Social Feeling—Becoming Yourself
Posted on October 05, 2022 by George Miller, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
How we see ourselves in relationship to others and our environment has profound implications for our quality of life.
For some people, it feels like you have to choose between being yourself and being part of the group. I know I saw things that way for a long time. The truth is, this is an artificial distinction, one that people make because they do not understand how we truly function. The best way to be yourself, it turns out, is to be a part of the group, and vice-versa.
This is one of the first of many insights I gained when I started attending workshops at the Wright Foundation, and while it flew in the face of what I thought I knew, it also made so much sense that I couldn’t deny the truth of it, and it changed my life.
The profound and freeing—albeit disturbing—realization I had on the introductory training weekend for the Wright Foundation was that my primary way of engaging with society and others around me was to be different. This had provided me with a pseudo individuality and an elusive sense of self. The tragedy and the comedy of all of this was that what I had thought made me unique was only my resistance to others. It hadn’t occurred to me in any meaningful way that I could really participate and belong with anyone, let alone any group in an authentic and direct manner.
On the More Life Training, I saw the possibility of being more myself and belonging in society. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to become conscious of what the renowned psychologist Alfred Adler refers to as Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a “sense of solidarity and communal intuition,”1 usually translated as Social Interest or Social Feeling. I didn’t have to resist people to maintain my identity. I began to see a myriad of possibilities when I considered that all of my repressed desires, if expressed, might actually contribute to others and well as contribute to my growth. I had been holding onto this pseudo-identity of resistance to the point that there wasn’t much left of me. I had begun unbecoming, like what Fritz Perls refers to as “being a paper person.” The concept that society and my interactions with it would actually develop me rather than diminish me was an exciting proposition. I signed up for the Wright Foundation’s Year of More and stepped into the most exciting adventure I had had yet—the adventure of becoming a responsible, effective man who belongs to himself and to humanity.
1 Ansbacher, Heinz Ludwig, and Rowena R. Ansbacher. The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. N.Y., Basic Books, 1959, 134.
