The Roots and Antidote to Conflict and How to Process Your Pain
Most families don’t intend to hurt each other. But when we don’t know how to metabolize our pain, we inevitably do.
In this talk I build on the work of one of Carl Jung greatest students, Erich Neumann, and his seminal, but little known work: Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, that first identified the depth psychological reasons why humans continue repeating the same cycles of conflict—from intimate relationships all the way to genocide and war—and what it actually takes to stop.
In Neumann’s original work he identified a three stage process of dealing with our pain, and trauma: Repression → Suppression, and Projection, and that in turn creates the conditions for eternal, never ending conflict and war.
In this talk, I explore each of these stages in detail and propose a fourth: The Development of a “Processing Function”—a psycho-emotional and somatic capacity that allows us to consciously metabolize our pain instead of exporting it onto the people we love, our communities, and our enemies.
In this video we explore:
- How the “Mainstream Industrial Distraction Machine” keeps us exiled from developing this ability
- Why repression and suppression were once necessary immune functions of the psyche—and why they now fail us
- How projection surreptitiously channels unprocessed pain into blame, scapegoating, and war
- What the Processing Function is, and how it can be installed in adults and children
- A practical picture of parenting, partnership, and community life rooted in a New Ethic
If you’re a clinician, healer, parent, or simply someone who is tired of repeating the same painful patterns of conflict in your life—and you sense there must be another way—this is for you.
