Suppression
By Peter Shepherd
It's easy to blame 'devils under the bed' as the cause of all one's difficulties. Something else to blame so one can shed responsibility and be unaccountable. But what happened to being at cause?
A 'suppression' is not normally the result of any such evil entity. It is simply caused by a person who has different intentions than myself, expressed persuasively, so that I now feel suppressed, depressed and stressed.
There other person is not necessarily evilly intentioned toward you, or anything of that nature. They may be well intentioned and often are. They merely have to cross your goals and purposes without malice or forethought and for the best of reasons. As someone once said: "The path to Hell is paved with good intentions and roofed with tears." How right he was.
So what is suppression? Suppression can be defined as being forced out of one's own time and space by another's purposes and goals. One moves out of one's own identity into the time and space of another's goals and purposes in order to handle the situation being presented - instead of saying "Get stuffed" or something more diplomatic and going on with what one was intending to do in the first place. In other words one didn't maintain integrity.
There are two directions in which one might move - toward or away from. Either creates the Catch 22 situation that is suppression. One can align with the other's identity, which their goal or purpose imposes, or one can resist the goal or purpose and become another identity - but not one's true self. But there is another alternative - one could maintain one's integrity, just be oneself. This also means taking responsibility, acting on the basis of a clear sense of one's own identity, goals and purposes.
For example, a proud father wants his son to become an engineer like himself. If this is not what the son intends he either complies and makes a lousy engineer and is subject to suppression throughout his life by having to follow his father's vocation. Or he resists this persuasion and becomes something quite the opposite, such as an artist, but he doesn't do well at it this either because it was set up in opposition to his father, not as something he really wanted to do. So again that person feels continually suppressed by life. His problem is that neither way can he be himself, a Catch 22. Compliance or resistance generates constant emotional charge in the person's life that doesn't resolve. Its a locked situation. He may - and normally does - hide this situation from himself and he may have no real idea who he himself is, what he really wants to be and do in life, what his true goals and purposes are.
Practical
Notice which people in your life make you feel good and which make you feel bad. When you find yourself feeling limited or put down or depressed in somebody's presence, write down who it is and exactly what happened. And when you feel uplifted and in a good mood in somebody's presence, note down who it was and exactly what happened.
Look for specific reasons for your feelings in those situations. What is the difference between the people or situations where you feel good and the ones where you feel bad?
Isolate what is going on. What are your intentions, likes, dislikes, purposes and goals that are being suppressed. They may be being suppressed by yourself now as well, but originally they were aspects of your own identity that were effectively suppressed by another's influence. Or that suppressive influence - perhaps with the "best of intentions" but not your intentions - may be continuing into the present.
Just recognizing the truth of one's current situation will help to free it up. Work out how you can organize your life to minimize the negativity and reclaim your power.
Remember that the situations in your life where you feel at effect or a victim are something you are doing and creating by yourself. It might appear to be other people's fault, however, we are the ultimate cause of our lives.
When I was a child, parents or teachers were "always right," and I had to conform to their rules. They had all the power. So the choices left would be extreme, like running away from home or jumping from a bridge; or being unquestioningly obedient and gradually losing touch with myself; or just being thoroughly depressed. How these experiences can be resolved? The past cannot be undone but I can change my interpretation of it. From a mature, adult point of view I can show my inner child that perhaps another choice remains: to understand that my parents or teachers may have been misguided but were acting in what they thought to be my best interest, so instead of feeling resentment I now have the choice to instead feel a little more understanding and empathy. And then I have the choice to forgive them, a choice that I did not feel I had then, and to learn some valuable life lessons from the experience.
Criticism
By Peter Shepherd
In the first stage of this series we have been looking at the factors that can cause fragmentation of our identity: invalidation (feeling put-down by someone), co-dependence (where we put aside our own feelings), suppression (the opposition to one's goals and purposes by another), and in today's lesson we look more at how criticism can affect us, and how best to handle it.
A person tends to defend himself and protest, when confronted by another's criticism or complaint. Nevertheless he may afterward start to introspect - "Is it really true, what was said?" - causing him to fixate his attention inwardly on himself. Compulsive introspection is caused by a false criticism being accepted, which causes the person to look inwardly and worry about the mystery caused by this error. In a normal person this can cause diminished activity and unhappiness or illness. With a neurotic person it can push him over the edge into psychosis.
This may begin early in childhood with the 'overcautious-parent' syndrome - "What are you doing?", "Careful, careful, careful!" when you're climbing up a ladder, and such things that interfere with the natural flow of simple actions, so the person arrives at a point in life where he is inhibited from handling the world around him. Such a person has to think about everything he does, rather that just do it.
Another's criticism or complaint is rarely specific and accurate enough to be helpful. Often it is a generality or exaggeration, i.e. more than the truth ("You're always moaning" whereas I only moan sometimes); or it may be not quite true ("You don't give clear instructions" whereas I have normally been giving clear instructions but I didn't in this particular person's case).
If the criticism is completely off the mark it is less likely to cause confusion and introspection. The trouble is, criticism often has an element of truth in it, and if the criticism is rejected off-hand, the truth of things remains uninspected and unhandled.
Even if the criticism is accurate, having behaved in a certain way for some time, often all his life, a person asserts the rightness of it - he IS the behavior! - and becomes resistive to inspecting and handling the condition objectively. Further criticism just makes this worse. But unless a person is able to evaluate his own behavior objectively, which includes learning from other peoples' point of view, he will not be able to break free from the shackles of a limited personal identity and realize his actual unbounded Higher Self.
Practical
For each person that you know, consider if there is something which that person has suggested is wrong with your behavior or attitude?
For each criticism that you find, consider whether it's an over-generalization or exaggeration, and whether the criticism was made from a viewpoint of intolerance or negative thinking. Was the criticism based on a false assumption? Is the criticism partly true or is it true of just a specific instance? Have you ever criticized someone of the same thing?