Healthy Embrace of Ethnocentric Identity 🫡

Whatever I repress usually leaks out in less healthy ways, including all of the developmental levels I’ve lived so far. My infantile needs, my magical thinking, my egocentric self that just cares about me, my ethnocentric self that just cares about ‘my people’. 

Now that I’ve got a wider identity, I can hold many overlapping and sometimes contradictory ethnocentric identities. Like any subjective experience I’ve made into an object, I can choose when and how to express when that energy shows up in my field. Like today. If I repress my “American” identity I’m going to project it onto some other group (ironically) or even other Americans (confusingly) and kick off the guilt-attack cycle.

You may be a rare person who has fully integrated all of your “Amber”, conformist self. But chances are you’ve got some ethnocentric skeletons in your closet. Religious affiliation. Gender. Race. Country of origin. Clique in highschool. If so, consider this an official invitation to find a way to love this part of you more. Relax the self-judgment, and find a healthy way to say “yes” to this younger you. You get more love of self and other, but you’re also being more honest. There’s nothing spiritual about self-denial. There’s nothing more evolved about seeing one as better than someone “less developed”.

In the beloved coaching course we do an exercise about feeling into all these levels, finding which ones are most difficult to embrace, appreciating and unblocking the repression, and learning to coach from them. The most difficult one for most people to embrace is their ethnocentric self. Especially if they’re white, from a rich country, or have been taught that it’s virtuous to be guilty for the circumstances of their birth (ironically), or that the best way to help those less fortunate than ourselves is to disavow our fortunes.

So much more could and should be said about what "healthy enthnocentricism" is, so I hope you'll say it.

With love, Jordan