Cleaning the Flaws by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD, Dip CH
Dec 2013
I’ve been thinking
about the necessary work therapists and healers in general have to do on
themselves in order that projections and assumptions are avoided while working
with others. It dawned on me that the work is a bit like house cleaning and
then the pun struck me, it’s cleaning the flaws and not being careless about
it. It’s thorough work that is required.
This kind of work means increasing our awareness
of not only our sense of ourselves
(our believes, hopes, dreams, vulnerabilities) but what we project onto others:
what things we admire in others, and what we use to condemn in others, and also
those things that inadvertently jump out of our mouths. When we engage in judging others, we most often
do it as if we were not part of a relationship with that person and, as such,
we project onto them very detached, very disowned shadows of ourselves.
The Shadow, as Jung
called it, has both negative and positive qualities (two faces) and thus is
found in those qualities that scream at us when another person displays it or
idolize it when someone else personifies it. When we idolize someone we are sometimes just projecting a
disowned part of ourselves that we have set aside out of a false sense of modesty. I, for instance, get quite defensive
when people comment on my achievements and yet promote, somewhat
idealistically, the almost glamorous achievements of others.
Two things happen
simultaneously for me when my achievements are commented upon: I forget what
I’m supposed to know and I feel ashamed. The air around me in that moment is
thick with stories. It’s noticing things like that that Shadow work comes to
its own, and not just for curiosity’s sake, but as a matter of necessity,
particularly for those who work closely with other people.
The Shadow has other
characteristics as well. As in a dream I heard recently, it lies in a
metaphorical box in which something or other is leaking its contents. The box
doesn’t even need to be opened for the contents to leak out. It’s like a rotten
piece of fruit that, instead of drying up, is dribbling out the stuff that
refuses to be ignored. The leaking Shadow comes out in displacement behaviour
(like smoking, drinking, compulsive sexual encounters, excessive eating, or
playing endless video games, for instance) that is contrary to our own ideas
about health, morality and safety. It’s what we do when we don’t want to do
something else. When you repeat
that behaviour seemingly involuntarily, it’s a sign that your Shadow is running
the show.
So it’s necessary to
know what is going on in the Shadow world; to bring conscious awareness to it
and give it a voice. Sometimes this Shadow work is helped by seeing another
therapist, of whatever modality, to increase our awareness of our own processes
so that we can be not only more present to our own purposes and needs but to
achieve what is called “phenomenological bracketing” when working with
others. We need an acute sensitivity
to ourselves and an acute sensitivity to the person we’re working with, and the
wisdom to know the difference between us.
Healers are at risk
all the time of being only acutely aware of their patients and of not knowing
where they begin and end and this is why personal work is critical. A healer,
cannot afford to have the boundaries blurred too much. It is this reason, or at
least part of it, that educational bodies are so strict in their requirements
for practitioners. Knowing the stuff of therapy, medicine, acupuncture, herbs,
or whatever, is just part of it. Knowing which belongs to me and which belongs
to you is hugely necessary. The awareness of self as an instrument of healing
and the awareness of self as an independent being protects us and allows us to
continue doing therapeutic work for many years, without burn-out. Thus cleaning
the flaws as an ordinary housekeeping job is really necessary, and like
cleaning the floors in our homes, this work is something that is never done
once and for all. You have to do it regularly, otherwise the muck just
accumulates.
