A pattern emerges

“If I didn’t exercise a great  degree of the optimistic bright spark me, I think  I would be a depressed mess today.”

Carl Jung defined the Shadow Self as “that which we think we are not.”

Usually I see myself as an optimistic half glass full person, and I ignore the negative and focus on the positive. Most of the time this habit has me seeing myself as a happy and positive person.

When however I am asked questions about the negative in my life, I usually seem to be much more negaitive than I thought.

Accent the positive and eliminate the negative has been my motto, but maybe I have just been selective in what I will allow to the surface, thus allowing the negative to have a great hold over me. Perhaps I am guilty of hiding, suppressing, digressing. Perhaps this as a child seemed like the right and healthy thing to do.

So  I am actually, a happy optimistic clownish person who finds within himself, a rather largish, depressed and pessamistic part. So do my scores keep suggesting.

I am doing a long term study that measures my ratio of daily positivity to negativity and so far everything stated above has been plotted and verified.

There is a pattern that I am starting to see,  a sort of blind spot being slowly slowly surfacing, it’s this…I think I am not capable of flourishing in important ways, and I seem to find daily proof, and since this is a constant and doesn’t change, I have at a very early age focused on the good stuff instead.

This has made me split. A happy optimistic confident clown that has this dark fearful shadow made up of pessimism and learned helplessness in areas that would make me think of myself as very poor.

 If I didn’t exercise a great  degree of the optimistic bright spark me, I think  I would be a depressed mess today.

So what to do. So far it’s been to tune into my optimism. Clearly that’s not been enough for healing of my shadow. Perhaps my loving kindness meditative  practice which turns me into a kind nurturing person,  a sot of father/ parent figure, helps me hold and comfort little hurt me.

The other thing I was doing was to let the pessimism be active while holding onto some kind of nurture, like these thoughts and feelings raging while in the shower, letting the water drip down the back of my hair, and feeling that tingle. Maybe the kria would work, or even the 3 finger triggers to produce a pleasurable feeling during some pessimistic interlude. Maybe this would help heal the shadow.

I used to just let the negativity go and just be aware of it, and it went on for ages until it was spent. Perhaps that in itself was damaging. Today is the day for a new kind of approach as outlined above. We’ll see!

Paul