HeyJaredThe Psychology of Us
The Psychology of Us is an audio archive of psychologically grounded work examining how human beings construct meaning, sustain identity, and orient themselves within emotional and social life.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
The Identity Collapse Cycle: Why Losing a Role Can Feel Like Losing Yourself (opens the original)
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Why does losing a job, a title, or a defining relationship so often feel like losing yourself? This episode walks through the Identity Collapse Cycle , a structural model within RJ Starr's Psychological Architecture framework . It traces how identity can become over-consolidated around a single role until the boundary between self and function dissolves, why the loss of that role produces not just grief but a structural disorientation that propagates across emotion and meaning, and why the syste
The Labor of Being Seen (opens the original)
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Most of us treat impression management as vanity, something shallow people do to look good. RJ Starr's essay, The Psychology of Impression Management , argues it is something else entirely: the ongoing labor of keeping a self coherent and legible in the presence of others. This episode traces why that work drains you even when nothing goes wrong, how self-awareness becomes self-monitoring the moment you are seen, why being alone reduces identity load rather than adding to it, and the difference
Why Self-Awareness Isn't Enough: The Mirror and Map of Self-Knowledge (opens the original)
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Why can you understand your own patterns perfectly and still keep repeating them? In this episode of The Psychology of Us, we explore RJ Starr’s essay “ Psychology as Mirror and Map ” and its argument that self-awareness alone is not the same as self-understanding. Recognizing what you do is one thing. Understanding the psychological structure that keeps producing it is something else entirely. Through the framework of the mirror and the map, the episode examines the difference between seeing ou
The Psychology of What We Talk About (opens the original)
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"Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas." The line is almost always used as a ranking of intelligence, a way of sorting who belongs in the room. This episode takes apart that reading. Drawing on RJ Starr's essay " The Psychology of Attention ," the discussion reframes the quote as a map of attention rather than a verdict on minds. What a person talks about is not a measure of how smart they are; it is a signal of psychological load. When strain is hig
The Architecture of Intactness (opens the original)
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In "The Architecture of Intactness," the discussion works through RJ Starr's essay "What Conditions Allow a Person to Remain Intact?", published through Depthmark Press within his broader framework, Psychological Architecture. The central claim reframes a reflexive habit in contemporary psychology. The usual question is who a person is: clarify the traits, stabilize the narrative, and coherence is assumed to follow. But a person can know exactly who they are and still experience themselves as re
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