How to Integrate Your Shadow Self | Robert Greene & Jordan Peterson

So I have a friend, he's a really good friend of mine and I've known him since I was in college and he's a tough guy, I mean, he grew up in pretty poor circumstances in northern Alberta, really in a border area. The land as if it had only been broken 50 years earlier by his father, who was a longshoreman, and the next soldier, good guy, his father, but this guy grew up and is tough, worked in lead smelters and wandered around Western Canada , was my roommate. when I went to university and he's still a good friend of mine and he ended up working with similar criminals, he went into social work, oddly enough, and he ended up working with some of the worst criminals in Canada and he's a really good guy and he likes help people get better, but he's not naive at all and part of the reason he was good at working with criminals was because there were no tricks they could use that he couldn't understand and that was partly because he had a really built-in

shadow

.

I mean, I'll give you an example of it, so one day I was living in this town called Grand Prairie and it was at the height of the oil boom and so it was a tough town and there were a lot of tough bars and a lot of young men there with a lot of money and they came looking for it, you know, three days after being out in minus 40 degree weather working on the oil rigs and they were ready to party, man we had a party. One night at this type of frat house that I went to college at, too many people showed up and some of them were real troublemakers and we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so on. one guy just ripped his leg off and knocked over the table and then a group of us got together and kicked them all out and this friend of mine was like, "Oh, they'll be back," so he went upstairs and put on some pointed toe cowboy boots. of steel, it was like a bloody west and he went down the stairs and just as he entered the room there was a loud knock on the front door, it was these hooligans returning to cause pain and he just didn't miss a step, he opened the door, He opened the door and there was a guy standing there ready to fight and he kicked them under the chin with a steel tool.

A cowboy boot launched him right onto the front porch and, you know, the battle was on, but that's exactly who he was, you know, and he had his

shadow

built in, you could, he's a great roommate, he reciprocated everything you said. I always knew, if I bought groceries one week, he would buy it the next just like him. he was a straight forward that you could trust, but he wasn't a naive man and that made him able to deal with criminals and help them, so that's part of the integration of that shadow, yeah, um, he went very deep into the shadow in a chapter from my latest book about the laws of human nature and I try to talk about how one

integrate

s the shadow because it's not an easy answer for that, you know, people are a little perplexed, well, I have this dark side and I explain a lot of where it comes from. and how many of

your

aggressive impulses, like the two-year-old room you were talking about, you also have.

I'm talking to the people who have my readers. You had that aggression when you were young and it came back. socialized outside of you and then it became repressed and it's like a lost

self

that lives inside you and is screaming to get out, how do you

integrate

it? So the main thing is that you have to be aware that you have this shadow. side that you have you can't run away from it you have to recognize that it exists you almost have to embrace it a good father also does everything he can to not repress that like what you want to do with children is what you want you want them to be forceful, you want them to have some power, you want them to integrate that capacity for aggression into, let's say, clear-headed conversation, you want them to be able to stand up for themselves in family arguments if you just punish them for being aggressive, let's say for talking back or something, you don't guide that towards a more sophisticated development.

You also see this in schools. Now you know, when my kids were in school, this was so silly. We had a rule in our house, which was you. You don't have to follow stupid rules, that's a good rule, but if you get caught you have to bear the consequences, but of course, one rule was that the school not only couldn't throw snowballs, it couldn't make them, and that's how they were. . trying to say, yeah, exactly, you should shake

your

head, that's for sure, it's because his answer and this whole thing was politically correct nonsense, you know, non-competitive games, we're just going to play non-competitive games, it's like first that nothing, you know, I studied.

Piaget, yes, a hockey game is not exactly competitive because in a hockey game, well, no one brings a basketball, everyone plays hockey, so that is cooperation and then in the team you have to cooperate and say if you are the star, but you never surpass your

self

. You're just a son of a bitch, you're not the star, so there's a huge amount of cooperation in all those competitive games that they're built into and this idea that you know it makes kids better by not allowing them to be competitive is so disgusting. . Is it that good, that's the Freudian devouring mother?

Well, well, everyone's safe and nobody's going to hurt anyone and that's where a lot of young people are, you know, they go into the world where they've been called where they think there are no winners, everyone is, you know, they're win-win situations and that's where they get very surprised by the realities of the world, so all this pampering and this idea that there doesn't have to be a winner, we don't have to do it. getting prizes for first place everyone should get a prize, you know, all you're doing is setting your kids up for big shocks, you know, when they come into the world and see that it's not like that, yeah, and then they get disillusioned and they get depressed. you know, or traumatized, but I mean, when my son's hockey team at his school won the city championship, which was very important, you know, and the school was very happy about it, you have to admit, like the coach, but the director, who was this authoritarian empathy she was a horrible person I thought of authoritarian empathy yes, yes, she used more virtue as a club when she was yes, well, there are a lot of those people around, yes, She said well, really today we are all winners and the coach had the yes.

Not exactly, it's disgusting because and you know, my son was just a bite from Paul, but the coach had enough guts and said no, no, the hockey team won and it's not like the kids at school were jealous, some Of them obviously they were, but most of them were very happy like you when your sports team wins, that's right, you know, and most people are generous enough to be able to celebrate someone else's victory without it, and that's the same thing i saw this with birthday parties, i just hated this. It's like every kid gets a gift bag It's like no, you know they have their damn birthday, every kid doesn't need a damn gift bag and it's the same thing, the same naive trick and it's also authoritarian because it imposes this kind of view. . of the world is like no, it's this kid's data, it's special, that's why we celebrate this kid, the rest of them, if they can't handle it, it's like there's something wrong with the way they've been treated and it tends to to improve.

In many of my books I have tried to remove the kind of taboo or negative associations that we have with the word power or with the word ambition. You know, I'm trying to say that ambition is a good thing, it means you've believed in it. You have some self-love and you think you're worth something and you want to go out and achieve it and that creates something worthwhile for other people, so ambition is a positive thing, but a lot of people feel a little ashamed of being a shamed human being. by our primate nature embarrassed by our own aggressive impulses this is partly why boys are now failing our schools at a disproportionate rate you know and I see that there is an assault of the type you are describing for the better part of fighting for masculinity and You know, I had a friend who committed suicide because he identified his ambition with the patriarchal force that is devouring the environment, let's say, and that is a scam, you know the cause of historical horror and one could say well. no one takes ownership of it up to that point and that's fine, you can say that but you just don't know what the hell you're talking about, people take care of it all the time and then they start to identify the best part about them is that he tries hard to follow through with the destructive impulses of humanity and they are very ashamed because they can't do anything good at that moment, but in principle, yes, you know, he tried to be as harmless and inoffensive as possible in every possible way. and it just took all the life out of you, you end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself, that's what ends up happening and that maybe leads to suicide, the last type of self-harm that I know I have personally, like I said, I definitely have one. dark side I am very aggressive and extremely competitive and I have a lot of anger, so a lot of those experiences in my youth made me very angry, but the way I put my program together I'm not saying this is a model, but the way I put it together What I integrated was through my books, yes, so that kind of anger seeps through the material that I write and I find that I can only write when I have that kind of anger, but I don't rant, I don't scream. and I kind of look down on people, I channel it into something productive and something creative and I definitely do that when I give a talk, you know, and people have commented, you know some of the people who have criticized me that I'm an angry person. and which is not true, but it's definitely that anger, that ability to get angry is definitely something that gives you strength and can definitely push and anger in a psychophysiological way, so imagine this is obviously a thought experiment, imagine that you're chasing a cat with a broom, well the cat will run away from the broom, but if you corner the cat with the broom it will attack you even if it is just a cat, the reason for this is that fear will make it easier to freeze or escape, but sometimes fear is not like that. the correct response and anger will suppress fear, so one of the tools we psychologically have at our disposal is anger as an antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you.