Why have I created this?

Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, speaks of the "Shadow" as everything in us that is unconscious, repressed, undeveloped and denied. There is very positive undeveloped potential in the Shadow that we don’t know about simply because what is unconscious is not accessible to us.

The Shadow, like other archetypes, is an aspect of our psychic make-up that is common to everyone. Each of us has a Shadow, and getting to know it is essential to developing self-awareness. We attract people or circumstances into our lives that reflect our Shadow. Whenever we are terribly irritated by the behavior of someone or by a particular situation that presses our entire emotional switch panel, we can be sure that we are experiencing our own Shadow. The reaction is normally of disgust, hatred or contempt for certain characteristics or qualities we see in others. We deny these characteristics and we project them onto others because we don’t want to be associated with them, but they are present in us and operate outside of our awareness.

Jung believed that for any quality with which we identify ourselves there's an opposite one relegated to our unconscious (Law of Opposites). So, unconsciously, we attract people who are mirrors of underdeveloped parts of us that we have denied but that we need for our growth.

According to Jung, the psyche seeks the totality of our being, seeks wholeness and through synchronistic events - which seem coincidental, but are not - we attract people and circumstances not by chance, but for us to reveal those parts of ourselves we have denied, in order to integrate them. This is the essential message of Jung's Law of Synchronicity. And if we are not able to pick up the signals that our subconscious sends us, the same types of people or events will keep showing up in our lives until we get the message.

When I worked in the corporate world, I once had an experience with a boss that made my life miserable. I felt humiliated and frustrated, and at that time, my level of consciousness did not allow me to overcome the attitude of the victim. I felt I was completely helpless and that no one wanted to help me. Even the company abandoned me, even though I had received from many departments recognition for the excellent work I was doing. I expected someone to see the injustice my boss was inflicting on me and punish him for it. I chose (albeit unconsciously) to live this experience in this way.

The disappointment in seeing my autonomy and my professional expertise challenged is a pattern that I had experienced often in my life. With the knowledge I have today, I can see that for many years I filtered the behaviors of everyone in positions of authority through the lens of my need for expression and autonomy, the need not to be constantly controlled by my superiors. The fear of not satisfying this need was so strong that if I was asked for too many check-point meetings or to undergo several permission levels - very common requirements in the business world - my automatic reaction was to attack, as if I was facing an enemy.

What options did I have? I could have acquired a greater understanding of the responsibility my boss was carrying and of his needs: he was probably driven by the need to prove that he could run the company effectively in a situation where he may have felt insecure, which led him to exacerbate his control over the employees.

I could have had a mature, less emotionally charged conversation with him, where we could have figured out together how I could help him do a good job and how he could get the best results from me. I later got the proof that this response would have given a different result. At the time, I decided to accept an offer for a leadership position in another country and to hire, with my boss’ approval, a new manager who took my place. I knew the candidate I had chosen, because we had worked together in another company in the past.

I was very anxious about putting him in a difficult situation because I expected that what had happened between me and my boss would be repeated with him. I thought he might never forgive me. To my surprise, after a few months I discovered that the new manager was getting along very well with my former boss and enjoying a freedom that had not been granted to me.

What happened? A sudden sunstroke? The truth is that my successor was not afraid that his need of expression and autonomy would be denied, and this allowed him not to make restrictive interpretations of the boss’s requests. In exchange the boss, probably feeling that his needs were satisfied, was open to granting him a lot of freedom.

Imagine that Jung was right about the law of synchronicity and that our desire for growth attracts people and situations in order to offer us the possibility of transforming limited parts of ourselves. If we can identify a recurring pattern in the annoying incidents of our lives or in the people who "push our buttons", this could offer some revelations about ourselves and about the needs that control our lives. Did you ever say, "Why does this always happen to me?"

One of the key questions to ask when we want to raise our self-awareness is "Why have I created this?" The idea that "I" created the conditions for the annoying situation puts me at the center of the reflection around what I can do. I have the power to change things. I am not a victim of others. This question forces us to see how we can learn, make changes and choose how to respond to others and to life events.

When I ask this question during the workshops I facilitate, I often receive, initially, defensive reactions. "I did not do anything, I created nothing." "It is the other person who was ..." (you can put here whatever adjective you like: rude, aggressive, manipulative, illogical, confusing, dishonest, and so on). Perhaps you're thinking the same at this moment. "How can I say I created a situation that just annoys or threatens me? Of course it must be another person who, by his conduct, makes me angry".

Attributing the responsibility of making us feel good to factors outside ourselves means we become victims. When we think in this way we are powerless, because somebody else must change to allow us to return to a situation of balance and serenity.

The moment we play the victim we lose the opportunity to do something about it, to find a solution.

In that moment we are in the hands of others. Being the victim is the easiest solution, that allows us to sink into self-pity, but it is certainly the one that makes us powerless.

Asking the question "Why have I created this?", as provocative as it may seem, means considering which part of us wants to learn and grow from the experience. This question requires us to take responsibility and to choose, instead of activating automatic reactions. We can choose to manage our emotions instead of being at their mercy. We can choose our response to the emotional hassles of life. We can choose to take the point of view that the discomfort, the pain, the events that cause us to lose our balance are a launching pad for learning, and discover that every upset can become a lever to transform a part of us that has been limited by the boundaries of our needs.

We can choose to live creatively, knowing that whatever happens in our lives we have created as an opportunity. From Jung’s point of view, we attract what we need to learn and grow. 

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Excerpt from the book “Personal Mastery. The Path to Transformative Leadership” by Giovanna D’Alessio, Foreword by Sir John Whitmore.