Some practical advice for social healing and renewal

I wrote in my last article that we need to think in terms of healing when it comes to social renewal. Today I want to take a look at what social healing could entail. 

As usual, I tackle a topic that is far too big for one small article and I’m not trying to cover it in its entirety, but I do hope to stimulate in you some contemplation and, if you feel inclined, a dialogue. I invite you to leave me a comment at the bottom of this article, or simply hit reply and let me know what you think.

Healing, not solutions

Years ago I participated in various social change projects and workshops where the people gathered had arrived with their minds already made up about what needed to be done to solve their collective problems. They were leery of talking and wanted to “get on with it”. 

The workshops were designed to break down the inner resistances and beliefs about solutions and points of view, and open them to new insights and information they hadn’t been exposed to or considered yet. But there was a deeper issue at play, and that is a propensity toward imposing a solution onto others, with or without their participation or agreement, particularly with urgent, dangerous, or highly complex social problems. 

For example, much of what is going on with regards to government activity around the social, environmental, and economic issues of our time is looking increasingly like social engineering (the use of centralized planning and control in an attempt to manage social change and regulate the future development and behavior of a society). 

This is increasingly problematic because we’re seeing those in power unilaterally deciding what is best for everyone else, often with disastrous results. I believe this is behind much of the increasing unrest we’re seeing all over the western world.

I’m convinced this is the wrong direction for us all. We are growing out of the old world’s love of diktat from distant authorities.

In this article I’m going to look at how we can work to avoid social engineering, and think and act more like social sculpture: an artful and co-creative way of working together on our problems and renew our culture. 

I think we should consider the example of living foods: best produced in small batches and healthiest when locally grown. Get too big in your production size and living foods tend to become more easily infected with pathological bacteria. 

The analogy here is we work at a human scale size, as Elinor Ostrum’s Nobel prize-winning thesis, Governing the Commons, demonstrates. 

The more decentralized, the healthier. The more centralized, the more corrupt, anti-human, and dictatorial.

So what, then, is social sculpture? It is a scalable social change methodology that uses art, play, and other means of cultural remediation and regeneration to foster deep and lasting positive social change. As an idea, it has its roots in the work and activities of Joseph Beuys, a post-war German artist who first coined the term. 

My husband and I further developed the idea based on our experiences in large scale social change, our backgrounds as artists, and Steiner’s threefolding work. I’ll share more about this in another article. I want to only mention it here, but focus in on one small part of social sculpture: what social healing looks like at a human scale.

More social, less anti-social

Never have we been so anti-social as we are in our modern age. A friend from Iraq tells me his birth culture prioritizes family and community which he in turn highly values, especially in his roles as father and business leader.

But he also notes that here in America and in much of western culture we are oriented more toward individuation and that this has a shadow element of anti-social tendencies. We find ourselves without adequate community around us; we are a society of loneliness. 

However, this individualism is also a gift, an outcome of the evolution of consciousness that we must embrace as inevitable. But we can take steps to re-balance what has become unbalanced with renewed effort to build community and fellowship. 

In short, we aren’t yet capacitated enough to be healthy social beings in our modern times, which are blatantly anti-social and divisive. 

So we must deliberately invest in growing new skill-sets for social health, new capabilities not yet natural nor normal to us. It’s just like learning to play an instrument; no one can play the violin without a lot of practice and knowledge. 

This is what is required for social renewal.

The practice space

In order to understand the social realm, we must consider the anatomy of the human being. Otherwise we fall back on whatever the old world has long decided for us about what constitutes human makeup — a biological automaton subject to incentives and disincentives just like a rat; an evolved ape. 

I’d like to suggest we consider three layers: body, soul and spirit. 

This idea helps us get a sense of what we’re dealing with in the social realm. We’re physical beings which house and make possible the other aspects of our composition: our soul and spirit. 

Our soul is like the focus point for our consciousness, a magnifying glass. It is the crucible of our thoughts, feelings, and motives. The soul mediates between body (our material existence) and spirit (our spiritual existence) and as such is where we experience life. 

We have to work with the constraints and realities of the soul life and how it is organized if we want to work in wise and regenerative ways with other humans. 

Otherwise we make mistakes in things like organizational design (see the book Regenerative Business by Carol Sanford, specifically the section about thirty toxic business practices for particular examples), or think that centralized control in government is a good idea. 

Or, we fail to take into consideration what I have come to call the light and shadow aspects of the soul life. This light and shadow can be observed playing out in our thought life, also our feeling life, and in our behaviors as well. Let’s go there next.

The light in you

I’ve written before about my definition of the spirit, which is another way of saying”light”:

“In my world, the spirit is an aspect of the make up of every human being but only in potential. It is the “I Am”, that part in us that is truly unique. It is also the part in us that lives in a rent-free place, where wound and trigger and brokenness don’t touch. It’s just that we aren’t aware that we have this in our makeup - in potential. 

We can either experience our soul as being influenced by our bodily nature through our instincts, reactions, and natural ways of being and doing without thought or awareness, or we can experience our soul as being imbued with spiritual substance that gives us more consciousness and a sense of a purer and freer purpose and way of being in the world”.

We are innumerable combinations of light and dark, each uniquely expressed in what we think, feel, and do. Our lives are a stage on which the light and dark in us battle for dominance at every moment. 

Will we choose to be present or reactive when confronted by something we don’t like?

The ideal goal is to set up conditions for the higher self, the spiritual, the I AM, to show up in order for healthier social dynamics to be present. 

This makes sense, right? I’d rather engage with what is higher and more present, more responsible and free in you than with what is still untransformed, wounded, and compulsive in your soul.

Over the past fifteen years I have worked to help people develop a connection to their light through practices of meditation and study. I have learned to see this as the strength training part of inner development. 

You can’t heal and grow out of the compulsions of the shadow if you don’t have the forces for it. 

Social renewal needs to work with the principle of the higher self, setting up the conditions for its participation in collaboration. We can then walk a higher road together. 

Otherwise we tend to allow the lowest common denominator to dominate in a culture, or get bent around the hysteric in the room, or tiptoe around the controller, the boss, or the angry person. And this tolerance of what is lower in us is a surefire way to undermine or even destroy teams and projects. I’ve seen it happen, and likely you have too.

The shadow in you

The biggest mistake I think people make in the collaborations and relationships that make up their social experiences is they don’t account for the toxic potential of the shadow sides in us all. 

By shadow I mean the aspect of us that is still locked in habit, wound, and unconscious reactivity.

Carl Jung, a mid-twentieth century psychologist, defined the shadow as the darker side of the psyche. Jung regarded the shadow as the unconscious and suppressed aspect that is projected onto one's social environment as cognitive distortions.

These cognitive distortions are very challenging to navigate as they become what I call “soul addictions” — we become so identified with them that we will sacrifice a great deal to maintain them. We don’t know who we are without them. They form the color of the “lens” through which we look through and judge the world. They become a part of our reality.

I made a podcast episode all about soul addictions you can watch or listen to here.

In short, you have to face yourself and your weaknesses, immaturities, and habitual compulsive behaviors if you want to make a meaningful contribution to a community. Otherwise your behavior ends up being a mixed bag, or even a liability. 

And none of us are exempt from this work, no matter evolved or experienced we are.

Let’s drill a bit deeper in and look at the most obvious place where social renewal takes place: communication.

And my advice for social renewal.

Alas, we’re shockingly bad at communication

Communication is something we do all the time, yet we would be shocked if we were listening to ourselves with someone else’s ears. 

We might find that our communications tend to be unclear, mitigated, confusing, abstract, blaming, shaming, irritable, fearful, defensive, or a million other effects that we don’t realize. 

This happens usually because we are not in touch with the acting out of our shadow, resulting in unmet needs. And so we use strategies — of which we are also unaware — to try and meet those needs. All kinds of confusion happens in the spaces between our unmet needs and the strategies we use in communication. 

I developed a formula that describes the hidden motives of the shadow behind our communication that goes like this: unmet needs + beliefs = communication strategy.

Chronically unmet needs tend to be suppressed and/or unconscious in us, for example, the need for recognition, to be seen or heard, for love, understanding, safety, reassurance, connection, and on and on. 

This is because we don’t believe we can ever get them met so we manage our way around them as best we can, usually through ignoring, denying, or suppressing them.

The belief is describing the outcome of our cognitive distortions as described earlier from Carl Jung. They are what we believe about ourselves and/or the world. These beliefs are the conclusions we’ve drawn, the self-fulfilling prophesies we see playing out in our lives.

For example, if we believe we are unlovable or unworthy we may tend to invest in relationships with people who are unable to love us.

The combination of unmet needs and beliefs create the conditions for how we are going to communicate with others, whether that is with tendencies toward being mitigated and unclear in our asking something of another person because we’re afraid of their response, or not being clear about what we want because we feel unworthy, or being manipulative in order to get what we need.

These are examples of the unfortunate strategies we use to try and meet our needs.

And if all that isn’t challenging enough, then there is the issue of how the other is hearing us. They might be taking us at face value but all too likely they’ll be interpreting our words according to their own wounds and proclivities, coming up with a conclusion about what we said that we may never have intended. 

My first piece of advice: get to know this terrain in you

This is a very big topic, and so I’ll just give two pieces of advice here. 

The first is: know the difference between needs and strategies. Learn more about this in an episode from my podcast here.

If you get to know this terrain in yourself, you will find that you are less likely to get triggered or disempowered in social dynamics wherever they happen. 

This is because you will see that the issue was less about another person than you had thought. 

You’ll take more responsibility for how you feel, instead of assuming the other made you feel your anger, resentment, or despair. You’ll have more power, more agency in the relationship, which is the unexpected but beautiful outcome of taking more responsibility for your inner life.

My second: get in the habit of checking your assumptions

I have found the biggest contribution I can make to another is to really listen closely to them, and hear what they are trying to say, reflecting that back to them. They tell me they feel heard and seen which is a rare experience in our modern world. 

I have come to suspect that being heard and seen should be at the very bottom of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, right there with the most basic physiological needs. If your friends and colleagues feel heard and seen by you, they show up differently for you and for others. This is a healing impulse that the world rather desperately needs.

So my second piece of advice here is to check your assumptions about what you heard. 

For example, you could say: “What I hear you saying is…” and then repeat what you heard. Then say, “is this correct?” Such a protocol offers the other a possibility to correct your understanding if you got it wrong. 

It is especially good when you are triggered by something someone said, and before you react and shoot from the hip, so to say, you can just check to see if what you heard is what they actually meant. 

It can be an illuminating moment when you discover that what you heard isn’t what they said at all. It can really reveal to you your “lens” of already present assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs.

Becoming aware of what we think — what we believe, our implicit bias, cognitive distortions, etc — and are harboring in our shadow is now a necessity for social renewal. 

And at the same time building our ability to engage with others from the place of our higher self is the other major healing activity.

Healing is an art form

What I’ve shared here is one small part of the art of social sculpture that focuses specifically on inner development, the soul work, that makes us capable of leading social change. It also teaches us to better understand the nature of the creative medium we are working with: people.

You wouldn’t want to try and paint a picture without knowing how paint and canvas work, would you? And so must we consider that social renewal is working with a medium that we must grow competent in. 

Moreover, that healing is an art form. It is a creative act. And when you are working with others toward social renewal it is then a co-creative act. We work and create together, sculpting the being-born world as we go because we heal the shadow and strengthen the light in us. 

And by extension the communities and cultures in which we live.