Integrating Aggressive Impulses: Shadow and Human Nature

A tough, integrated man leverages his shadow to help troubled individuals, advocating for embracing and integrating one's shadow.

### Integrating the Shadow, Competitive Spirit, and Anger: Insights from Jordan Peterson
* Jordan Peterson's tough friend, who grew up in poverty and worked with delinquents, had an **integrated shadow** that helped him **see through people** and **handle tough situations**.
* 💡 In "The Laws of Human Nature," Peterson delves into integrating the shadow, explaining that it is **crucial to acknowledge, embrace, and integrate one's dark side**.
* 🏫 Peterson criticizes non-competitive games in schools, arguing that **competition is essential for teaching cooperation and preparing children for the real world**.
* 🏆 He believes that the trend of giving everyone a prize and avoiding competition is harmful, as it sets children up for **disillusionment and shock** when they face real-world competition.
* 🦸 Peterson aims to remove the negative associations with power and ambition, emphasizing that **ambition is a positive trait that creates value for oneself and others**.
* 😠 He shares that he has a **shadow side with a lot of anger and competitiveness**, which he channels into his writing and lectures to make them **forceful and productive**.
* 😡 Peterson explains that anger can be a psychophysiological tool to counter fear, as it **suppresses fear** and can serve as an **antidote to freezing** in terrifying situations.

so I have a friend. He's a really good friend of mine, and I've known him since I was in college. He's a tough guy. I mean, he grew up in under rather poverty-stricken circumstances in northern Alberta, really on a frontier piece of land. Like, it had only been broken 50 years before by his father who was a longshoreman and the next military guy. Good guy, his father, but this guy grew up, and he is tough. He worked in lead smelters, and he wandered around Western Canada. He was my roommate when I went to college, and is still a good friend of mine. And he ended up working with like delinquents. He went into social work, oddly enough, and he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in Canada. And he's a really good guy, and he likes to help people get better, but he isn't naive at all. And then part of the reason that he was good at working with delinquents was because

there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn't see right through, and that was partly because he had a real integrated shadow. I mean, I'll give you an example of him. So, one day I was living in this town called Grand Prairie, and it was at the height of the oil boom. And so, it was a rough town, and there were lots of rough bars and lots of young men in there with plenty of money and plenty they come in for, you know, three days after being out minus 40 weather working on the oil rigs, and they were ready to party, man. We had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in, and about oh way too many people showed up, and some of them were real troublemakers. And one, we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth, and one guy just went over, like, tore the leg off and knocked the table over. And then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out. And this friend of mine, he said, Oh, they'll

be back. And so, he went upstairs, and he put on some steel-toed cowboy boots. It was just like a bloody west, and he came marching down the stairs. And just as he entered the living room, there was a big knock on the front door. It was these hooligans coming back to cause grief. And he, he just didn't break stride. He opened the door, he pulled open the door, and there was a guy standing there ready to fight. And he kicked them underneath the chin with a steel tool cowboy boot, knocked him right over the front porch. And, you know, the battle was on. But that was exactly what he was like, you know. And he had his shadow was integrated. You could, he's a great roommate. He, he reciprocated everything. I always knew if I bought groceries one week, he'd buy it the next. Like he was a straight shooter, you could trust him. But he was not naive, man. And that made him able to deal with delinquents and to help them. So that's part of that integration of.

that shadow, yeah. Um, I go very deeply into the shadow in a chapter in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature, and I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it's not, it's not an easy answer for that, you know. People are kind of perplexed, well, I have this dark side, and I explain a lot of where it comes from and how a lot of your aggressive impulses, like the room of two-year-olds that you were talking about, you have that as well. I'm talking to the people that have my readers, you have that aggressiveness when you were young, and it got socialized out of you, and then it got kind of repressed, and it's like a lost self that lives inside of you and is screaming to come out. How do you integrate it? And so the main thing is you have to be aware that you have this shadow side, you have. You can't run away from it, you have to acknowledge that it exists. You almost have to embrace it. A good parent too does everything he or

she cannot repress that like what you want to do with children is you want to like you want them to be forceful you want them to have some power you want them to integrate that that capacity for aggression into let's say lucid conversation you want them to be able to stand up for themselves in family discussions if you just punish them for being aggressive let's say for talking back or something like that you don't guide that into more sophisticated development you see this in schools too now you know when my kids went to school this was so dumb i we had a rule in our house which was you don't have to follow stupid rules that's a good rule but if you get caught you have to put up with consequences but right so one rule was the school had not only could you not throw snowballs you couldn't make them and so they were trying to yeah exactly you should shake your head that's for sure it's like because their answer and this was all politically correct

nonsense. You know, non-competitive games. We're only going to play non-competitive games. It's like, first of all, you know, I studied Piaget. Yeah, a hockey game is not competitive exactly because in a hockey game, well, everybody, no one brings a basketball, everybody plays hockey. So that's cooperation. And then on the team, you have to cooperate. And like, if you're the star but you never pass, you're just a dumb son of a, you're not the star. And so there's a tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games. They're integrated. And this idea that, you know, make children better by not allowing them to be competitive, it's so, it's disgusting. It is. It's that, well, that's the Freudian devouring mother, right? That's, oh, well, everyone's safe and no one's gonna ever hurt anyone. And that's kind of where a lot of young people are, you know, they enter the world where they've been called, where they think that there are no winners, that everyone is, you know, it's just win-win.

situations, and that's where they get really shocked by the realities of the world. So all this coddling and this idea that there doesn't have to be a winner, we don't have to get prizes for first place, everybody should get a prize, you know, all you're doing is setting your children up for massive, you know, shocks when they enter the world and they see that it's not like that. Yeah, and then they get disillusioned and depressed, you know, or traumatized. But I mean when my son's hockey team in his school, they won the city championship, which was a big deal, you know, and the school was pretty happy about that. To his credit, so was the coach, but the principal, who was this authoritarian empath, she was an awful person. I thought, authoritarian empathy, yeah, well, yeah, she used more virtue as a club when it was, yeah, well, there's plenty of those people around. Yeah, she said, well, really today, we're all winners, and the coach had the, yeah, exactly, no, it

is sickening because it, and you know, my son was just a paul bite, but the coach had enough guts. He said no, no, the hockey team won, and it's not like the kids in the school were jealous. Some of them were obviously, but most of them were really happy, like you are when your sports team wins. That, yeah, you know, and most people are generous enough so that they're able to celebrate someone else's victory without. And that's the same. I saw this with birthday parties. I just bloody well hated this. It's like, well, every child gets a gift bag. It's like, no, you know, they have their damn birthday. Every child doesn't need a damn gift bag. And it's this. Is this same the same naive trickly, and it's authoritarian too, because it imposes this kind of view of the world. It's like, no, it's this kid's data be special. That's why we're celebrating this kid. The rest of them, if they can't take that, it's like there's something wrong with the way.

that they've been treated and it tends to well a lot of my books. I've tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power or with the word ambition. You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing. It means that you have you believed in yourself, you have some self-love, and you believe you're worth something, and you want to go out and achieve. And it creates something worthwhile for other people, so ambition is a positive thing. But so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being, embarrassed about our primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses. This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate. You know, the, and I see this, there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity. And you know, I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with, you know, the patriarchal force.

that's devouring the environment. Let's say, and that's a con. That's, you know, the cause of historical horror. And you might say, Well, no one takes that on to themselves to that degree. And that's, well, you can say that, but that you just don't know what the hell you're talking about. People take that on to themselves all the time, and then they start to identify the best part of them that strives forward with the destructive impulses of humanity. And they're so ashamed because they can't do anything good then. But in principle, yeah, you know, he tried to be as inoffensive and harmless in every possible way as he possibly could, and it just sucked all the life out of it. You end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself is what ends up happening. And that's maybe leads to suicide, the ultimate kind of self-aggression. I know that I personally have, as I said, I definitely have a shadow side. I'm very aggressive and extremely competitive, and I have a lot of anger.

so a lot of that those experiences in my youth made me very angry. But the way I kind of integrated my show, I'm not saying this is a model, but the way I integrated it was through my books. Yeah, so I kind of that anger kind of seeps through the material that I write, and I find I can only write when I have that kind of anger. But I don't rant, I don't yell, and kind of put people down. I kind of channel it into something productive and something creative. And so I definitely do that when I'm lecturing, you know, and people have commented, you know, some of the people who've criticized me that I'm an angry person, and which isn't true, but it's definitely that anger, that capacity for anger, definitely is something that gives you force, and it can push and anger definitely so psychophysiologically. So imagine that this is obviously a thought experiment. Imagine you're chasing a cat with a broom. Well, the cat's gonna run from the broom, but if you corner the cat with the broom.

it will attack you, even though it's just a cat. Well, the reason for that is that fear will facilitate either freezing or escape, right? But sometimes fear isn't the right response, and anger will suppress fear. And so, one of the tools that we have at our disposal psychologically is anger as an antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you.

How to Integrate Your Shadow Self | Robert Greene & Jordan Peterson

Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, best-selling author and host of the #1 Education Podcast, "The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast." Watch the entirety of Dr. Peterson's catalog on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueJdK

This channel features videos from his classes, his podcasts, interviews, book tours and lectures. You can watch the incredibly popular lecture series "Personality and Its Transformations", "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief", as well as his "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories" lectures for free.


Jordan B Peterson

A friend from northern Alberta, with a tough upbringing, became a no-nonsense social worker, using his integrated shadow to work with delinquents.

He demonstrated his straightforward and trustworthy nature in his personal relationships, making him a reliable and respected friend.

His ability to see through tricks and his tough exterior made him effective in handling challenging situations, as evidenced by an incident during a rough party in Grand Prairie.

Integrating the Shadow: Embracing Your Dark Side

The shadow side, representing repressed aggressive impulses, needs to be acknowledged and embraced for integration.

Repressing the dark side can lead to a lost and screaming inner self, so it's important to guide and integrate aggressive tendencies rather than punishing or repressing them.

The concept of non-competitive games and the idea of making everyone a winner is criticized for not allowing children to embrace competitiveness, leading to a false belief that there are no winners in the real world.

Over-coddling children and giving everyone a prize can lead to a rude awakening when they enter the real world.

This behavior can contribute to disillusionment and depression in the future.

The practice of giving every child a gift bag at birthday parties is also criticized for promoting a naive and authoritarian view of the world.

Embracing Ambition and Aggressive Impulses

The speaker advocates for embracing ambition as a positive force linked to self-worth and productivity.

He discusses the negative impact of societal shame around aggressive impulses, linking it to the disproportionate failure of boys in schools.

The harmful consequences of suppressing aggressive energy, leading to self-aggression and citing a personal experience and that of a friend.

Channeling Anger into Creativity and Productivity

The speaker integrates their anger into their writing and lectures in a productive and creative way.

They emphasize that while some may see them as an angry person, they use anger as a driving force psychophysiologically.

The speaker explains that anger can serve as an antidote to fear, allowing for a different psychological response.