Stereotypes - they’re all over the place, they’re as widely used as they are fought. You know what they are – think about yours, and those of your friends or family.
The trouble is they’re so useful to us – especially if we want to explain away our issues with someone else’s weaknesses. I often say to my clients in corporates:
“It’s much easier to refer to employees as mad, bad or stupid – instead of considering your role in their behaviour”
In all seriousness they do often develop out of a practical need to make sense of the world and not have to keep rethinking through the myriad of possibility in everyday life. We look for patterns and when we find them we don’t have to bother anymore, we can predict, automatically respond and our cerebral cortex can get on with ‘more important things’. The more we can filter out and automate the more we can deal with new things coming at us.
Survival has also played a role: “Those bears will kill you, you need to run!”
In some examples, our cerebral cortex does not even need to be engaged – reflexes.
Some stereotypes are taught by our parents:
“You must learn that you can never trust a man”
“Don’t expect a father to look after children”
“You see, women are always too emotional”
So, seeing patterns and settling on a response that seems to work, frees up your brain, helps you survive and perhaps even advance:
“This is how things really work around here, so if I want to get promoted I should definitely not be honest with the boss -despite what she says”
If you move to a new place and the door is too low. You have to tell yourself, perhaps even with a sign – to duck. After a while you are no longer aware that you are ducking each time you walk through.
But, if the doorway is later raised, one tends to carry on ducking unnecessarily.
You see, our unconscious reliance on assumptions does not always serve us well.
We fail to really meet each other because we fail to really see each other, beyond our unconscious lenses. Lenses that might have nothing to do with the specific person, but come from our own story, our childhood, our other relationships.
These can then easily develop into a very narrow view on life, prejudice and disconnected relationships.
Our lives lack depth as we unconsciously re-join our weekend echo chambers and repeat our patterns and dismissive remarks and avoid confronting ourselves.
Automatic responses can be unhelpful to our own ability to grow and adapt – we get stuck in our stories about others and about us. In this state a new experience of people, even of those closest to us, is highly unlikely.
Of course it impacts our relationships, it impacts whole groups, society, the world. But boy does it stunt us as a person. When we behave unconsciously we close ourself off to possibility and we encourage automatic responses from others.
“There she goes again” “I know what he’ll say, because………”
It becomes a vicious circle.
Sound familiar to anyone?
So what now?
"The moment an assumption is held consciously as only a possibility,
it is no longer an assumption" (Peter Raymond)
My life has given me plenty of opportunities to observe this in myself and others, and also to experience something different – where people interact with openness and with little, if any, pre-judging or need to defend a position.
Conscious and curious engagement creates possibility.
That’s why it can be scary- that possibility could include the monster under the bed!
We can’t improve until we are aware of who we really are, until we discover, observe and admit what we’re doing. That can be a tough process, bringing the unconscious onto the table. From there it gets tougher as we do the work to question and test.
Testing out something new can be scary, but it really can be a lot of fun too.
We can do this work on our own, in therapy and practice, but we need to take it to the arena of everyday life for it to have real substance, to really bring something new.
I want to help people experience this more for themselves and their relationships.
As a start, I’d like to promote real conversations between people, not coming at each other from our own or someone else’s ideology. We plan to put together such conversations in small groups of men (no, we don’t actually only talk about rugby, sex and beer!)
and also groups of women.
Then we want to host conversations together, men and women in groups (this is not a couples thing, but of course could be helpful at home)
These conversations will have some structure, but will be allowed to flow in a range of directions. We’ll have some fun and there will be meaning – which means we might find ourselves feeling a little uncomfortable – that will be a good sign!
Let’s see where this goes. I am so looking forward to this! Are you ready?
Hilton Barnett
