By Mo Edjlali, Founder of Mindful Leader; Author, Open MBSR
At this point, you may be wondering why I am so interested in contempt. Fair question. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article called 4 Ways We Carry Contempt. Then I wrote 4 Signs You’re a Mindful Zombie, which was, let’s say, not exactly written with the softness of a lavender eye pillow.
And now here I am, back at contempt again. So either I am developing a specialty, or contempt has been trying to tell me something.
After writing about mindful zombies, something felt off. Not because I thought the piece was wrong. There is a great deal that is real and important in there. Mindfulness can become performance. Calm can become branding. Non-judgment can become its own form of judgment. The shadow can hide very comfortably in spiritual language.
But I also noticed something else. There was some contempt in me too. Not just critique. Not just clarity. Something colder. Something that enjoyed seeing a certain kind of person as less awake, less honest, less alive, less real.
That is the annoying thing about contempt. It is much more fun to diagnose in other people. Nobody signs up for a mindfulness article hoping the mirror starts talking back. But if we are willing to study it, contempt can become useful. It can show us where we are trying to stay above, what we are trying not to see, and what parts of ourselves we may have left behind.
Here are three things contempt taught me.
1. The persona I was defending
Contempt usually arrives feeling like insight.
We think we see the other person clearly. They are fake, foolish, hypocritical, asleep, captured by the system, the teacher, the ideology, the trauma-informed laminated handout.
But contempt does not just judge another person. It also protects an image of ourselves.
Carl Jung used the word “persona” to describe the face we present to the world. It is the mask we learn to wear so we can function in society. We all have one: the mature one, the rational one, the spiritual one, the ethical one, the awake one, the one who definitely does not have a superiority complex, thank you very much.
There is nothing wrong with having a persona. We need some kind of social self. Nobody wants the cashier at Trader Joe’s to meet your entire unconscious. The trouble starts when we mistake the mask for the whole person.
Contempt often appears when that mask feels threatened. If I need someone else to be ignorant, maybe I am defending the identity of being awake. If I need someone else to be fake, maybe I am defending the identity of being authentic. If I need someone else to be spiritually performative, maybe I am defending the identity of being the one who sees through spiritual performance.
This is where contempt gets sneaky. It does not simply say, “This is wrong.” It says, “I am above this.” That little elevation is intoxicating. Suddenly I am not just making an argument. I am occupying a higher floor. And from up there, everyone looks smaller. The question contempt taught me to ask is not, “Was I wrong?” Sometimes I was not.
The more useful question is:
Who am I trying so hard to prove I am not?
2. The shadow I was projecting
The shadow is one of those words that started in Jung and somehow ended up in a TikTok journal prompt. Still, the basic idea is useful.
The shadow is not just the “bad” part of us. It is the part we have not been willing or able to recognize as ours: aggression, envy, ambition, vanity, neediness, weakness, hunger for attention, desire for power, the wish to be admired. Not exactly the qualities we rush to put in the LinkedIn bio.
The strange thing is that the shadow is often easiest to see outside ourselves. We spot it quickly in other people. Sometimes instantly. Sometimes with great precision. Sometimes with a little too much enjoyment. The arrogant person may touch my own hidden desire for authority. The needy person may touch my own buried longing. The self-righteous person may touch my own certainty.
Contempt points with force. It says, look there, that is disgusting, that is beneath me. And then comes the tell: The more certain I am that something has nothing to do with me, the more carefully I may need to look.
Some behavior is harmful. Some people should be confronted. Some rooms need someone to say the plain thing plainly. But contempt does something extra. It turns another person into a container for everything I refuse to see in myself. It lets me outsource my shadow.
The question here is:
What quality in them am I trying to exile from myself?
3. My unlived life
This may be the most uncomfortable one. Sometimes contempt does not point only to what we reject. It points to what we secretly want.
The person I judge may not be admirable. They may be reckless, vain, arrogant, performative, or unwise. And still, somewhere inside my reaction, there may be envy. Or grief. Or longing.
We may despise someone's confidence because we have not let ourselves be visible. We may mock their ambition because we are afraid of our own. We may call them shameless because some part of us longs to be less governed by shame.
It is easier to say, "They are ridiculous," than to ask the harder question: what are they letting themselves do that I won't?
Because maybe the person I judge is carrying a distorted version of something I need to reclaim. Not their behavior. Not their arrogance. Not their lack of care. But the energy underneath it. Their boldness may be distorted, but where is mine? Their visibility may be obnoxious, but what have I hidden? Their power may be careless, but why have I confused powerlessness with virtue? Their aliveness may be messy, but when did I decide that being acceptable was the same as being awake?
The goal is not to become the person I judge. Please do not read this as a license to become more insufferable. We are already at capacity. The goal is to recover the part of myself I projected onto them.
That is what contempt was teaching me. It was not showing me who I disliked. It was asking me:
What are they letting themselves do that I won't?
What to do with contempt
I do not think the point is to eliminate contempt. That sounds like another excellent way to become a mindful zombie.
The point is to notice it before it takes over the room, the argument, the article, the movement, or the self.
When contempt appears, I try to ask:
Who am I trying so hard to prove I am not?
What quality in them am I trying to exile from myself?
What are they letting themselves do that I won't?
And underneath all of that, the question with teeth:
Why do I need them beneath me?
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