When it comes to personal growth, owning your dark side is a powerful practice. Owning darkness means you’re willing to explore and accept that the world “out there” is a reflection of the world “in here.” Hatred, judgement, contempt, disgust and rejection can’t work as strategies for creating a better life, more peace, more success, or more well-being in your relationships or in the world. Rigidly rejecting, hating and judging others indicates there’s something within you that needs you to risk greater honesty.
When we chronically judge, it’s actually our own darkness projected out onto the world. There’s some aspect of ourselves awaiting integration. We’re not facing something–usually a hard truth about who we are. It’s much easier to project our self-judgement onto another person or group of people than to see it for what it is. This is why stoking judgment is an irresponsible choice when it comes to creating change in our relationships. It keeps us in the dark about our own darkness.
Dissolving Separation
When you acknowledge and admit to moments of hatred, jealousy, ignorance, shame and inadequacy, or failure, judgment, prejudice, selfishness, arrogance, or a sense of entitlement, meanness, self-importance, and superficiality–whatever it is that you find intolerable when you look out through your eyes at others in the world–you’re actually dissolving something that separates you from the world you see. Darkness is no longer “out there.”
You can stop and notice it, wonder about it, question it and challenge it. You can become a little humbler as you see it and feel it. You can become a little more authentic, a little more vulnerable about the pain that exists in the human mind and heart, about your own human experience. This can change the way you relate to yourself and others. You don’t have to be better, superior, or untouchable to protect yourself from what’s simply your own darkness.
Acceptance Allows You To Change
There are big payoffs to owning your dark side. You suffer less, because being you doesn’t hurt as much. There are fewer parts of you that your unconscious has to funnel energy into hiding, burying, or disguising. You have the grace within you to tolerate and maybe even accept what you view as the “unlovable” parts of yourself. They’re here. Denying what’s here never works, as anyone who has ever stepped onto a slippery patch of ice with slick-bottomed shoes knows well. Your own acceptance is part of what allows you to change.
Photos from Unsplash.
Originally published on The Good Men Project.
