Within each of us lives a dark energy space. It is made of things that are unpleasant for us to face and acknowledge. Over time, it becomes a shadow force that lives within us until we address, acknowledge and deal with the issues that are contained in this inner world of ours.
What sort of things are we talking about? How many of us feel or have felt ugly, fat or dumb, or self-conscious about our braces, wearing glasses, our difficulty with reading or understanding math, or our poor athletic ability? How many of us feel a sense of not being good enough, or have a sense of being the cause of others’ discomfort and suffering?
The forces that begin the creation of this list begin at birth. It depends on how well we experience positive attachment with our mothers, how well our needs are met and how secure we are made to feel about ourselves and our world of people.
Our inner critic
From our very beginnings as children, we try to make sense of our relationships with others and our life experiences. We create storylines that define who we are in relation to ourselves.
Depending on where we are in life, we use our cognitive ability to understand, our level of language development to explain and our emotional development to make sense of what is going on in our lives, in relation to those with whom we interact.
These thoughts become our ‘inner voice,’ which becomes, in time, our ‘inner critic.’ This ‘inner critic’ serves as an ongoing voice that criticizes who we are, what we think, how we feel and what we do. What does your inner critic say about you? Most everyone has an inner universal sense of not being good enough.
Who in their right mind would want to face such a litany of negatives in life? Turning away from such messages and feelings about ourselves only makes good sense. However, what we resist facing about ourselves remains an active force within us. What we resist, persists. This fragmentation causes suffering and pain in our lives.
A big house with many rooms
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., in his recently published book Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness, relates to those aspects of ourselves that are in the shadows of our inner world of emotions. He writes:
It’s as if the mind is a big house with many rooms, and some of them are locked up for fear of what’s inside. As understandable as this is, it leads to problems. We make ourselves numb to keep the doors bolted shut. But the more repressed, the less vitality and passion. The more parts we exile, the less we know ourselves. The more we hide, the more we fear being found out.
Another way of looking at our ‘shadow’ is to see it as a force of negative energy which, if ignored, develops into an autonomous inner force, or personality of its own, that expresses itself regardless of how we may not want it to do so.
In an example of how this manifests itself, Hermann Hesse (in his novel, Demian) wrote: “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
That which resides in the shadows of our unconscious will speaks out in ways that often catch us off guard. The only cure for this dynamic is to acknowledge that which resides within us, as painful as it might be.
An incomplete snapshot of the truth
It is very possible to begin this recognition process by acknowledging that our conclusions about what we hear other people saying about us, or those thoughts that we have concluded about ourselves, are often an incomplete snapshot of the truth.
The little five-year-old girl, for example, whose Mommy and Daddy are constantly bickering and finally decide to divorce, decides that all of this upset is because of her. She concludes that she has caused her Mommy and Daddy’s anger, and they have decided to leave one another because she is a bad little girl.
We can only do the best we can with what we have to work with. As children, we can hardly expect to understand the whys and ways of adult behaviour.
Our storylines are often an incorrect reading of what is going on around us. This little girl’s father, for example, was having an affair with another woman, and that was the cause of her parents’ arguments and eventual divorce.
So often, we believe in untruths about what is going on in our lives. Our thoughts that are the cause of how we feel are often predicated on the mistruths and lies that we tell ourselves. We can only do the best we can with what we have to work with. As children, we can hardly expect to understand the whys and ways of adult behaviour. Our parents are also limited by being able to only do the best they can with what they have to work with.
It is imperative that we overcome our ignorance about what is happening around us and the false premises for our thoughts, which determine how we feel. As for those feelings we have about being ugly or dumb, or not good enough, it is our thoughts that cause our feelings and conclusions about ourselves.
Wearing braces does not mean we are ugly. Having difficulties with reading does not mean we are dumb. Being introverted and not being the outgoing, popular person in a group doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with us or that we are not good enough.
Reinforce successes
I had a difficult time learning my multiplication tables when I was in the fourth grade. My father would drill me and drill me, and I would always have difficulty remembering some of the times tables. My inconsistent performances frustrated my father and me. This difficulty caused me to feel badly about myself.
What I didn’t know about myself was that I was an intuitively oriented child. Instead of approaching life from the perspective of ‘rocks are hard and water’s wet,’ which would make learning the times tables much easier, I approached things from the perspective of looking at the whys and wherefores, the possibilities and potentials of something. My mind didn’t work as a fourth-grader in a way that would facilitate my learning by rote memory tasks.
By the sixth grade I was a master of multiplication, division, and fractions … actually, the best in my sixth-grade class. My development and accomplishment did make me feel much better about myself. It helped ease my sense of dumbness. And Mr. Morales, who was my fourth- and sixth-grade teacher, reinforced my efforts and successes. His support went a long way to erase my doubts about my abilities, and for that, I am profoundly grateful.
It helps to have a caring and supportive person to work with you in this discovery and healing process, as Mr. Morales did for me. Such support is an important way that we can overcome our ignorance about those things that cause us to put our thoughts and feelings into rooms that are locked, because we are afraid to face what is inside of them.
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image 1 Nuno Lopes from Pixabay 2 image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay 3 image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 4 image by Harut Movsisyan from Pixabay
