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The Gift of the Dark Side
An interview with Debbie Ford
by Raz Ingrasci, President (Edited
by Shawn McAndrew)
Debbie Ford (HQP 1990) is a New York Times best-selling author,
creator of The Shadow Process, and founder of the Ford Institute for
Integrative Coaching. Her books include The Dark Side of the
Light Chasers: Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance
and Dreams, Spiritual Divorce: Divorce as a Catalyst
for an Extraordinary Life, and The Secret of the Shadow:
The Power of Owning Your Whole Story. Her books have sold more than
700,000 copies and been translated into 17 languages. Her new book,
The Right Questions, will be published in Spring 2003. Debbie has
committed her life to supporting others in leading fully integrated
lives. She lectures and leads workshops around the country. For more
information visit www.debbieford.com
or www.integrativecoaching.com.
Raz Ingrasci: What did you address with your first
book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers (1997)?
Debbie Ford: The thing that changed my life so dramatically
was when I first saw the gift of the dark part of myself. I had spent
7 years and $50,000 trying to get rid of parts of myself, manage parts
of myself, or overcompensate for parts of myself. What I finally learned
was that it wasn't about getting rid of anything. In fact, I couldn't
get rid of anything. It was about finding the gift of the dark side
and integrating it. There is so much personal growth work designed
to find and accept the dark parts. But what I learned was that the
real work was about going beyond simple acceptance to real healing.
It was about integrating, embracing, and seeing the gifts of the dark
side.
RI: Can you speak more about the transformative possibility
of looking deeply inside and finding the gift hidden within the difficulty.
DF: Acceptance always seemed to make me feel worse
about myself because I had so many dark qualities. What I found to
be transformative was the next step of embracing the dark qualities
and seeing what could be good about this aspect of myself. How could
I love this part of me? How could I have compassion for this part
of myself? That's all of my work today - teaching people that there
is no quality that exists that doesn't somehow have some gift for
us, some wisdom. For example, I spoke to a client who is an overachiever
and highly successful. We looked at the opposite qualities of those
characteristics. His worst fear was to be viewed as a loser, failure
or lazy. So instead he was an overachiever. He was able to acknowledge
that the gift of not wanting to be viewed as incompetent or a failure
drove him to go out and produce results in the world.
RI: So the things that others may admire him for
are founded in his fears or dark side. But that positive identity
he created also hid from him the parts of himself that he didn't want
to see. He had both a negative and a positive identity and neither
one of them are who he really is.
DF: Exactly. Because he stills hates these parts
of himself he can't have any fun, he can't relax and he can't plan
his retirement. Because if you can't be with "lazy", no
matter how successful you become or how many things you do, you will
always feel driven to do more. The key is in realizing that whatever
we hate about ourselves actually drives us to what we love about ourselves.
That's how we find the "shadow". Look at what you love about
yourself and then look at the opposite quality and you'll find something
that you hate in yourself.
RI: When you speak about accepting the dark aspects
of ourselves as well as the positive sides of ourselves you are speaking
about wholeness, and you're really speaking about healing.
DF: Right, healing is about emotional wholeness.
What it takes to be emotionally whole is having a profound appreciation,
an acknowledgement, of all aspects of the self - negative and positive.
Its very similar to what Hoffman teaches. We have the qualities of
our parents. And as long as we are rejecting or hating them, we are
going to try to get rid of them without being able to love and accept
ourselves for who we really are.
RI: People naturally want to move away from pain.
Our culture bombards us with messages to consume our troubles away.
The real work, however, can only be done by moving into one's pain
in order to heal it. How do you help people overcome their aversion
to making this move?
DF: I try to inspire them. Carl Jung said, "The
gold is in the dark." So everything that people have been waiting
for, everything that they are wanting, is in their negative aspects,
or in their pain. They can keep trying to run from the pain, eat over
the pain, work over their pain but, ultimately, the pain will prevail.
At some point the pain catches up to you. Whether it's in disease,
anger, or pushing people away. We know that if you don't have all
the love, success, and peace of mind that you desire then there is
some hidden pain. The quickest way out of the pain is actually through
it. I tried the other way out. If there was a way to hide or deny
it or achieve emotional wholeness some other way, I think I would
have found it by now.
RI: You did the HQP in 1990. What would you say was
the gift of the Process for you?
DF: The Process was one of the pivotal experiences
that changed my life. The anger work in the Process brought me to
a new level inside of myself. I value and respect anger. I believe
that anger is connected to our passion and our creativity. The freedom
that Hoffman gives through this work and the attention that it gives
to the dark side is crucial. I tell people that if you want to see
what a healthy human being looks like, look at a baby. They're upset
one minute, sad another and blissfully happy the next. Although I
did some anger work before, it was really in the Hoffman Process that
I embraced my anger and came to terms with it. I was so angry before
the Process that I would beat people up in the outer world, but it
was really just about beating myself up. The Process had a profound
impact on my life. So if you haven't yet done the Process, take the
step. It's such an amazing experience.
RI: You have empowered a lot of people through your
books and your work. What can you tell us about The Secret of
the Shadow that came out earlier this year?
DF: I love The Secret of the Shadow because
it's all about your drama and your story. The most amazing thing about
people is that they actually believe what they tell themselves. They
believe that their story about their life is the ultimate truth. I
wrote this book after taking people through the Shadow Process and
realized that you can do all this work but if you can't get out of
your story you just keep living inside of the drama. All of my dreams
came true outside of my story. Inside my story nothing would have
been possible. So many people want to know who they really are and
I say that’s the booby prize. If you know who you are then that’s
only as far as you can go. What about if you don't have a clue who
you are? Then you can be everything. I really try to get people to
live in that uncertainty and I think that when you embrace the shadow
you're able to do that. Because you don't have as much attachment
to the idealized positive qualities that you're trying to attain.
The goal is to identify everything that lives inside your story so
that when you get out of your drama you can see that everything is
possible. Everyone holds onto their identity so they can be someone,
but in that identity you're really all alone. Not until you let go
of that identity can you experience the totality of the world and
everyone in it.
RI: Self-compassion, then, is at the very heart of
what you are doing. It is also one of the more difficult things to
attain. How do you find compassion for yourself?
DF: Self-compassion, self-forgiveness is the core
of my work. It is the most difficult thing that we do. Deepak Chopra
says it so beautifully "We are both a microcosm and a macrocosm."
When you stand in that reality, that each of us is everything, you
then realize that you can't have compassion for me until you have
compassion for yourself. My work is very much aligned with Hoffman.
I want people to not just get the information in their head but have
the experience in their heart. I do a lot of psycho-synthesis work,
which has us go inside and dialogue with these dark aspects of our
personality and find out what their gift is, their wisdom. To find
out why those parts deserve forgiveness. We must understand that there
is no part of us that is going to hurt us and that we're all going
to make mistakes. If I beat the crap out of myself everyday then it
is most likely that I'll go out into the world and beat the crap out
of somebody else. So internally if we dialogue with these dark parts
of ourselves, then we can find compassion. Once we see the gift of
that shadow then we can have compassion for the "loser"
or the "not good enough" or the "angry" or the
"selfish" in us. When you find the gift of any aspect of
yourself, you will also find self-compassion.
I always use my son, Beau, as an example. When Beau was three I came
home from work one day and asked him if he got his hair washed. And
he said "Yes, Mommy." As the nanny was leaving she said,
"Beau wouldn't let me wash his hair." So I knew Beau didn't
always tell the truth. When I would ask him "Is it Mommy time
or Beau time?" He would almost always answer "It's Beau
time." So I knew he was selfish. And if there were four cookies
on a plate and four of us, he always wanted all the cookies. So I
knew he was greedy. Now, those aren't bad qualities for a child of
three, they're just part of being human. And if you can understand
that, why wouldn't you also have compassion for yourself? It's part
of our humanity.
There is a Rumi quote that I heard many years ago that really drove
me in my spiritual search "By God, when you see your beauty,
you'll be the idol of yourself." Somehow I knew that was the
truth. I think that what he's saying is when you find the beauty inside
your greed, your selfishness, your anger, then you will be able to
have compassion and take the light. ø |
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