Hidden Emotional Needs: Exploring our Shadow and Secret Longings

In this Interintellect Salon, hosts Matjaz Leonardis and Maybe Gray will explore hidden emotional needs and how they affect our lives.

Much of what we do is motivated by the kind of sensations and feelings we want to experience. Some of our desires – like that for a delicious slice of pizza – are clear enough. But quite often we are also driven by desires that might be less socially accepted. By desires we feel ashamed of and don’t want to recognise. By desires we don’t know how to recognise. And desires that are altogether unconscious. 

The unrecognised pursuit of some of these desires and needs is often the cause for strange and dysfunctional patterns in our lives. Somewhat more sinisterly there are also many institutions and schemes that take advantage of them. 

In this salon we will explore some of these needs and the patterns they lead to. We will also explore why the truth about them is often so difficult to face. In doing so we hope to reach an expanded and truer sense of who you are, a greater sense of acceptance about it and the option to act differently in the face of patterns one usually enacts mindlessly. 

Optional suggested reading:

• https://highexistence.com/carl-jung-shadow-guide-unconscious/
• https://arbinger.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/what_we_are.pdf
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7JEi-5oz50
• https://medium.com/what-to-build/what-the-hell-are-values-541614d8c949
• Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink