Our shadow selves make bad decisions 1
24th Jun 2009
Hello lovely people
Have you ever been in a position where you made a decision because you felt at the time that you had to, even though your mind was woolly and the world was unreal? I am sure you lived to not only regret that decision, but also to ask yourself “What had gotten into me when I decided that?”
And it is possible that at the time you were recently traumatised, for example being widowed, walking away from a very destructive relationship, being forced to leave a job, and so on.
Such experiences often uproot our entire existence, and turn our world upside down. While we are grasping at anything that may look like the old reality that we knew before, the world keeps turning and changing. We hold on for dear life, wishing the world would just for a moment stop turning so that we can get our footing back again.
However, the world keeps turning, and we have to make decisions about various things, from what to wear today to whether I should sell my house and move to the other side of the country.
Why is it that these decisions often turn out to be the worst we can imagine? It is probably because the decision is made by the shadow self that has taken control of the situation.
What is a shadow self? It is a far less mature self that we adopted earlier in our lives to deal with a situation that we could not cope with at the time. For example we refused to take responsibility for our actions and found somebody to blame, and at the time it worked. Remember when you were sixteen years old and stayed out too late on a date and had to face your father? Were you to blame? Of course not. It was either the boyfriend that did not want to leave on time, or the car that ran out of petrol.
Or we find that we have such strong emotions that we cannot deal with them. As a result we either stop functioning from the head down and refuse to have any emotions, or we do everything possible to distract the attention from ourselves and anything that is remotely personal. Remember when your adored parent suddenly died? You were frightened, scared, angry about being abandoned, lonely. You decided that nobody would see what a mess you are inside, and the emotional shutters went down.
Or we become doormats and accept the blame for everything, even when our logical minds say that we are not to blame. Remember when you first discovered that somebody you love is addicted to drugs or alcohol? Remember the argument where you were told “You drive me to it!” and you felt confused, hurt and wronged?
Later on we learned that all these shadow selves are temporary solutions and we discovered that in the long run it is far better to accept responsibility where appropriate. We learnt to deal with our emotions and get more perspective on situations. We develop ranges of responses and we get to choose the most appropriate response for a situation.
To be continued.
Please leave a comment if you feel inspired.
Love and Light
Elsabe
