“Wembe ni Ule Ule”: How our Subconscious minds work
By the standards you judge, so shall you be judged… but it’s deeper than that when our subconscious minds are involved.
Wassup my people. Let’s get deep today, and hopefully free our inner children to some level, and take ourselves a step closer to who we truly want to be, which is who we know we truly are at our core.
Once you judge people a certain way, you have to live by the standards you judge them for consistency in your self concept, to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Let me explain.
Let's say your neighbor is someone really orderly, organized, routined, planned .. and as a result they come across to you as someone so planned and in control of their lives because of the consistency by which they tend to live their lives. But, this same neighbor is very mean to their children/family etc.
You are also at odds with this neighbors for other reasons like extended family conflicts. And also, this neighbor is generally disliked by almost everyone in this village.
You on the other hand, believe yourself to be kind to your children and family. There really is love in your house. You actually are kind to your family and the people around you.
However, you can’t help but admire the sense or level of control that your mean neighbor seems to have over their lives out of their apparent ease of self management. You admire it in them because you really want to be like that- more organized and orderly, not mean.
To make yourself feel better, you gossip about this neighbor, and hate in them, and bad mouth then over how mean they are to their own children, how no kid from the neighborhood visits that home because they are unfriendly. You join in all the village hate against this person.
So you continually extract reasons to feel that better than this neighbor to avoid the jealousy/ admiration you feel for them over their clearly excellent self management. You look for reasons to feel better than them, reasons to justify yourself, reasons to commune with your other neighbors against this one "mean" or "evil" neighbor.
This whole time, you don’t have the language for why you feel jealousy/ admiration towards your “evil’ against neighbor. You just know you feel bad. You can’t reconcile in your mind that you admire them. You cannot even tell what you admire about them. You are just jealous, but sort of convince your self that your pretence that you don’t even like them or admire them is true, and that you are just better than them. You even lament to your neighbors about how bad you feel for their children, you even pray for those children to be “protected from the evil of this person”, good &kind hearted neighbor that you are.
However, what you don’t realize is that what you admire about them is the way they seem to be in control of their lives because they have a routine, order, and good organization.
As a result, they seem to be more in control of their lives, and that is what you really admire in them. It’s what you actually want in your life. You like how clean their compound is. You like how consistently they seem to do their home management chores. You like how good they seem to be at their time management.
But no one likes them because of their meanness . In fact, it is even said that kids cry if sent to go pick something from that homestead, because they are afraid of this clinically clean and mean home owner. There is a consensus that no one likes this neighbor.
Here’s what you (people) don’t realize:
You hate for them, for what they are that you are not. In return, your subsconscious mind, which is both primitive and intelligence, may be very clear on what you actually admire about them- their apparent excellent self management and organization. This same subconscious though, sees how much you “don’t like them”.
So, your mind (sub-consconcious) associates good self management skills , order, routine and consistency with being hated, and no one wants to be hated. As human beings, we are created tp connect with others, we desire it, and try to shield ourselves as much as possible from social exclusion.
If there’s one thing we are also wired to have as Human beings is cognitive consonance (consistency of our values/ beliefs and the decisions/choices we make/ the actions we take).
To avoid any form of cognitive dissonance (that sense of internal conflict due to conflicting values /beliefs and actions), you find yourself continually sabotaging your own efforts to self manage better. You find yourself continually sabotaging your own efforts to create a routine. You find yourself continually sabotaging your own efforts to self manage better, your efforts to be organized, your efforts to have more control over your life through better planning.
What you don’t understand is that your subconscious mind (inner child) is trying to protect you from "being hated", because it primitive thinking/processing power associates being well planned and routined with being hated, and thus with being disconnected from society.
Your subsconscios mind is trying to protect you from the loneliness that comes from being alienated by the society because they all don’t like you, and your hatred input against your organized neighbor told your brain that being organized amounts to hatred by everyone.
And so you keep sabotaging yourself to maintain some cognitive consonance (consistent self concept- which is basically, harmony between your beliefs/ intentions and actions).
Yet the opposite happens, ie, you experience even worse cognitive dissonance. Why?
Because as you continually sabotage your efforts to be organized, you cause cognitive dissonance in your brain (loads of internal frustration, conflict and dissatisfaction with yourself) because your intention is to be better at self management, (so this is your belief/value/ something you treasure); yet in action, you seem to keep doing the opposite.
"Wembe ni ule ule"- A Swahili saying meaning that the same standard is used to judge all, the same standard by which you judge, you too shall be judged.
So, you are jealous of others(which you convince yourself is hatred against them as opposed to admiration) for what they are that you currently aren’t.
Because you don’t realize that this jealousy is actually admiration: you are likely to keep sabotaging your own efforts to actually improve through this twisted subconscious self protection mechanism, because by the same standard you judge others, so do you too judge yourself.
Think deeply about that.
Solution?
Perhaps start by accepting how/what you actually feel.
Try to get accurate language for what you feel. Try to clearly and accurately identify what you feel.
Secondly, try to understand what certain emotions actually indicate.
You can research this online. A good example is how an emotion like jealousy actually means that we admire something in the people we are jealous of, but to level the ground we convince ourselves that it’s hatred against them.
Jealousy means that something in that other person actually threatens your self concept, because it’s something you want and you don’t have, and they have it... Yet something about how they live conflicts with your ideas of who you’d typically admire. They are ideally someone you should hate or not want to not be associated with.
It’s like finding yourself liking/admiring Trump’s freedom to be and say whatever he feels like... And you wish you could do that(Sorry to all the Trump supporters, I just don’t get it… but also, there is something admirable about his kind of crazy).
However, how could you like Trump? That hate monger? That volcano of controversy etc... your brain can’t reconcile that you’d actually like them. What you don’t realize is that it’s not the whole Trump you like, it’s something about his life that you would want for your life.
Yet who said it has to be either black or white? Who said it has to be all or nothing? You can both admire some qualities in someone and not like what their complete person represents. That’s the lesson we must teach our subconscious minds. It’s not either or. This model of thinking is a cognitive distortion in and of itself.
So the next thing we must teach our brains is wholesome perspectives of thinking. Retrain that little girl/dude in you that you can admire some qualities in people, and not admire some qualities in those same people, and that's okay.
That will give our brains - our inner children (subsconscios minds) the freedom to pursue what we really want without a conflicting inner constitution.
I hope this helps.
Yours Truly, 🤗 .
Hey there. My name is Risper Wanja Njagi. I am an Advocate by Training, Writer and Voice Over Artist, currently living and working in Kenya.I am a believer in Jesus Christ… and I dare say my life has gotten richer for it… in all aspects. My life mission with Course Correct is to disarm the Kingdom of the devil, by highlighting all the ways in which we have redemption in Jesus Christ, no matter how messed up we may have been, or still feel we are.I’m happy to partner with as many organizations as possible that are working with young people and mental health … both in writing and speaking engagements.You can reach me for any speaking or partnership engagements on coursecorrectbyrisper@gmail.com
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