The opposite is not the solution

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

People tend to shape their identity around their worst relationships. The experiences that cause them the most intense suffering tend to provoke the biggest change. But that change isn't always positive because it comes from something negative.

It's such a overwhelmingly bad experience that it causes you to change who you are i'm sure we've all seen this manifest in ways of children and their parents it tends to be if a child had a controlling or very strict parents they end up being too soft on their kids because they don't want to impose the same suffering that they experienced as a child onto their child but as opposed to forming healthy relationships and healthy boundaries with their kids,

instead they go too far the other way and they end up having no boundaries. They aren't able to say no to their kids so they grow up to be entitled and lack respect. And this is all because of a human tendency to try to get as far away from what we don't like as possible. It's that fight or flight mechanic that convinces you that those are the only two options, but they aren't. We are able to resolve conflict amicably without needing to run away or resort to violence.

However, when you are carrying trauma from maybe a time where you weren't able to speak up for yourself or you were physically or mentally overpowered, when conflict arises we tend to end up feeling like we're right back at that place where we're going to be attacked or hurt or abused for saying how we feel or trying to resolve conflict we feel like there is that extreme level of reaction that is going to happen to us and you can feel this in

your body you can feel the tension and the tightness you can feel the adrenaline and the anxiety and this could be something as simple as a conversation or a dispute or some argument with a stranger and it sends you right back to that place where you feel overwhelmed with fear. And fear has this...

Outstanding ability to blind us to everything else you know when we have fear all we see is all the ways it could go wrong we don't even consider the ways that it could go right because we are so focused on what could go wrong that it feels almost like a guarantee or at the very best if there's even a chance that it could go wrong it's better to avoid the situation altogether and this is how it becomes problematic because left untreated and unhealed it manifests in kind

of two ways one way will be incredibly reactive and very angry someone who blames the world and feels like they're a victim of life so it makes them incredibly reactive and explosive you know they're very quick to anger and it's because they're so used to having their boundaries crossed that any time they view anyone encroaching on their territory there is a very fierce and explosive reaction to this and it's because they're so frightened that someone is going to hurt them

or someone is going to take something away from them that they care about and in the other way it makes people completely avoid conflict altogether where they don't mind their boundaries being crossed as long as another person won't be upset with them or angry with them they'll let people tread all over them they'll let people walk all over them just to avoid the fight because to. Put up resistance or to get involved in. That conflict means that there is a potential that.

It could go wrong that they could get physically or verbally assaulted and even though these might seem like opposites they still stem from the same trauma. The same wound it's just that one person learned to find safety in fighting for it and another person learned to find safety in hiding away, in keeping themselves sheltered and protected.

But both of these are still shadow forms. The person who is explosive and angry will end up driving everyone away, whereas the person who avoids conflict ends up being taken advantage of and becoming bitter and resentful.

When doing shadow work, you will probably quite clearly see that you are trying to adopt a mode of living that is the opposite of that which you don't like that you're trying to be as far away from the person that you don't like as possible and that means that there's probably a lot of parts of yourself that you haven't accepted especially when it's something like a parent and a child relationship where you will do everything to avoid becoming that parent but.

You either end up being so far away from that parent that you are too far the other way, or even more common, you end up exactly the same eventually. And this is because the opposite isn't always better. The opposite of one extreme is just another extreme.

What we want to achieve, how we want to be, is balanced, to achieve harmony.

And then when it comes to conflict, we're not feeling like the only way is to either get into a fistfight or to run away we actually feel like we can have a conversation to reach some level of understanding and to put the effort in to get people to understand our point of view and to fight for ourselves you know to stand up for ourselves not in a way that is violent or offensive just in a way that is unwavering and rooted and certain a little dark psychology trick is

to look at somebody who presents a really big aspect about themselves and whatever the opposite of that is going to be their biggest insecurity if somebody is so over the top confident and you know really loud and obnoxious then really what they feel like inside is that nobody hears them and that nobody cares if somebody is a bully and they keep inflicting their will upon somebody else the chances are that they had somebody doing exactly the same to them

they're not strong because they're aggressive and try to fight everyone they're actually just insecure and they feel weak and the only way that they can prove to themselves that they're not is by hurting other people by making them feel small and this all stems from the same principle that we chase the opposite. That we try to become either a mirror of exactly what we don't want to be or the opposite, which isn't any better.

This is why they say that people's greatest strengths are also their biggest weaknesses. So if I ask you to sit there and think about somebody, think about a person that you really wouldn't want to be like, somebody that you know and know well enough that you don't want to be anything like them. Now, if you were to describe what the opposite of that is, the chances are that's going to be you.

You're going to be somewhere there because we try and strive to be the opposite of what we don't want to be. As we begin to analyze our behavior, our patterns, and understand ourselves better, we can use this method to begin to unpick the reactions to trauma.

We don't want to be acting or behaving in a way that is a reaction to something traumatic we want to act in a way that aligns with our beliefs and who we want to be and most likely this exists outside of the extremes we don't want to be too soft and we don't want to be too hard we don't want to be too passive and we don't want to be too aggressive we want to find that balance and that harmony we want to be able to act and express ourselves freely without fear without

anxiety we want to know that we are at harmony with ourselves and we are not just simply acting out of pain or avoiding more pain and what happens is we become so.

Afraid of being anything like what we don't want to be who we don't want to be the person that we have blacklisted in our mind the ways that we feel that we stuff down all of the stuff that exists in the shadow aspects of ourselves we are so afraid to even get close to that that we shut whole parts of ourselves off we don't want to feel like we're anything like the worst parts of ourselves and we all have shadow aspects we all have parts of ourselves that we repress and most

people will go to extraordinary lengths to never have to confront those aspects of themselves to never even go near a scenario where that aspect of themselves might emerge and conflict is one of those things where people feel like it's either all or nothing that it's going to be a complete avoidance of the situation or an absolute all-out war whereas most day-to-day conflict can be resolved with effective communication. It doesn't require the war and it doesn't require running away.

When you are not used to conflict, when you haven't been able to express yourself effectively and had healthy communication, it feels like everything is either going to be all or nothing and that there are going to be severe consequences for just saying how you feel. And for those people that are stuck in one of the extremes.

Either avoiding complete confrontation they have to be willing to overstep to get it wrong to make a mistake to fly off the handle to get angry because they have been so repressed they have been so far the other way that in order to achieve that balance you know they have to figure out that whole other part of themselves but if you keep suppressing it if you keep locking it down and not getting in touch with it not being at harmony with yourself you will never truly be

free you will never be able to figure out who you are because you are locking away aspects of yourself that you are judging not worthy that you are judging as not good and instead of having all the information at your disposal to look at the big picture and see yes this is me in my entirety and make an accurate assessment an accurate judgment of that and test that character instead you are looking at limited information that you choose that pleases you that pleases your ego that you

can say yes i'm a nice person i'm a good person and completely ignore those aspects of yourself where maybe you don't have the best intentions maybe your desires aren't true and pure because we all have that and if you think that you don't, you're exactly who I'm talking about. And the chances are that you've only gotten to this stage in your life where you believe that by limiting yourself so much that you've never truly had to prove yourself.

You've never tested your character and you've never gone through the process of dealing with lots of confrontation. You've avoided it or somebody else has dealt with it for you. Or maybe you've just had a very sheltered life because even morality, our sense of right and wrong soon goes out the window when environmental conditions change if you were in abject poverty or a war broke out.

Your idea of what was right or wrong would be tested and the chances are you would fail because it's easy to say that you're a good person, you're a nice person when the environment supports that.

But if you're in an environment of poverty and famine and you have to steal just in order to eat because there's no food, the chances are your morality would go completely out the window and you would do what you needed to do to survive. And if you think that you could get out of it by saying, well, I just wouldn't survive because I'm a good person and I wouldn't do what it took. Well, what if it was your family?

What if it was your kids or your loved ones that you needed to do that in order to provide for them? World War II is a great example where, in hindsight, everyone can say, you know, why did so many people do nothing in Germany? When the Gestapo was there and all these Jews were being exterminated. People did nothing and turned a blind eye. And people like to believe that that wouldn't be them, but the chances are it would be.

If everything was going on right now, you would be the complicit person. As much as we would all like to believe that we wouldn't, that we would do it differently. Until you are in that environment, until you are in that situation, you can't judge other people.

You can't say that you wouldn't do that because you don't know. And most people never get into these situations, so their character is never truly tested.

They never have to find out the hard way about how far their shadow extends about what they are capable of about what they would do if they had to and if you're feeling uncomfortable just hearing about this or thinking about this that's perfect because this is the work to understand those aspects that you cut off from yourself that you prevent yourself from even thinking about the aspects that you are so ashamed of in yourself that you stuff deep down and pretend don't exist once you begin

to make peace with those parts of yourself once you begin to harmonize with all aspects of yourself and love all aspects of yourself you are then in a position of power you are not being forced one way or another you are aware of the entire spectrum of information you are aware of the entirety of yourself so then you can make an informed decision about who you want to be and how you want to show up in this world otherwise you're stuck you're simply

hiding from your shadows or you're reacting to them thank you for listening.