathy, and helps regulate them.
Decision-Making:
Influences choices by integrating feelings (somatic markers) with cognitive processes, helping us learn what’s rewarding or risky.
Cognitive Control:
Involved in attention, working memory, and initiating intentional actions, connecting feelings to motivation.
Social & Moral Learning:
Helps learn social norms, right/wrong, and evaluate social cues, impacting trust and interpersonal behavior.
Why It’s Underestimated & Re-Emerging
Hidden Location:
Deep within the brain, beneath the frontal and temporal lobes, making it harder to study.
Integration Hub:
Its extensive connections to sensory, emotional, and cognitive areas make it hard to study in isolation but essential for linking systems.
Clinical Relevance:
Underactivity is linked to issues like addiction (craving recall), anxiety, and impaired empathy, while its role in homeostasis is crucial for overall health.
In essence, the insula is the brain’s “feeling center,” translating our body’s signals into conscious experience, guiding our decisions, and shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world, making its underestimation a significant oversight in understanding human experience and disorders.
The Insula:
An Underestimated Brain Area
Carl Rogers on Active Listening
For Rogers, empathy is sensing the client’s inner world “as if” it were one’s own, including the felt meanings and emotions, while still knowing it is the other person’s experience, not one’s own. It involves carefully communicating this understanding and checking back so that the client recognizes their own experience in what is reflected, which helps them feel deeply understood and facilitates change. (via acceptance)
Carl Rogers on active listening
Within Carl Rogers’ person-centered framework, a therapist’s own unarticulated inner experience, or internal incongruence, would be the potential source of PROJECTING feelings or biases ONTO the client.
Rogers emphasized the therapist’s core condition of congruence (or genuineness) as essential for therapeutic personality change.
Congruence means the therapist’s inner and outer experiences are aligned. The therapist is aware of their internal feelings and, if appropriate and helpful to the client, is transparent about them within the relationship.
Incongruence for a therapist would be having internal feelings (e.g., judgment, frustration, personal reactions) but hiding them behind a “professional façade”.
When a therapist is incongruent and not fully aware of or processing their own internal, unarticulated feelings, those feelings could implicitly or unconsciously influence their interactions, leading to a form of projection or an inability to offer genuine empathy and unconditional positive regard. This might manifest as subtly guiding the client, making interpretations, or signaling judgment, which would raise the client’s defenses and hinder their self-exploration.
Therefore, self-awareness and, when therapeutically relevant, the appropriate articulation of the therapist’s experience (transparency) are key in the Rogerian approach to avoid imposing the therapist’s own internal world onto the client.
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Carl Rogers did NOT advocate guessing or imposing a feeling label from a pre-set “LIST” if the speaker had NOT conveyed that feeling, either in words, tone, or clear implication. Instead, he emphasized tentatively reflecting the feeling that seems present in the speaker’s actual message, and then checking its accuracy with the speaker.
Rogers on active listening
Rogers described the listener’s task as grasping both the facts and the feelings in what is heard, not inventing or supplying feelings the speaker has not expressed. He contrasted this with more interpretive approaches that project meanings and dynamics onto the speaker, which he warned can increase defensiveness and inhibit real expression.
Feelings reflection, NOT guessing
In Rogers-style reflective listening, the listener attends to the “total meaning” of the message, including tone, posture, and other nonverbal cues, and then responds especially to the feeling component that is actually manifest in the communication. When the listener reflects a feeling, it is meant as a careful, non-evaluative hypothesis about what the speaker is already expressing, not a speculative guess pulled from an abstract list of emotions the speaker has never indicated.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-active-listening-what-did-c-D42hS8shTk29OFWloNGtzA
https://lifebuilderscounseling.org/wp-content/uploads/activelistening.pdf
https://r.jordan.im/download/psychology/arnold2014.pdf
Active listening does not necessarily mean long sessions spent listening to grievances, personal or otherwise. It is simply a way of approaching those problems which arise out of the usual day-to-day events of any job.
https://wholebeinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/Rogers_Farson_Active-Listening.pdf
How does Rogers distinguish empathy from interpretation of feelings
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-rogers-distinguish-em-K4NQMqWGR3K8H3YI8hsSGA
Rogers treats empathy as an accurate, moment‑to‑moment entering of the other person’s experiential world, and he contrasts this with interpretation, which adds meanings or motives that go beyond what the person is actually expressing. Empathy stays close to the client’s “internal frame of reference,” while interpretation moves toward the helper’s theory, assumptions, or inferences about what the client really feels or means.
What Rogers means by empathy
For Rogers, empathy is sensing the client’s inner world “as if” it were one’s own, including the felt meanings and emotions, while still knowing it is the other person’s experience, not one’s own. It involves carefully communicating this understanding and checking back so that the client recognizes their own experience in what is reflected, which helps them feel deeply understood and facilitates change.
How interpretation differs
Interpretation, in contrast, involves the listener offering an explanation, hidden meaning, or deeper feeling that the client has not clearly expressed, often drawing on diagnostic or theoretical ideas. Rogers warned that this kind of interpretive stance can make the client feel analyzed or judged, increase defensiveness, and shift the focus away from the client’s lived experiencing toward the therapist’s concepts.
Key elements of the distinction
Empathy tracks the client’s explicit and implicit meanings and feelings as they emerge, staying within what the client is actually communicating.
Interpretation goes beyond that communication, proposing “what is really going on” psychologically, even if the client has not signaled it.
Rogers framed effective helping as privileging empathic understanding and accurate reflection over interpretive moves, especially early in the relationship.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The fundamental attribution error is the psychological tendency to overestimate the role of personality and underestimate the role of situational factors when explaining another person’s behavior.
For example, one might assume a coworker who is late is lazy, without considering that they might have faced a significant traffic jam or a family emergency.
How it works
Internal vs. external factors: We tend to attribute others’ actions to their internal characteristics (like their personality or beliefs), while overlooking external, situational pressures (like a bad day or a stressful environment).
Self vs. others:
We often make this error when observing others, but we are less likely to do it to ourselves because we are more aware of the external circumstances influencing our own actions.
Impact on judgment:
This bias can lead to unfair judgments, strained relationships, and misunderstandings because we are not considering the full picture of what is influencing behavior.
Example
Observing a driver: You see a driver swerve and assume they are a “jerk” or a “bad driver”.
Considering situational factors:
However, the fundamental attribution error occurs if you don’t also consider that the driver might be rushing to a hospital or dealing with a sudden medical emergency.
** Workplace scenario:**
A manager might believe an employee’s missed deadline is due to incompetence, without considering the possibility of insufficient resources or unclear instructions from the company.
Assata_Shakur
..::”Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of people who are oppressing them.
Assata Shakur
