The Secret of the Shadow (9 page)

Our need to know, our need to control, our need to be right, and our need to be
somebody
are what keep us trapped inside our stories. It’s a natural response to try to fix something that doesn’t work, and if we can’t fix it, our next impulse is to get rid of it. But no matter what we do, we cannot fix or get rid of our stories. If we did succeed in getting rid of our stories, we would never find out who we are at the deepest level. If we win the game of fixing our stories, we lose the bigger game of knowing ourselves, because we might choose to stay in our stories, convincing ourselves that ours is not really a story but rather who we are. If we do this, we will miss our opportunity to contribute our unique piece to the grand puzzle of life. It’s like winning a fight but losing the war. What we 77

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w think we will receive by fixing our stories pales in comparison to what we will win when we step outside our stories into the fullness of who we truly are.

Many of us are afraid to let go of our stories even when they no longer serve us, for fear that we won’t know ourselves without them. “Who would I be without my story?” we ask. “I’m scared I won’t know myself.” I say hooray that you won’t know yourself! It is so exciting not to know yourself. The self you know is a limited part—a tiny speck—of who you really are. It is like a single pane in a huge kaleidoscope filled with thousands of colors. You have been committed to thinking of yourself as one pane of crystal-red glass, when in actuality you are a thousand jubilant colors, all intertwined and dancing together to create magical images. Every time you turn the kaleidoscope in a different way, a whole new world opens up to you. By shifting your focus, suddenly you can see things you never saw before. The perspective you hold about yourself is nothing more than a limited view of your true nature.

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w h y y o u h o l d o n t o y o u r s t o r y H e a l i n g A c t i o n S t e p s 1. Create a quiet environment free from distractions. Take out your journal and free-write your response to the following questions:

Who would I be without my story?

What am I afraid I will lose if I give up my story?

2. Make a list of all the things you’ve done in an attempt to fix or get rid of your story.

3. Make a list of all the ways resistance shows up in your life.

What behaviors, emotions, and beliefs do you hold that prevent you from accepting what is?

4. Make a list of all the ways you use hope to avoid dealing with reality. If there was no hope of a miracle happening, what changes would you make in your life today?

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Contemplation

=

“It’s safe for me

to let go of my story.”

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= Chapter 5 <

Reclaiming Your Power

If I could make a difference in just one human issue, it would be to relieve everyone of the unbearable suffering of being a victim. The problem with this desire, of course, is that I don’t have the power to relieve anyone of anything, including being a victim.

Only you can relieve yourself. Everyone I’ve ever met has some story about how they have been victimized. Most of us blame our shortcomings on our parents, while others blame our teachers, our ex-husbands or wives, our perpetrators, our religious leaders, our friends, or our grandparents. Many of us feel we’ve been abused in our jobs, taken advantage of by our families, abandoned by God, or victimized by life in general.

The story of victimization tells us that somewhere along the road we have been wronged and that the crimes perpetrated against us are the cause of our pain. This is a story that will limit us 81

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w and strip us of our personal power for as long as we believe it. Most of us have gathered strong evidence to validate our perception that we are victims of life. And this is certainly one way for us to look at life. If we view our lives from the perspective that we are not the co-creators of our realities, we
have
been wronged. But if we change our perspective, we find a bigger, more powerful reality that tells us
we
are the co-creators of our own experience. Viewing our lives from this new perspective, we can embrace everything that has happened to us as exactly what we needed in order to blos-som into our full potential and move forward in our lives.

Victim consciousness is frightening, because when we are in it we don’t always know we are there. Victim consciousness is such an integral part of our stories that we can’t even see how deeply it affects our lives. Even if we don’t feel like victims in the outer world, many of us have become victims of our own self-abuse.

Instead of projecting our blame onto others, we turn it around and project it onto ourselves. Some of us think it makes us better people if we beat ourselves up rather than lay blame on those around us.

If we prefer to blame ourselves, we probably have feelings of righteousness about those who prefer to blame others. But either way we are the victims: Either we are the victims of someone else or we are the victims of ourselves. Either way we are left powerless, and when we feel that way we are driven deeper into our stories. What a choice! Either someone else is beating us up or we are beating ourselves up. Either way we’re left wounded. Either way we lose.

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r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r T h e C o s t o f B l a m e

As long as we are getting something out of our stories, we can never step outside of them. Without even realizing it, most of us get a huge payoff from making others wrong. There is an inner satisfaction that comes from pointing our fingers and assigning blame. Many of us will go to our graves blaming others for the condition of our lives. We will do anything to avoid taking responsibility for our part in our dramas. But making others wrong and holding on to the pain of our past means committing ourselves to a lifetime of limitation and misery. And as long as we are blaming others for our circumstances we have no freedom, because our resentment keeps us bound to the very people—and the very circumstances—we dislike. As long as we carry that seed of resentment in our hearts we will have to create some kind of pain, drama, or discontent in our lives in order to keep our blame alive.

Most of us have a strong internal commitment to saying, “Look what you did to me.” No matter how much we scramble in the outer world to make our lives great, this internal commitment to making others wrong will ultimately prevail. It will drive our behavior and draw forth the experiences to prove ourselves right: that we have been wronged, and that somehow that wrong has damaged our ability to manifest the results we desire. As long as we are committed to being the victims of someone else, we will have to find some way to sabotage ourselves in order to justify our resentment.

The only way out of this trap is to take responsibility. At the deepest level many of us avoid taking total and complete responsibility 83

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w for the events of our lives. We do this because in taking responsibility we often feel like we are letting someone off the hook who has harmed us. But in truth, taking responsibility is the only way we can let ourselves off the hook. If a person victimizes us and we wind up becoming the greatest human being who ever lived, we will naturally give up making that person wrong and will no longer need or desire to rub the crime in that person’s face. In fact, we will see how the skills we’ve developed and the pain we’ve endured have been a necessary part of our process.

I met Jerri, an attractive woman in her mid fifties, at a friend’s house. As we talked, I learned that Jerri is a highly successful financial consultant. When I asked her what person or event had contributed most to her success, Jerri looked me straight in the eye and said, “My alcoholic mother.” Intrigued by her answer, I questioned her further. “What did your alcoholic mother teach you about financial management?” I asked. Jerri told me that after her father left the family when she was a teenager, her mother became very irresponsible with money, frequently spending all the family’s monthly income on a few wild nights on the town. In order to make sure that she and her two younger brothers had school supplies, clothes to wear, and food to eat, Jerri intercepted her mother’s bimonthly disability checks and used the money to buy necessities for the family. “It sounds like you’ve had a knack for financial planning your whole life,” I said to Jerri. “Not at all,” she replied. “When I was younger, all I wanted to do was find a man to support me so I could stay home and raise a family. I wanted nothing to do with managing our finances. Then, when my ex-husband and I divorced, I was forced to make a living on my own.

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r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r

“Faced with the challenge of starting a new career so late in my life, I looked to see what skills or abilities I had that would be valuable to others. It was then that I realized I had a knack for managing money and that it was because of my financially unstable childhood that I had acquired those skills. I decided to go back to school to get my CPA certification, and suddenly I realized that my mother had actually taught me a lot. Something shifted inside me when I had that realization. I was able to let go of the anger I had carried toward her, and no longer blamed her for being financially irresponsible.

“When I finally let go of blaming my mother, I could see very clearly the direction my life was supposed to take. From that point on it was clear that I no longer needed to suffer around my finances and could contribute my gifts to others while reaping the benefits of my success.”

F o r g i v i n g Y o u r P a r e n t s Taking responsibility is a process that often comes in layers. I have known people who came to the difficult realization that even after twelve years of therapy and countless transformational seminars they were still blaming their parents for their lot in life. Not wanting to feel as though they had wasted all that time and money, they adopted a spiritual approach that told them they had to take responsibility for their reality. Instead of exploring their deep-seated resentment toward their parents, they tried to make their stories better by saying things like “My parents did the best they could with the awareness they had. They were carrying their own 85

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w heavy load. It’s not fair to blame them.” Though these statements might be true, it’s important for people in this situation to really take the time to heal the issues from their past by finding the blessings in these events and not just making up new stories about them. Taking responsibility in the spiritual world has become a new form of self-abuse; it leaves us still locked into the victimization of our stories. It’s another thing we use to beat ourselves up, to make ourselves wrong and disempower ourselves. This is just another, subtler form of victimization. It turns our outward fury into inward seething.

Taking true responsibility is a process, and it is the only way out of the victim story. It means acknowledging that we are co-creators of the dramas we have lived. Taking responsibility requires us to extract wisdom from our life experiences and find the gifts they hold for us, as Jerri did. It means learning the sometimes painful lessons that each experience has to teach us. Responsibility is our ultimate destination, but if we are harboring deep-seated resentments toward others, we must search them out and deal with them. Otherwise they will continue to poison our psyches, sabotage our self-worth, and suck the life out of our dreams.

There are many layers of healing when it comes to our parents.

We can feel free at one time, and then something happens and we uncover another level of pain. But if we are not thriving in our lives, it means we are still carrying a little bit of “Look what you did to me” regarding our parents. Resentment is very deep. It can take a lifetime to peel off. But if we don’t acknowledge that we have it, we’ll never make the progress we desire. If we are continually blocked or stuck and can’t find satisfaction in our lives, it 86

r e c l a i m i n g y o u r p o w e r means we are still carrying resentment. We might want to consider that in actuality we are withholding ourselves from greatness so we can justify our blame. Once we have completely forgiven our parents for their flaws and shortcomings, the best gift we can give them is to lead extraordinary lives, to shine as brightly as possible.

But if we still have some resentment toward our parents or caregivers, we will unconsciously get back at them by being miserable.

Ever since she was a young girl, Lori had a dream of becoming an actress. Her teachers recognized her gift for self-expression and drama and encouraged her to pursue a career on stage. Lori’s mother, however, was less than supportive. A proud and proper woman, Lori’s mother had wanted her to go to a good college and find a respectable and responsible career, as her older brothers had done. After some thought, Lori ignored what she considered to be her mother’s rigid opinions, and chose not to go to college. But she always resented her mother deeply for not encouraging her to follow her passion.

A year later, when Lori was nineteen, she became pregnant out of wedlock. It was 1965, she was living in a conservative Midwest town, and Lori thought the best thing she could do was get married. Because of her proper upbringing, it was important to Lori to feel like a dignified woman having a baby rather than feeling the shame of being a single mother raising a child alone. So Lori chose to marry someone she didn’t love, knowing that in all likelihood she would end up raising her child by herself. It turned out that Lori was right. Just months after her son Joshua was born, Lori’s husband moved out. Then, when Joshua was six months old, Lori’s mother sent her a newspaper clipping announcing an 87

T h e S e c r e t o f t h e S h a d o w open casting call for a new play that was coming to town. The play called for a leading lady in her early twenties, and her mother suggested that she should try out for the role. Lori was startled by her mother’s sudden encouragement of her acting career, and began resenting all the times her mother had discouraged her from chasing her dream and put her down for having the desire to act.