It’s the fall and most of us in America have been conditioned to think of fall as football season. Both college and professional. And how many times have you heard or seen the idea of “a house divided“. This is a tongue and cheek way of talking about living in the same household and favoring different teams that are arch rivals. It’s fun and we see lots of memes about it. It can get dicey, but for the most part it is all fun.
But what if the division is inside yourself? What if there are parts of yourself that you desire to disavow? Do you have these aspects of yourself that you want to reject? Here is my question for you… How do you know that these are parts of yourself that should be rejected? Where did you learn that these aspects of yourself are not worthy? Could you unlearn this?
More than likely where you learned not to love this aspect of yourself was in the rules of social conditioning. Social conditioning is a powerful pull. It teaches us what we should and should not be. And I don’t mean to give this a totally bad rap. There are values to social conditioning, including that this keeps us on the straight and narrow, away from making bad choices that could be harmful to ourselves or others. This has value in some places in our life. However, it’s a runaway train. Social conditioning starts to make opinions about subtleties and aspects of our self that we cannot change. When this starts to happen, we start to be a self, divided.
We take the war from the outside and turn it inside. Our internal conflict with parts of ourselves that we do not like about us, creates a discomfort that we seek to numb or deny. One way or the other we are pushing against our own self. And when we are in conflict with our self, we start to be in conflict with our outer world as well.
Warning this is a part where you will hear some therapist speak that likely will irritate you. It’s the section of the blog where I say things that you know to be true, but hate when I’m right.
If you are noticing more irritability in your life or that you’re trying to numb away with over eating, drinking, overworking, or whatever your favorite numbing agent is, then it is likely that there is division within yourself. What you’re noticing on the outside is an effort to make this division either go away or to escape from this discomfort. Yet, the division really isn’t on the outside, it’s on the inside. What about this thing you’re pushing away from, this irritation, this aspect in your outer world that you do not like, has a parallel on the inside of yourself? Think about it.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are in line at the grocery store and someone asks you if they can go ahead of you because they only have a few items and you have a full cart. Normally this is something you would offer to another person, however you hadn’t noticed this individual standing behind you. Now you’re irritated that they have the audacity to ask. Yet, you let them go ahead of you anyway. Now you’re irritated with this person. Irritated by their arrogance in asking, or at least that’s what you tell yourself.
You know what I’m going to say next. You aren’t irritated with this person at all. You are irritated with yourself. Maybe you’re irritated that you allow people to walk all over you. Maybe you’re irritated that this person has the capacity to ask for what they need, and you do not. Maybe you’re just irritated that you didn’t notice that they were there and weren’t able to offer before you were asked. Whatever you’re irritated with, you can bet that it’s a part of yourself that you don’t like. It’s an aspect of you that you’ve noticed in the past and you try to push away. It may even be an aspect of yourself that you don’t think is changeable. I assure you that is not the case. Anything inside of you is changeable. But maybe it doesn’t need changing. And that is where true irritation comes to play.
Why wouldn’t we change some thing about ourselves that’s irritating? I’ll tell you why…because it’s not a part of us that needs changing. It’s a part of us that needs acceptance. It’s a part of us that needs loving. It’s a part of us. And therefore it should not be something that we reject but some thing that we pull close. But what if these aspects of our self are in opposition to other aspects of our self? How do we accept those? This is the paradox. That two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time, even when they are opposite things about ourselves. These can be excepted. These can coexist. And the way we facilitate peace about this is through loving all aspects of our self…the good, the not good, and everything in between.
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