Unlearning to Be a Good Person

{Going Through Cycles of Unlearning and the Torpor of Being a “Good Person”}

Cultivating Change as a Lifelong Practice

Unlearning is not just an intellectual or philosophical gesture. It is a living, multiple, visceral, bodily, and relational process. And it is often a path where pain crosses us, a journey of disorientation and loss of the frameworks that organize our world. Throughout this journey, we repeatedly find ourselves faced with the need to sustain states of confusion, shame, discomfort, and cognitive dissonance. Not as problems to be solved, but as symptoms that something is being stirred up in the deepest sediments of our perception. When the tectonic plates of our frames of reference collide with the multiple complexities of the world.

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Transformation, the real kind that descends into the gut and disorients, begins with a micro-crack.

A subtle discomfort. An insistent friction. An echo that doesn't fit.

And then the cycle begins.

Unlearning.

Unlearning is neither a straight line nor a series of ascending steps.

It is a spiral, tangled, organic, and always unfinished motion.

There are moments of lucidity, where everything finally seems to make sense — and then, a collapse, a return, an unexpected dive into old wounds.

It is a deeply somatic process.

It does not happen only with thought: it happens in the nervous system, in automatisms, and in individual and collective emotional membranes.

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In these moments, it is common to feel the torpor of being a “good person”, a learned and internalized response, inherited from a system that has trained us for individual purity, moral correctness, and goodness detached from the collective. When we are confronted with other ways of being in the world, more contextual, animated, and relational, the body and mind react. They feel attacked, judged, and diminished. They go defensive, protecting their internalized image of innocence.

There is a numbness in the promise of being a good person.

A numbness that seems kind, but which lulls the conscience into layers of conformity. A tamed kindness, educated not to disturb, not to overflow, not to question. We learn early on to say the right words, to appear fair, to maintain harmony — even if it means swallowing the truth of the body. Even if it means abandoning what we know, viscerally, no longer serves us.

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This kindness is not alive.

It is the functional version of sensitivity.

It is the trained reflex of adequacy.

And it is in this torpor that many of us fall asleep to the possibility of real change.

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But this defense is also a neurobiological manifestation. The nervous system seeks security through the familiar, and the cultural frameworks we carry are also somatic frameworks. What we have learned to consider real, safe, and right is inscribed in our bodies, in our automatic gestures, and our reflexes of belonging. Thus, culture is not just a system of ideas, but a metabolism that expresses itself biologically, generating ecosystems of dogmas and beliefs. Unlearning, then, requires a new metabolism. One that sustains “not knowing” without collapsing.

Culture, after all, is not just made up of ideas — it is metabolized in bodies. The norms we learn, about what it means to be a good person, about how one “should” feel, speak, act, and live, are in our tissues, in our reflexive gestures, in the ways we breathe. And the body, shaped by years of relational learning, does not always feel safe to unlearn. Even when we whisper, “I know this doesn't make sense anymore,” we simultaneously respond, “but I'm safe here.”

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Culture exists as metabolic activity.

And metabolism does not change by mandate.

It changes by rhythm.

By affective repetition.

By small and constant interruptions.

Where pain can be recognized without having to be silenced or justified.

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Therefore, cycles of unlearning are not linear or purely cognitive. They are made up of returns, repetitions, resistances, and ruptures. They involve slowing down the impulse to find immediate meaning. Furthermore, they require the repeated practice of staying with what does not fit, breathing in discomfort, and listening to the margins.

Of noticing that many of the questions we bring (“so what about practice?”, “how do you do it?”) are symptoms of the culture we want to unlearn.

The metamorphosis towards more relational forms of consciousness, embodied, ecological, and collective, is therefore not a simple change of ideas or learning a new method. It is a reorganization of our internal systems. An invitation to cultivate a somatic ecology that allows us to live complexity without reacting automatically, to listen without defending ourselves, and to get involved without centering ourselves. A journey where we cease to be “good people” in the civilizational mold, to become more porous, contextual, mature, and responsible presences, direct participants in life.

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Torpor is not a moral error but a survival strategy.

It is the body protecting itself from feeling too much in a world that does not want to listen.

But it is also the place where we begin to numb responsibility, risk, and relationships.

The unlearning journey is therefore also a journey through torpor and apathy.

It is learning to feel without being swallowed up.

To react without reproducing.

To listen without needing to control.

And perhaps the most radical gesture we have left is

to sustain discomfort without shortening it.

To honor the body that tries to remember something that has been forgotten.

Choosing to step out of the role of kindness, not to fall into indifference,

but to return to a living, embodied, and contextual ethic.

Because being a “good person” will never be enough.

But becoming an engaged body reminds us that we are ecology, and that, yes, we can transform worlds.

References

• Article: The Torpor of Being a Good Person.

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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.