Diversité intérieure et inclusion

La diversité et l’inclusion sont des sujets brûlants de nos jours, étant donné les conversations généralisées sur le racisme systémique et l’injustice sociale. Mais la diversité et l’inclusion ne s’appliquent pas seulement au fonctionnement interne des groupes et des organisations. Elles s’appliquent – peut-être même d’abord et avant tout – au fonctionnement interne des individus.

Ce sont des états d’esprit autant que des pratiques commerciales. Ils s’appliquent aux parties de vous-même que vous accueillez ou excluez, aux voix dans votre tête que vous encouragez ou ignorez, aux préjugés inconscients que vous avez à l’égard de certaines parties de votre personnalité.

Un environnement diversifié et inclusif – y compris dans votre psyché – est un environnement où chaque voix a sa place à la table et se sent valorisée et incluse. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de savoir qui est présent dans la pièce, mais aussi de savoir si ces personnes sont impliquées et soutenues. Comme le dit Verna Myers, défenseur de la diversité, « la diversité, c’est être invité à la fête, l’inclusion, c’est être invité à danser ». L’inclusion, c’est être invité à danser ».

Et lorsque tout le monde se retrouve sur la piste de danse à faire des pirouettes et à crier, cela peut devenir une véritable foire d’empoigne, mais des études montrent que c’est également bon pour les affaires, car cela favorise la créativité, l’innovation, la productivité, la capacité d’adaptation et l’engagement. Il en va de même pour la gestion de la vie personnelle.

Créer un environnement diversifié et inclusif entre les personnes signifie accueillir « l’autre », qu’il s’agisse de groupes minoritaires, de pratiquants de religions et de croyances politiques différentes ou de races entières. Mais créer un environnement diversifié et inclusif à l’intérieur de soi signifie accepter ce qui est « autre » à l’intérieur de soi – les parties de soi que l’on nie ou dénonce, que l’on craint ou que l’on évite, ou que l’on ne comprend tout simplement pas, en refusant de les laisser entrer dans la conscience.

These parts could be “negative” qualities such as anger, fear, grief, vulnerability, aggression, vanity, sorrow, lust, or laziness. Or they could be “positive” qualities like leadership, compassion, sexuality, creativity, or exuberance. Either way, they represent repressed life-force, and a kind of inner tyranny in which you elevate certain principles and suppress others.

Whether we’re talking about public or private othering, the human mind is an absolute zoo of tactics for suppressing the psyche’s “undesirable elements,” and the endorphins of choice are denial, defense, distraction, repression, dissociation, projection, procrastination, and moralizing.

But whatever parts of yourself you push down—because you can’t permit them expression, or can’t love them, because others won’t approve or they don’t fit your self-image—will just come up somewhere else in your life, urgent and rebellious.

The closets into which you stuff whatever you refuse to express are the body and soul, and they can take only so much before bursting open and spilling their contents into the room, typically in the form of symptoms, dreams, addictions, projections, or what Freud called repetition compulsions, the captive’s way of trying to free itself.

These are the lessons you’ve endlessly had to learn, the mistakes you continually make, the issues you’ve worn a footpath to and from, to and from, the dream that keeps coming back, the creativity that’s constantly causing you labor pains but without a birth, the symptoms that won’t go away, the kind of partner you routinely attract, the kind of fight you keep having with that partner.

I met a young man recently who said he’s always wanted to be a teacher and speaker, but spent so many years “biting my tongue,” that he literally had a pronounced scar on the tip of his tongue, like a big callous, from where he’d bitten it repeatedly.

Pathology means the logic of pain, and its logic is often that something in your life is longing for expression and reconciliation. And it’s in the nature of your secret self to seek that expression. Thought-bubbles always swim for the surface and dreams always try to press themselves into consciousness. Passions that are unlived, gifts ungiven, secrets unspoken, wounds unaddressed are things you’re withholding and restraining, and they tend to build up a charge that needs discharging. Whatever has a voice can’t stand being silenced, can’t be anything but a caged animal that keeps rushing the bars whenever you walk by.

At the least, they’ll tend to lodge themselves in the middle of your path, between your intentions and your achievements, and you’ll constantly stumble there. They’ll become the downstairs neighbors who bang on the ceiling with a broomstick while you’re busy having a party.

There’s no walking away from unlived parts of yourself any more than you can walk away from an angry partner and expect him or her to not still be angry when you come back, any more than you can shove unpaid bills in a drawer and expect the electricity to stay on, any more than we can perpetuate a world of radical inequality and not expect it to come back and bite us.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung considered it a foregone conclusion that whatever you’re unwilling to face in yourself, you’ll be forced to confront in the outer world, which might help explain the recent conversations we’re being pressed to have around Diversity and Inclusion. That is, the parts of ourselves we’ve disowned and disinherited—Jung called it the shadow—are parts of us (individually and collectively) that want to be acknowledged, embraced, and healed.

But carefully.

Shadow is largely what was unloved in you, and in some cases with good reason, so in attempting to re-integrate it, you have to keep your wits about you. Loving your own cruelty, rage, vengefulness, or narcissism is different from identifying with it, or giving it license. Treating the devil with respect is not the same as worshipping the devil. Dealing with the more “negative” aspects of shadow demands the ability to deal with paradox: shadow must be loved and changed. It’s intolerable and it’s in you. The enemy is also an ally. Lucifer means light. And 90% of the shadow, said Jung, is “pure gold.”

“We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,” he said, “but by making the darkness conscious.”

If you’re worried about being overwhelmed by your shadow, reckon with it in a caretaking situation, such as therapy or a therapeutic workshop. You can’t just pull the contents out of the bag like you’re pulling feathers out of a pillow, not without psychological readiness and emotional effort, as well as some grounding: a solid relationship or two, a worklife, a community or support group, some stabilizing routines, and a life with which you’re not already overwhelmed.

Above all, says Thomas Moore in Care of the Soul, take it easy. “The shadow is a frightening reality, and anyone who talks blithely about integrating it as if you could chum up to the shadow the way you learn a foreign language, doesn’t know the darkness that always qualifies shadow.”

And you’re not just hauling whatever is in the catacombs up into the light of day and cataloguing it as if for some museum exhibit. You need to go bodily down there through journaling, artmaking, therapy, bodywork, etc. and spend some time just mucking around and getting to know the place.

But your body’s own immune system is proof that the skill of transforming darkness through embrace is one that comes naturally, one you know in your cells. The body routinely “turns not-self into self” as the author Neil Douglas-Klotz describes, merging with invading enemies and making them part of the body, part of the whole.

What you’re after is creating a sense of community among the various parts of yourself, and community means practicing diversity and inclusion. As soon as you start excluding anything (or anyone), it’s no longer a community. It’s a club.

The more of yourself you can own, the more you belong to yourself, and the more you can share that gift of belonging with others.

For more about Passion! visit www.gregglevoy.com