Wednesday, March 09, 2005

strategies


I'm working with feelings about something I did as a child. While I could say that I was too young to be responsible, that isn't touching some of the deepest feelings inside me so I am looking for other possible approaches. One of my philosophies of life is that there are always more than two alternatives, so I am trying to think of as many alternatives as I can for how people live with having done something bad. Here's what I have so far:
  • repression--forget that it happened
  • always feel inside "I'm bad"
  • find God's forgiveness
  • throw yourself into working for some related good cause

I'm trying to think of more alternatives. They don't have to be desirable alternatives--I'm not looking for an answer but rather trying to enlarge what I call the possibility space, the range of ideas available to me. More generally, the direction I want to go in is the Jungian idea of embracing the shadow.

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