Polarity

Why do individuals, relationships, organizations, and societies keep swinging between extremes—even when we know better?

In this solo episode of Fractals of Change, Mary Schaub explores polarity as a foundational pattern of reality: the dynamic tension between opposites that generates movement, meaning, and emergence. Drawing from physics, Jungian psychology, Taoism, systems theory, and lived experience, this episode reframes polarity not as a problem to solve, but as a law of motion to work with.

From personal shadow work to relationship dynamics, organizational leadership, and the weaponization of polarization in modern media and politics, Mary examines what happens when systems over-identify with one pole and suppress its opposite—and how integration, rather than oscillation, becomes the path to stability and growth.

Summary:

Polarity shows up everywhere: stability and change, order and chaos, control and freedom, innovation and governance, sensitivity and strength. When one pole is over-emphasized, the neglected opposite doesn’t disappear—it returns through symptoms, conflict, projection, or collapse.

This episode traces polarity across domains:

• Physics, where energy, motion, and structure only exist because of opposing forces
• Psychology, where suppressed traits return through shadow and compensation
• Relationships, where unintegrated opposites fuel cycles of pursuit, withdrawal, and rupture
• Organizations, where pendulum swings between centralized and decentralized models repeat endlessly
• Society, where polarity is increasingly weaponized through attention economics and identity-based conflict

Rather than choosing sides, Mary argues for developing the capacity to hold tension long enough for a third, integrative way to emerge—individually and collectively.

Takeaways:

💡Polarity is not conflict. It is the precondition for structure, movement, and emergence.

💡Suppressed opposites do not vanish—they accumulate and return through symptoms, projection, or crisis.

💡Extreme certainty creates brittleness, not strength, in individuals and systems.

💡Growth requires integration, not elimination, of uncomfortable traits and perspectives.

💡Leadership is polarity management: holding stability and change, innovation and governance, care and accountability simultaneously.

💡Modern polarization is often engineered, exploiting our cognitive and moral shortcuts for profit and power.

💡The “third way” emerges only when tension is held, not prematurely resolved.

Compelling Quotes:

🎤 “Polarity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a law of motion.”

🎤“What we refuse to integrate doesn’t disappear—it returns through our behavior, our relationships, or our projections.”

🎤“Stability doesn’t live at the extremes. It lives between them.”

🎤“The work isn’t choosing a side. It’s holding the tension long enough for something new to emerge.”

🎤“Polarity isn’t ideological or psychological. It’s ontological—it’s how reality organizes itself.”

Links:

Polarity and Leadership

✅Polarity as a Leadership Lens & Complexity Frame

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

Transcript

Mary Schaub (00:00)

If opposites attract, why do we have divorce? Why war? Every major religion tells us to love our enemy. Eastern philosophy says maybe the secret is learning to hold opposites together. And yet here we are, despite everything we know, all the technology we've built still ping-ponging between extremes like we can't help ourselves.

Look at what we can do now. We carry the sum of human knowledge in our pockets. We can talk to anyone, anywhere, instantly. We cure diseases our great grandparents died from without question. We can see inside atoms.

into the edge of the observable universe. And still, we're deeply unhappy, self-destructive, divorcing, fighting wars.

We're a species at war with itself. But here's what keeps me up at night. It's not which side is right. It's this. What happens when a system, any system, learns to hold opposites without collapsing? Could this be the solution to so many of our problems?

Polarity is the state of having two opposite ends or characteristics, like positive and negative charges in electricity, north and south poles in a magnet, or opposing ends in a molecule. It signifies a separation that creates distinct opposites, influencing how things interact. Attraction and repulsion in magnets, current flows in circuits, or how molecules dissolve in water.

Polarity is one of the simplest patterns in nature. It's also one of the most misunderstood. Across physics, psychology, society, reality doesn't move in straight lines. It moves through the tension between opposites. Stability and change, order and chaos, light and shadow. These aren't enemies. They're more like dance partners who define each other. When a system leans too far into one pole, whether that's a

person, a relationship, a whole society, the neglected opposite doesn't just disappear, it accumulates.

Carl Jung had a word for what happens next. Compensation. The denied opposite sinks into the unconscious and comes back through symptoms, projections, conflicts, sometimes collapse. In systems theory, the feedback loop destabilizes. In history, the pendulum swings violently back.

You see this pattern everywhere once you know to look for it.

The content changes, physics, psychology, politics, but the form stays the same. And here's the thing, when one poll gets overemphasized, the system doesn't get stronger, it gets brittle.

In physics, polarity isn't a metaphor. It's how things work. Electric charge, positive and negative. Without both, there is no field, no current, no chemistry, no life. Magnetism is north and south. And here's what's wild, cut a magnet in half and you don't isolate one pole, you get two new magnets, each with its own north and south. Polarity reproduces itself, practically, at every scale.

Thermodynamics formalizes this as gradients, hot and cold, order and disorder. Energy flows because of imbalance. When everything reaches equilibrium, motion stops. You need a symmetry for change.

In physics, polarity isn't conflict. It's the precondition for structure and emergence.

Long before we understood any of this scientifically, philosophers were wrestling with it. The Stoics understood that we recognize things through contrast. Health means something because we've known illness. We value wealth because we've experienced poverty. Pleasure exists because we've felt pain. To the Stoics, polarity wasn't a bug.

It was a feature of reality.

In Jungian psychology, when a conscious attitude becomes too one-sided, the psyche builds up its unconscious opposite. And if it gets extreme enough, the whole thing flips.

The philosopher Walter Russell described reality as unfolding from a single unified source into rhythmic opposition, compression and expansion, masculine and feminine, rest and motion. In Russell's cosmology, creation isn't substance. It's balanced interchange between opposites. Lose balance, you get decay. Restore it,

you get regeneration.

Taoism says the same thing, just symbolically. Yin and yang, neither is good or bad. Each contains the seed of the other. When one reaches its extreme, it naturally transforms into its opposite. Change isn't moral, it's structural.

Unity differentiates into multiplicity so it can be known, experienced, reintegrated. Separation isn't failure. It's how unity becomes conscious of itself.

Across systems, polarity is the mechanism by which the absolute becomes

relative. The infinite becomes experienceable. What strikes me is how fractal this is. Polarity isn't something to eliminate. It's a law of motion. This is why extremes so often generate their mirror image. Moral certainty breeds shadow. Control invites rebellion. And enforced unity

produces fragmentation. We can see this today happening in real time. The work isn't choosing one side. It's holding the tension long enough for something new to emerge, a third position that integrates instead of oscillates.

Jung called it individuation. Taoism calls it balance. System science calls it adaptive stability. Polarity isn't a

problem to solve. It's a law of motion. And once you see it, you start to see it everywhere.

I had a friend years ago who would announce her intentions to me like they were New Year's resolutions. She was struggling. Health, money, loneliness. And every few months we'd meet up and she'd say, okay, starting next week, I'm going to start bringing my lunch to work. I'm not going to shop for things that I don't need. I'm going to start to save money. I'm going to start going to the gym. Want to guess how long this lasted?

What seemed clear to me, but wasn't visible to her, was that she didn't want to be an unhealthy person. She wanted to be the opposite. But she struggled to look honestly at the parts of herself that she found shameful. And so she'd make these grand, completely unrealistic declarations. And every time, after a week or two, she'd swing right back to the opposite. And by the way, if you can't tell by my tone of voice,

This friend really pissed me off. I cared for her. I wanted to help her. And this stuck pattern she was in frustrated me to no end. But this is me projecting my disowned frustrations about myself onto her. Because here's the thing, all of us humans do some version of this all the time.

January brings spike gym memberships, therapy apps, meal prep subscriptions. Growth requires expanding yourself to include the parts you're uncomfortable with, maybe even the parts you hate. As long as you disown them, they don't disappear. They go underground, gathering energy until they come back through your behavior, your mood, or, and this is the really insidious part,

your projections onto others.

my friend, who was generally very kind, could be extraordinarily cruel to people she saw as beneath her. Condescending, elitist. She treated people who were struggling with contempt. Just the very same failings that she brought up in me. Look, we're all struggling with the same challenges. These negative feelings we project onto others

That's us. It's our psyche recruiting the outer world to carry what we can't accept in ourselves.

I can't overstate enough that what I'm discussing is a uniquely human experience. I'm no better than my friend, no different. We all do this.

Here's another example. I was a hypersensitive little girl, empathetic to the point where at eight years old, I could walk into a room and immediately feel what everyone around me was feeling. I remember helping out at a homeless shelter once and leaving in tears, just sobbing, unable to contain my grief for people I didn't even know. In the wrong environment, without the tools to understand what was happening, I became a troubled teenager.

I couldn't make sense of all the feelings pouring through me. I couldn't even tell which ones were mine or why I had them. Sometimes it felt unbearable. Normal day-to-day challenges could feel like storms blowing through my mind. And then, around my 30s, something shifted.

I started distancing myself from my emotions. And then I stopped sharing it all, even with close friends. I lost my awareness of the energy in a room. I called this maturity.

I thought it meant I'd healed from painful things in my past. But it wasn't healing. It was exile. I became a workaholic, more focused on my career than relationships. I'd resented the sensitivity I carried as a child. And I was relieved to have lost what felt like an unbearable burden. And with it went my compassion.

It wasn't growth, it was abandonment. Being cold wasn't a worthy goal. neither was walking through life with an exposed nervous system The answer was a third way. Having enough spaciousness to feel deeply while staying steady enough to remain kind. And by the way, just because I figured this out doesn't mean I solved it.

it's something I still work on and practice to this day. I expect I'll do so for the rest of my life.

It's common to have relationships with people who carry complimentary wounds to our own.

You see this dance in pursuer-distancer dynamics. Maybe you've known relationships like this, where one person's always chasing and the other's retreating. Each person's strategy to feel safe becomes the other person's threat. Or double binds. Your partner tells you to be honest, then attacks you when you say something that upsets them. Maybe they encourage independence, and then get hurt when you don't seem to need them.

These conflicting messages are confusing because they're playing out at deeper levels of consciousness. When they go unexplored, they create chronic dysregulation. Resentment corrodes trust and intimacy. If people can't explore what's happening inside themselves and between them, they miss the chance to grow individually and together. Instead, they focus on superficial complaints.

Over time, those grievances pile up. When a couple can't metabolize the tension of opposites, they often solve it through separation. What if the goal isn't agreement? What if the better path was choosing a shared third story that makes room for both nervous systems, both truths?

Polarity is everywhere now in politics, society, even in employer-employee dynamics. Take any issue and look at the two opposing sides. Now ask, why is this framed as an either-or question? Given the complexity of the world, why are we pretending these are or questions instead of and questions? And also, and think really hard about this one,

Who benefits from keeping it this way?

I spent most of my professional life at the intersection of operations and transformation. Operations strives for stability, efficiency, and predictability. Transformation, of course, is all about change. There's always tension between these opposites.

Managing this tension and working through it constructively is where I've spent my career. Take innovation and governance. Innovation is about growth and exploring the unknown. Governance protects organizations from going too far out on a limb by ensuring that investments and innovation are reasonable. It tracks progress and monitors associated risks.

Innovation used to be a buzzword. Now it's an executive mandate. In 2024, 83 % of senior executives ranked it in their top three priorities. But only 3 % of companies were actually innovation ready. When leaders invest, they rarely see ROI. One study found only 21 % met their innovation goals. Here's the truth.

You need people thinking outside of the box, breaking barriers, but you also need people measuring risk so the organization doesn't destroy itself. Innovation and governance aren't enemies. They're a polarity. When organizations treat them as either or, they get the failure modes of both.

Healthy operating models let opposing forces exist constructively and transparently. Good leaders do three things. They genuinely listen to all viewpoints. They review data alongside qualitative feedback. And they look for a third way that honors all logical points.

Leadership is managing polarity. It's finding the third way that can sustain the dramatic pendulum swings that define mediocre management. If you've been at a company long enough, no doubt you've seen the pendulum swings in action through shifts such as moving from a decentralized to a centralized model and back again, or moving from a rigid project management structure to an agile one.

This is classic polarity terrain. Over-emphasize one pole and you get its predictable downside. Then the opposite returns as a crisis, a leadership change, a reorg, and often the pendulum swings right back to where you started. This is why so many transformation efforts under deliver

and why many organizations rerun the same initiatives over and over again.

I want to talk for a moment about weaponizing polarity. That's something that we're seeing a lot of.

If tension is where growth happens, why do we treat it like a bad thing? Well, because polarity can be weaponized. The same dynamics that generate creativity can also be exploited, especially at scale.

There's five ways this can happen. Attention engineering. Systems reward outrage and certainty. Polarity becomes an efficient tool. Hey, pick a side because binary choices are cognitively cheap and emotionally sticky. That polarizing content in your feed, it's there because it works. Two, group polarization. When like-minded people cluster,

Attitudes shift toward extremes. Moderation becomes socially costly. We're wired for belonging, and when choices collapse into two camps, neutrality and independent thinking get harder to sustain. Three, effective polarization. Disagreement hardens into identity-driven dislike.

Opposing views stop feeling like differences of opinion. They feel more like moral contamination. The wrong choice signals you're a bad person, not just someone with a different belief. Four, moral matrix activation. Messaging can selectively activate different moral foundations.

Jonathan Haight's research shows these patterns are stable and correlate with political orientation. Because moral judgment is intuitive and happens before conscious reasoning, messaging that aligns with your dominant moral foundations feels immediately right. This intuitive fit short circuits neutral evaluation. It explains why persuasive appeals, whether they be political or commercial,

work so effectively across ideological divides. And five, propaganda and filters. Power shapes what feels salient. What gets repeated, what gets framed as common sense, gradually becomes accepted as normal. Modern technology, social media, targeted marketing, AI, has amplified all of this dramatically.

Polarity in this light becomes a highly profitable business model. In politics, media, entertainment, attention flows to division, and attention creates leverage over perception, judgment, and behavior.

Polarity is a gift. It's the mechanism for understanding, learning, growth, but it can also create inertia, conflict, and when weaponized, can be a tool of manipulation. If polarity is all of these things, then the question is, how do we develop the capacity to work with polarity rather than against it? I offer three practices which you might find useful.

These aren't techniques to master polarity. They're ways to develop a different relationship with it.

First practice is yourself. It's the most important investment you'll make. We're complex. None of us have had perfect lives. Getting to truly know yourself, especially the shadowy parts you're uncomfortable with, maybe even hate, is critical. Follow the tension. Be curious about your inner conflicts. Maybe even befriend them.

I'm lucky to have wonderful friends. Throughout the year, I have a steady stream of social opportunities, many of which I host. But I'm also an introvert. I need regular time alone to rest and reset. As much as I love being social, it drains my battery. For years, I didn't understand this tension. So I went to extremes, social binges followed by weeks, sometimes months of isolation.

Because I hadn't explored who I really was or understood what I needed, I took cues from my ego. I should go out, otherwise my friends will be hurt. Or I was afraid that if I didn't jump at every opportunity, people would stop inviting me. I felt embarrassed, even ashamed of enjoying time alone. So I repressed it. now I know and accept myself more.

I can check in with myself and make decisions based on what I actually need in the moment. Befriending the tension between these opposites expands my options. It makes me a more interesting, well-rounded person. And most importantly, it makes me more honest and authentic friend to others and to myself.

Second practice is the integration of both and thinking.

Start integrating a third way. This is the both and thinking. Begin with one or two relationships where you experience regular conflict. Start by just observing. Where's the tension? What happens when differences arise between the two of you? Do you both dig into your positions? Are you listening to understand? A healthy and connected conversation should feel like a friendly game of tennis.

When done wrong, it looks more like racquetball. where both people end up litigating against each other. No one's really listening. You're waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can begin your monologue. Or worse, you're listening to find ways to use their perspective against them. Everyone does this. Don't judge yourself or the other person. Stay objectively curious.

Resist the temptation to lecture. Ask questions about their point of view. Validate them. Make sure they know from your body language or tone of voice that you're sincerely interested in understanding them. Then ask even more questions. Share your perspective using non-inflammatory language. Share personal experiences where possible. In the beginning, you might want to stop there, just hearing each other out.

Over time, as you master these skills and build trust, you can start co-constructing third-way options.

I coached a woman in her mid-30s who was arguing constantly with her husband about, among other things, eating out. She loved treating herself at the end of the work week. No cooking, no cleaning. He wanted quiet and comfort after a stressful week and was more conscious of the extra expense. Together, they co-created a third way, eating out on Monday nights at a local family-run place with large portions and Monday night discounts.

She got her night out, he got to decompress on Fridays. The discount offset his money concerns, and they had enough leftovers for Tuesday dinner. Most importantly, they worked together to find a solution which took into consideration both of their concerns. This way of working together doesn't just solve individual conflicts. It builds rapport, trust, and goodwill.

all of which improves the relationship and paves the way for smoother problem solving down the road.

Third practice, support constructive reconciliation in systems.

Encouraging and supporting constructive reconciliation in systems and institutions helps you actively resist manipulation. Take part in public narratives that normalize complexity. Avoid platforms and people who speak in absolutes. Be mindful of language that demonizes the other, especially where dehumanization and moral platitudes show up.

Align with incentives that prioritize accuracy and choose dignity over domination. In families, at work, in your community, encourage frameworks that force constructive discussion and compromise between opposing groups.

Take stock that you're not self-selecting into groups that demand shared thinking or discouraged debate. And avoid exposing yourself to polarized platforms feeding you biased content.

Physics tells us there's no energy without difference, no motion without tension, no structure without opposing forces. Jungian psychology says something strikingly similar. When consciousness becomes too one-sided, the unconscious compensates. The disowned opposite returns through dreams, symptoms, projections. Growth doesn't come from prematurely solving conflict, but from holding it.

resisting repression, rationalization, impulsive action. If you hold this tension long enough, a third way emerges. New symbols, new meaning, new insight that includes both sides. Polarity isn't a problem to eliminate. It might be the engine of reality. And reality doesn't progress by erasing opposites. It progresses by playing them off one another.

At every scale, particles, organisms, minds, cultures, the same pattern repeats. Too much of one pole leads to collapse. Denial of the opposite guarantees its return. Stability lives between extremes, not at either end.

This is why polarity shows up so consistently. These aren't special cases. They're expressions of the same underlying rule. Polarity isn't ideological. It isn't political. It isn't even psychological. It's ontological. Not about what we believe, but about how reality itself organizes, evolves, regenerates across scales. And once you adopt that lens,

The world stops looking chaotic and you begin to see the pattern everywhere.

I'm Mary Schaub, this is Fractals of Change, wishing you curiosity, presence, and flow.