The Invisible Grasp of the Collective
- Natalia Blagoeva
- Apr 26
- 5 min read
Dedicated to the "unexplainable" repetitive patterns that run our lives despite our better knowing, and the kinds of things we can't Google our way out of.
Published first on my Substack blog: nataliablagoeva.substack.com
You probably know the story of Romeo and Juliet. As the story goes, their families, the Capulets and the Montagues, had been locked in a bitter feud for generations. The original cause was probably long forgotten, but the suffering, the deaths, the accumulated grief kept deepening the fight.
Similarly, we often don’t realize how entangled we are in our own choices and beliefs, caught in silent loyalties to our own "Capulets and Montagues." In most cases, it’s not about killing each other literally, but just as bad, we take the full living out of our lives. Without noticing, we fear betraying our tribe. We stay loyal to family members who deserved a better fate, or to those who were excluded for reasons we hardly understand. We unconsciously compensate for old injustices, carrying emotions, burdens and destinies that were never ours to bear.
Does any of this sound familiar?
I don’t know about you, but I have been peeling away layer after layer of entanglements — personal trauma, family stories, societal conditioning, collective dramas. Doing so has helped me feel more at ease with life, more fulfilled, and free to step onto my own path instead of being weakened and diviated from my own path.
How did these things show up in my life?
Well, the list is long, but let’s try to summarize how all that showed up in my life:
Unexplainable emotions and uncontrollable outbursts
Under-usage of my intelligence, doing stupidities despite knowing better
Subconscious guilt and shame, keeping me in doubt of myself
Stuckness in old narratives, even when I knew better
Addictions to work, food, movies, shopping, changemaking
Excessive loyalty that drained life out of me instead of affirming it
You probably noticed: I used words like unexplainable, uncontrollable, subconscious, contradicting better knowing, addictive.
So, where is all this coming from?
Why do we act unintentionally, despite our better knowing?
Let’s try to unpack it.
To do so, I’ll draw on Bert Hellinger’s way of understanding conscience, and on my own experiences with Family and Systemic Constellations. According to Hellinger, there are three types of conscience, each creating a distinct spiritual field.
1. Personal Conscience
The voice inside that whispers: “this is good” or “this is bad” for me personally.
It is very narrow.
It belongs to the self.
It guides us within the bounds of our personal moral compass and interests.
2. Collective Conscience
The voice of the family, the tribe, the larger human systems we identify with
This field is vast and complex.
It serves the interests of the families we come from and the groups we choose- our cultures, communities, organizations, and affiliations.
Its purpose?
To hold these groups together.
That happens usually at the price of excluding those who do not belong or fit.
It does not care for fairness or truth.
It does not distinguish innocence from guilt.
It only cares about belonging, balance, and the sacred order of arrival.
When our personal truth diverges from the group's norms, we feel the sharp sting of bad conscience. A good conscience keeps us aligned with the tribe.
A bad conscience warns us: "If you do this, you may be cast out."
This is why we cling to outdated beliefs even when they suffocate us.
Why we defend the indefensible even when it makes no sense anymore.
Not because it is meaningful, but because it preserves a sense of safety and belonging.
3. Spiritual Conscience
The field where all belong. The conscience of the soul.
It is the largest, most encompassing field holding everything: the light and the shadow, the victim and the perpetrator, the hero and the forgotten.
Here, there is no exclusion.
No camps.
Only movement towards love in the service of life.
When we align with this deeper current, we feel at ease.
A quiet strength.
A profound knowing.
A sense of being led and not pulled like puppets.
We act without fear.
We step forward with ease.
We feel profound clarity.
We love without condition.
And when we go against this deeper field?
We feel stuck, restless, disconnected from life itself.
We get angry, anxious, depressed, even sick.
The Choice
Most of us live split between personal and collective conscience, caught in subconscious patterns and inherited narratives running our lives, living stories that belong to someone else. Stuck. Small. Weak. Unfree.
Such unseen loyalties run deep.
They shape our choices, our fears, our limits.
Our first step is to see them, to see ‘what is.’
No matter how many books we read or advice we gather, nothing truly changes until we see ‘what is’ and we address the roots. This was by the way the reason I made a career transition from Management Consultant, Leadership Coach and Organizational Culture Change Consultant to the work I do today. Standard advice, and in general other people’s advice, is useless if the subconscious patterns related to the personal and collective conscience remain untouched. That leads to incredible waste of resources- it’s like putting make-up and expecting it to cover the traces of an unhealthy lifestyle. It may do it for a little but then it shows up the very next day again.
We can’t Google our way out of these entanglements.
We can’t think our way through them.
We should not also waste resources on “make-up.”
It’s up to us to choose differently.
It’s about tapping into intuition, and connecting to something bigger than us.
Only then can we untangle the invisible threads pulling us like puppets.
Only then we can feel free, empowered, alive.
Feel free to get in touch and ask me more about that. But even before making any moves, there is something else important to understand.
When we live inside "good conscience," we prioritize ourselves and our groups over the larger whole. We subconsciously preserve patterns that secure our belonging, even at great personal and collective cost.
And that feels good.
We feel safe, we feel included.
But we also know today what the costs of that are.
And this is one of the factors keeping the “wars” like those of "the Capulets and the Montagues," and the polarizations. Today, they are further fueled by the acceleration of world events and the algorithms of social media but their root is in our sunconscious need to live in “good conscience.” Maybe in the past that was working better because we were living much more separated. However, today it only fuels more polarizations and more wars.
So, take this as an invitation not to be stuck in “good conscience” at any cost. However, it’s not an invitation into the "bad conscience" that comes from betraying our tribes and the groups we identify with. That path, the way of the so-called "black sheep", works for very few, if at all.
It’s an invitation to a better way.
It’s about loving our tribes and the groups we identify with so much that we choose to break the spell of subconscious automatic and repetitive behavior that governs them. It’s about engaging with our wisdom, intuition, creativity, and agency, it’s about fully embodying our humanness and our sacredness- The Human Advantage©.
Natalia Blagoeva: As The Human Advantage Guide©, I offer true seekers a path to deeper clarity, intuitive insight, and personal agency — freeing them from unconscious repeating patterns and inherited narratives, and awakening their unique gifts — the Human Advantage© no machine or AI can ever replicate.
