I hope this finds you well and thriving. There is always so much I want to share with you but so little time to actually sit down and send you my thoughts on all the Shadowy figures that show up in our daily news. But since we have been bombarded this week with the redemption tour of the former reverend Ted Haggard, I thought I would remind us all of how easy it is to fall from the top of the mountain and land on the icy hard ground below. And as Ted Haggard, two years into his fall from grace, goes from Oprah to Larry King, apologizing and asking for forgiveness while grappling publicly with his dark side, we simultaneously witness the defiant denial of now former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich. Both men were driven to make a difference and serve the greater whole. But at the end of the day, they will not be remembered for all the good that they did but instead for the destruction that followed. Both men fell prey to the same hidden forces that drive any of us to commit unbelievable acts of self-sabotage and self-destruction. Both were trapped in the grip of their shadows.
We should all understand that our shadows are always lurking, and either we will deal with them or they will deal with us.
We've all heard the stories; they show up on the evening news, on the front page of newspapers, and as headlines in the weekly tabloids: the Olympic sports hero who falls from grace after being accused of injecting steroids; the TV evangelist who gets arrested for soliciting prostitutes; the schoolteacher who carries on an affair with one of her students; or the baseball star who gambles on his own games. These are the public demonstrations of good people who have gone astray, and they have become our national obsession.
While it's easy to point our fingers and gawk at these people, we must remember that they were once considered good, not common criminals, psychopaths, or sociopaths whose histories might predict their unscrupulous behavior. They are people like you and me, people who started out with big dreams for their future. But despite their best intentions, these so-called good people did some very bad things, most often without even understanding why.
The underbelly of the human psyche, what is often referred to as our dark side, is the origin of every act of self-sabotage. Every aspect of ourselves that we've denied, every thought and feeling that we've deemed unacceptable and wrong, eventually makes itself known in our lives. The impulses that we hid away 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years ago come up one day and destroy everything that is important to us.
Your self-destruction might not be big enough to hit the evening news. It may be something as small as picking a fight with your husband right before you are about to go out on a long-overdue date, or criticizing your child in front of her friends after spending months trying to build her trust. It might be procrastinating on updating your resume and missing a huge opportunity, or spending a night in front of the refrigerator after dieting for three months. Maybe it manifests itself as oversleeping and missing your best friend's bridal shower or calling your lover by the wrong name. Maybe it's making a smart-ass comment to yourself while thinking someone had already hung up the phone when actually they had not.
But all of these acts of self-destruction and self-sabotage, whether big or small, are warnings. They are reminders that when we reject, deny and suppress our dark urges and impulses, they will build up and erupt, destroying our lives. But if instead we acknowledge, accept and embrace our dark side, we finally cease to be our own worst enemy.
excerpt from Why Good People Bad Things:How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy
So we must remember that all public figures are here trying to support each of us in the evolution of our souls. They are here to mirror our own flaws, greatness and imperfections as well as our good and bad behaviors. Today, we can bless the likes of Ted Haggard and Rod Blagojevich as we allow them to serve once again by reminding all of us that if we don't deal with our unconscious emotional pain and denied impulses, they will deal with us.
With love and blessings,
Debbie Ford
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