Wholeness

I was a little bit of a wild child when I was a teenager. My high school friends who are reading this will probably nod their heads and smile. In college I mellowed out a bit. Leaving the dysfunctional environment of my home life and starting out fresh in a new place was heavenly for me. But, my early twenties were still pretty – shall we say – eventful. As a fifty year-old now looking back I am amazed at all that I managed to survive.

Then, as often happens, the pendulum swung completely in the opposite direction. I got involved with fundamentalist Christianity. I didn’t just dabble in it either. I was really in to it. In fact, I was in to it for 20 years! It’s a very typical reaction for people who come from dysfunctional families with chaotic emotions to seek comfort and safety in a structured system that tells them how to think and behave. (That's not to say that's the case with everyone who is attracted to fundamentalism, though.) I really liked it there for awhile but as my forties rolled in along with the typical mid-life angst, I did some major soul-searching and realized I wasn’t living authentically. (Note: to my wonderful evangelical friends who I love so much – I don’t think that it’s not good for everyone. As you know, there are things about it that I don’t think are healthy but it seems to be ok for some people. For various reasons it just wasn’t resonating with me. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. This was just my own personal experience.)

One of my favorite quotes is by the famous psychologist Carl Jung. He said, “I’d rather be whole than good.” It’s possible to strive to be good at the expense of being whole. Ultimately, you can become dishonest and repress parts of yourself that need to be owned. Two of the best books I’ve ever read were “The Dark Side of the Light Chasers” and “Why Good People Do Bad Things” by Debbie Ford. (She has recently co-authored a new book called “The Shadow” which I’m sure will be similar.) Debbie brilliantly elaborates on Carl Jung’s theory of the shadow which refers to those parts of ourselves that we’d rather not portray or that we’d rather not admit to. But, as Debbie says, what we resist persists and when we suppress our dark side in an attempt to show the world only the bright side of our persona, we go dangerously out of balance. Ironically, by repressing the dark side of ourselves we are only inviting it to manifest itself in unhealthy ways.

In my experience with conservative Christianity I really noticed how this played out. It seemed incongruous that people so focused on morality were so outrageously immoral according to their own standards. In my twenty years among the flock, every church I was a member of had major scandals of some sort and it seemed that the more legalistically religious the church, the greater the scandals. I witnessed three pastors extramarital affairs, one pastor’s prostitution scandal, one pastor’s kidnapping/battery/drug arrest, the same pastor’s strip club visits being broadcast on the local news, two pastors embezzling money from the church offering, one music minister’s male prostitution arrest, and one Christian school principal’s and two Sunday School teacher’s pedophilia. (Those were just the church leaders; I won’t go in to the regular lay people’s issues!) I could write a book about my experiences and what all I think was going on there psychologically but one of the main reasons to which I attribute all of that craziness was an imbalance of portraying goodness at the expense of seeking wholeness. Putting on the good Christian front and not owning the unacceptable aspects of our humanity requires a lot of energy. We can exhaust ourselves when we try not to be something. Have you ever tried to hold a beach ball under water? What about three beach balls at one time? It’s difficult and similarly the more aspects of ourselves that we are repressing the more likely they are to eventually rise up, shooting out of the water and manifest as something that we really don’t want. Ironically, it is in denying or shaming our dark side that makes it activate. It’s also why we project it on to other people. (See my post about projection.) Of course I’m not suggesting that we embrace the dark side and live like hell. I’m saying that there is a balance that we should seek in order to live our lives in wholeness. This is a very illuminating theory to study and I can’t do it justice in the amount of time and space that I have here. If you find it intriguing, I highly recommend Debbie Ford’s books. She goes in to great detail about what we can do to achieve wholeness.

It all comes down to the fact that knowing what I know now, if given the choice, I would rather be whole than good. Paradoxically, it’s in our wholeness that our goodness actually has a chance to shine.