Free Chapter: Good Boy, Bay Boy
Below is an excerpt from my book Good Boy, Bad Boy, How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy and Live an Unapologetic Life of Joy, Success and Love
You can order it here: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Boy-Bad-Unapologetic-Success-ebook/dp/B0DL8H6HVC
INTRODUCTION
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Some 8,000 years ago, mirrors made from polished obsidian were used in Turkey and Egypt to reflect a person’s appearance. By the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, mirrors were also used for dispersing additional light, as well as for creating a greater sense of spaciousness. Today, the mirror has become an essential tool for self-monitoring, hanging over the sink in virtually every bathroom.
So, when you look in the mirror, who do you see?
Do you see someone who has persevered through challenges and learned lessons that have made them stronger and more well-rounded as a human being? Do you see someone who is proud of their uniqueness and of what they contribute to the world? Do you see a physical body that is almost miraculous for how it functions? Is the person staring back at you worthy of praise, joy, success, and love?
Do you see a good person?
Or do you see the toll that a series of mistakes and failures has taken? A person who is not as good as their friends and peers? Someone who is flawed and imperfect and worthy of harsh judgement? Do your shoulders sag with regret, shame, or guilt? Do you feel the person staring back at you needs to work harder and achieve more to be worthy of praise, joy, success, and love?
Do you see a bad person?
Maybe you see both.
At age fourteen, when I looked into the mirror, I saw only a bad person. No matter how much I accomplished or who I pleased, my life was pervaded by an unshakeable, underlying feeling of badness.
This feeling of badness grew to consume me. It pushed me to make choices based on what I thought others wanted me to do, or what I thought was good, or what I thought I should do, regardless of how I felt inside. But none of that resulted in the love and acceptance that I truly sought. Doing what I thought was the “right” thing just led to deeper feelings of unworthiness. No matter what I did, I was never good enough.
Perhaps you’ve felt the same? For so long, I thought this affliction was exclusively mine, which only made the feelings worse; later I learned I was not alone. According to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, “Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
Of course, I didn’t know it when I was a teenager, but that moment, in front of that mirror I met my shadow. The shadow self is a term Jung coined to describe the aspects of our personality we don’t like and therefore reject; it’s our “badness.” It is the counterpoint to what he called the persona or conscious ego.
The shadow is the side of our personality that resides in the metaphorical darkness. We hide it and repress it and feel laden with guilt for harboring this shadow because, in part, it contains the emotions and impulses we’ve learned to consider negative: lust, greed, power, anger, envy, and more. It’s the part of ourselves we would rather not acknowledge or allow to be seen. But the more we repress our shadow self, the more powerful and malevolent it becomes. As a teenager, whizzing through life, I unconsciously kept pushing more and more of myself into the shadow.
“What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job?”
~ Lao Tzu
“If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it,” Jung said. “Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.” Meaning, if we are aware that our sense of inferiority is limiting us, we can change our behavior.
The cues we receive about what is good and bad are all around us. Society, media, religion, teachers, and our parents relentlessly voice the message: some behaviors are good, others are bad; some emotions are good, others are bad. And no one wants to be around a bad person. But when the external messages we receive conflict with how we feel, inner turmoil can result. And within this turmoil lives anxiety, shame, guilt, judgement, and feelings of unworthiness. Such inner conflict limits what we believe is possible and holds us back from a fulfilling life.
This dichotomy between good and bad—our perception of being good or being bad—is what we’ll explore in this book because, contrary to what we have been taught, these two concepts are not polar opposites. Nor are they mutually exclusive. In fact, only by embracing both the good and bad within ourselves, in others, and in the world can we free ourselves from the limiting beliefs that deny us joy, success, and love. That holistic integration of our shadow self into our consciousness signifies true maturity where, ultimately, we can come to understand that are we neither good nor bad, we just are.
When I was young, I took up long-distance running. I became obsessed with keeping a daily log to track my progress. This log eventually morphed into a journal where I spilled deeper thoughts, fears, and questions onto the pages. Long before I could have a meaningful dialogue with my inner self, I was curious about this inner self, but in a biased way—like a child tattling on a sibling, unaware of their own role in creating the displeasing situation. I wanted to understand what was going on inside so I could make sense of myself and the world, but I bumbled along for quite some time before I became more aware of what was happening inside me, and things finally started to click.
Through the years, I’d periodically head to the garage, dust off the box labeled Joel’s Stuff, and flip through those old journals. Worry and angst were common themes for the younger me, but the biggest throughline was my longing to understand why I felt bad about so many things, especially given how good I appeared to have it. No answers came right away, but I kept asking.
According to the American Psychological Association, dichotomous thinking can be defined as “the tendency to think in terms of polar opposites—that is, in terms of the best and worst—without accepting the possibilities that lie between these two extremes.” My younger self, not knowing any better, constantly classified things as right or wrong, good or bad and couldn’t see past the dichotomy to a compassionate self-view devoid of judgement.
We humans are complex, nuanced creatures who live in the messy middle of life, a hard and confusing place where it is difficult to reconcile the goodness of our hearts with the chaos of our minds.
No question about it, finding inner peace and happiness as a human is a constant struggle.
Part of the reason I feel compelled to write this book now is because a healthy appreciation and understanding of that nuanced struggle between good and bad is in short supply these days, just as it was for me when I was a kid. In some ways, nuance is the fine thread that sews our differences together. Nuance is vital for compassion, tolerance, acceptance, and progress to manifest in this complex and rapidly changing world, a world in which fear is wielded as a weapon to keep us in a pattern of dependence on institutions and to suppress our potential for growth, self-acceptance, and self-awareness.
While fear manifests in almost every facet of life, I personally became aware of it in 2016.
I was watching the TV news in my tiny apartment outside New York City, when a headline stopped me short: The Year of Fear. It appeared on the banner at the bottom of the screen. A warning signal shot from my gut to my brain and was amplified by the talking heads as they discussed the acts of terrorism that were being perpetrated around the world.
This stark presentation of fear in the form of violence and distrust conflicted with how I saw the world. Whatever my inner struggles were, I believed the world to be a welcoming and safe place, a good place, with good people. In the past, I had explored many so-called dangerous places, from Honduras to Lebanon to Cambodia, and had left each with memories of people’s kindness, generosity, and incredible hospitality. Even at home in Canada, I had pushed the boundaries of safety by sticking out my thumb and hitchhiking from one coast to the other. Kindness and generosity had accompanied me once again.
The fear narrative spewing from the TV was jarring—there was no balance or nuance in the reporting. In Canada they talked about murderous hitchhikers abroad. They portrayed terrorist events as if every person in the rogue country was guilty of the same crime. Over time, the villainization of people, places, and groups has been magnified. The media now proclaims, “We will tell you what is bad and who is bad!” This isn’t new, of course. External influencing and shaping of perceptions have happened throughout history, but after I first noticed the manipulation for what it was, the floodgates opened wide.
Was it just a narrative of current events that shaped our perspectives of the world around us, or was it also shaping how we felt about ourselves?
I wondered why it seemed like society, as reflected in the media and institutions, was so hellbent on casting a dark cloud over our lives, shifting us towards judgement and fear. I wanted to uncover why this was happening and how we could overcome it. But not just for me; I had an instinctual need to show my young daughters that the true spirit of the world was not reflected by the media or even by society at large. My girls would need to get out there and see things for themselves. They would have to gather their own evidence and form their own opinions instead of adopting those the media, politicians, corporations, and, yes, even their parents pushed on them.
If they could see discrepancies between what was being said about people and events in the wider world versus their own lived experiences, maybe they could also recognize discrepancies and nuance within themselves, as well as understand that external influences were shaping much of what they learned to accept as true.
So, in 2018 my wife and I sold our Jeep, packed our bags, and took our two girls (then aged two and six) on a journey around the globe. I wanted them to see firsthand what I had experienced in my travels: we live in a world of grey where good and bad are held in a delicate balance.
As we roamed from the Middle East to South America and then around the edges of the Arctic Circle, we witnessed a lot of hardship and suffering. But right alongside that we saw courage, generosity, love, divergent opinions based on shared values, and the unshakable human spirit. I wanted my girls to see and acknowledge the existence of both, and to be thankful for the beauty of the shared human experience.
When we touched down at home after the last leg of our trip, I was even more troubled by what I was seeing, despite arriving in the same place we’d left.
Reverse culture shock can happen when you return to a familiar place that feels uncomfortably different from when you left, different because you’ve adapted to foreign places and now see home from a different perspective. Sometimes home actually is different. Re-adjusting can be plagued with confusion, loneliness, and disconnection.
We’d been catapulted back into a culture of mass hysteria, divisiveness, and negativity. Fear and the badness of the “other” felt like a juggernaut that had ripped through the fabric of society, and in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The perception of a dangerous world fueled a collective anxiety, and this anxiety was further exacerbated by social media and mass media.
The indomitable human spirit that once underpinned our thriving Western society was, it seemed to me, disappearing. What happened to the civil disagreements that built our democracies? Differing viewpoints were fracturing into niche offerings; algorithms enabled viewers to exclusively enjoy opinions that reinforced their own. This curation of information, with different ideologies pushed into diametrical opposition, tickled our primal brains, and we were once again angry tribes at war with each other.
My family had arrived home to a feast of the not-so-tasty Crab Mentality, or the Theory Crabs, which is most simply defined as “If I can’t have it, neither can you.” Schadenfreude, defined as the pleasure derived from the misery or misfortune of others, was on full display. I watched this tempest of fear and anger grow, and it became clear that it was fed, at least in part, by how we each felt about ourselves. People were starring as the victim in stories about themselves and their tribe.
Are we about to permanently lose sight of the goodness in the world and in others because of an inability to recognize it in ourselves? Why is society’s shadow so prominent? Is this an opportunity to integrate our shadow selves individually, which will subsequently impact the broader community? In my experience, the worse I feel inside—unworthy, undeserving, not good enough, like I don’t belong—the more addictive the media machine becomes. This is because it feeds my need to fixate on the external bad in the world so that I can avoid confronting the bad I feel inside. This creates a self-sustaining cycle of negativity.
I knew I had to do my best to break this cycle for me and for my family. I had spent a good chunk of my life struggling to feel “good” and be “good” while feeling like a perpetual failure, always a bad boy inside. I certainly did not want to unconsciously pass this mentality on to my children; instead, I wanted my family to benefit from the learning I was endeavoring to acquire. We can help heal our next of kin with what my wife calls, healing the line. Some even believe the radius of our individual healing extends beyond our inner circle of spouse and children, reaching back to our parents and grandparents, and laterally to our friends and extended family. We can do this by healing ourselves.
Taking personal accountability sounded like the only strategy to me, and so I committed to deepening my own healing as a parent, son, husband, and friend. When we heal our own traumas, we change how we act, respond, and speak, thereby breaking the pattern of inflicting our wounds on our children or perpetuating the wounds of our parents. The traumas we address need not be horrific, life-altering events.
Each trauma with a little t is like a snowflake. Each one may be innocuous on its own, but they can accumulate over the years and bury us. At ski resorts they trigger mini avalanches throughout the season to reduce the risk of a giant, destructive one building up. We can do the same thing; instead of letting emotions collect and build, we can process them as they come up.
Life experiences, including traumatic ones, shape our mindset, our perspective, as well as the stories we tell ourselves about good and bad. We’re wired to denote and categorize our interpretations of events. Our brains do not register absolute truths, only our interpretations, and so faulty interpretations can rob us of feeling good, feeling loved, and feeling accepted.
I am not a moral authority on good and bad. What I present here is open to interpretation, and I approach this topic primarily from shadow work, which entails investigating and integrating the unconscious aspects of oneself, such as repressed emotions, fears, and desires as well as from intentional and unintentional societal conditioning. It’s a chance to look within to find your truth. It is a reminder of your inherent goodness, but also an acknowledgement that skewed interpretations of information and events throughout your life can limit your perception of what’s possible, affecting how you live and present yourself in the world.
The first part of this book focuses on the roots of the problem, showing how we got here. The second part of the book offers the solutions I’ve discovered through my experiences.
From now on, when you look in the mirror, my hope is that you can hold the ideas of both good and bad simultaneously and see yourself as the multi-dimensional, nuanced, mature human being you are. And, most importantly, to let your inherent goodness shine through.