A while ago, when I wrote to you about healing shame, I made the following passing comment:

“Pride is inverted shame, in the sense that we find qualities we are not ashamed about and make them a horcrux for our self-esteem.”

To some of you, it may be obvious what that meant. To others, it’s gobbledygook.

But horcruxes are highly common, so it’s about time we gave them their own post.

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What Are Horcruxes?

When I say “horcrux”, I’m metaphorically referring to Harry Potter lore. To quote fanwiki:

“A Horcrux was an object in which a Dark wizard or witch had hidden a detached fragment of his or her soul in order to become immortal. As long as the receptacle remained intact, so too did the soul fragment inside it, keeping the maker anchored to the world of the living, even if their body suffered fatal damage. “

So in the pride/shame example:

1) Self-esteem suffers damage (shame)

2) Find something you can take pride in (ivy league degree, list of achievements, Amazing Abs™)

3) Put a horcrux in it. Now you are protected. From experiencing the loss of self-esteem.

(E.g. If someone would reject you, you can point to your Amazing Abs™ and say “their loss, lol“)

…but that’s just for that specific example.

Everyone you know has horcruxes, and they don’t have to be related to shame.

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Horcruxes In Daily Life

Remember: A horcrux is something we put a part of our soul in so that we can’t die.

But the thing is that “the person inside us” dies all the time, without us noticing. Our interactions with life change us, until at some point we are very different.

That’s why, when someone mentions something we did 15 years ago, we say “I was a different person then”.

In my book, I wrote about how most of the parts of us that stay the same are an illusion. They are just things we do, ways we behave.

If you want to, you can get up tomorrow and do something completely different. Of course, I don’t recommend that, per se (unless you’re unhappy with life).

It’s useful to keep behaving in similar patterns and ways that have served you. To wake up and not know who you’ll be that day is liberating, but also disorienting and requires a lot of capacity.

If we truly were to embrace this practice and show up completely different every day, the world would be likely to label us crazy.

Actually, we would probably soon start to think we are going crazy. Because most of us would lose our sense of self.

Horcruxes are the solution to that.

A horcrux stops you from losing yourself. It keeps your present self alive, no matter what happens.

While some people put their horcruxes in external things (beauty, career, etc.), most of us have a subconscious mind wise enough to know that youth fades and careers end. So the more common places to put horcruxes are:

• Lifestyles
• Opinions
• Affiliations
• Political views
• Aesthetics & taste
• Behaviors & traits

For example, if you put your horcrux in being “rock & roll”. All you have to do is keeping living on the wild side. The rest can change. You can have periods where you act kindly or periods when you’re insufferable. But you’ll be able to say “I’m just rock & roll baby” and those fluctuations don’t hurt you.

If you put your horcrux in being a highly rational and logical person, then no matter what happens, as long as you can rationalize it, you’ll be fine.

If you’ve read my previous post, which was about how personalities function as a set of gates for what you allow to be expressed through you, this might ring a bell.

Indeed: A horcrux is in essence, a reinforcement of a gate. A barricade, if you will, that stops this gate from being opened. It keeps your personality intact because the horcrux stops that part of you from changing.

However, this also means that if someone (or something) breaks the barricade, the gate is now forcefully opened without you consciously choosing to. Suddenly a part of your personality feels lost, and its disorienting.

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Why Horcruxes Are Dark Magic

In essence, what horcruxes do for us is create the illusion of coherence.

We feel most grounded in our sense of self when we feel that who we are is coherent. That there’s unity, alignment, and connection between the very parts of us.

It’s quite fascinating that in Harry Potter, the horcrux contains a fragment of the person’s soul.

Because coherence is the opposite of fragmentation. Which hints at something very true:

Every horcrux we make increases fragmentation while also increasing the appearance of coherence.

Perhaps that’s why they are called dark magic. It’s a deal with the devil, an inversion of the powers that be:

You fragment yourself to feel more whole.

Here’s how it works:

• If you put your horcrux in a political leaning (e.g. “left”), you will never lose your sense of self in a political discussion as long as you keep agreeing with that side. However, you will disconnect from all parts of you that do agree when the other side (in this case “right”), makes a good point.
• If you put your horcrux in “always being nice, that’s just who I am”, you will abandon and disregard all parts of you that want to be angry or fierce when it really matters.
• If you put your horcrux in a lifestyle (e.g. “I’m a smoker” or “I’m a health freak”), you will not be able to change it without losing your sense of self.

So horcruxes while keeping us alive, make us less alive. They sever parts of us, to allow us to keep feeling “like ourselves” when we are not.

Why is this?

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Coherence vs. Consistency

People often mistake consistency for coherence.

But the most coherent people I know can fluently shift between perspectives, attitudes and modes of expression without losing their sense of self (in my book, I call this “range, not change”).

This paradoxically makes them seem less coherent to people who can’t do so without losing their sense of coherence.

Here’s why:

Having a coherent sense of self is like having roots, or gravity. It allows you to branch out in many different directions, have greater range of motion.

We can behave in all sorts of ways, we can change opinion, make unusual jokes or dance moves, wear different clothing. But we’ll still feel “me”.

When we lack coherence, all these things would make us feel “off”, they would make us feel “not me”. So we have to protect against that. Our sense of self can only survive through horcruxes.

Horcruxes make us consistent. They freeze a part of us. No matter what changes, we can point at that part and tell ourselves “see, I’m still me, that is so me!”. Which makes us feel coherent even when the other parts are in flux or chaos.

The more truly coherent we become (maintaining a sense of self while how we act, feel and think constantly changes), the less horcruxes we’ll use.

But there’s a social element too:

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Projected Horcruxes

We don’t just make our own identities.

We make identities for other people too, and then we project those identities onto them.

We do this to have an internal model of “who they are” that allows us to predict their behavior.

This creates safety. On one hand, life is infinitely more beautiful when we can gaze at our friends every day and rediscover who they are in that moment, as if we’ve never met them before.

On the other, we want to be able to rely on the fact that they’re not the kind of person that will suddenly kill our cat.

So to some degree, we must start to make an intuitive model of who they are based on our past experiences.

But here’s the kicker:

We create horcruxes for other people, too!

For example, when I quit drinking, it took many people a few years to adjust. Drinking was one of their horcruxes for me. So it was like they “didn’t know me” anymore and this was confusing.

When we tell someone “you’re being incoherent”, it usually means they broke our model of who they are, they broke one of our horcruxes.

(This happened for many people during COVID lockdowns, for example: Our models of each other broke as we watched everyone’s responses and opinions differ from our predictions.)

In extreme cases, it can feel like betrayal. But in reality, we projected a fragmented model onto a “whole” person.

People confuse consistency for coherence because when someone does/says similar things all the time, our model of them feels coherent. Their consistency is our horcrux for the identity we assigned to them.

The better we know them (in terms of intimacy, not time spent together), the less consistency is required. We’ll have witnessed more nuances and fluctuations and need less horcruxes for their behavior to make sense to us.

I think we all intuitively know this. This is why most people “don’t show their crazy side“ right away, unless they explicitly make it their brand.

It allows people to slowly expand their model of them—and as they reveal more and more, that model gets updated without losing the appearance of coherence. Until we’ve met their full weirdness and it still feels like “them”.

Why does this matter?

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Coherence = Safety

Coherence is safety.

The more we feel the people around us have a coherence we can grasp, the easier for us to navigate a situation with them.

The more inner coherence we have, the more slack we can tolerate in our model of others.

Because we feel so safe in our own coherence that we can handle more unpredictability.

What this also means:

The less coherence we have, the more one-dimensional we’ll need others to be, and the more we’ll cling to consistency (even if it’s a fake image) rather than real coherence.

Because our own self-trust will be too low to navigate complex situations.

When we are coherent, people naturally open up to us and show more of themselves because our coherence brings the safety.

When our capacity for coherence is low, we will feel more “stuck” in our own behavior, and people will have a harder time being honest with us about certain things.