Jung said, "Every part of us we do not love will regress and become more primitive". He didn't say, 'Indulge it', or even, 'Indulge in it'. He said, 'Accept that part', and he's right to say that. So if someone becomes a mathematician at twenty, and in order to be excellent in his field he gives up paying attention to his emotional body and doesn't think he needs it, it will regress, go backward in time, and become somewhat stubborn and violent. And it will happen that if he tries to recover his feeling body, he's less likely to be able to do it. If he sees this regression in another person, he'll say, "That thing is savage. I'm not dealing with it". Every part of you that you do not love will de-evolve.
Robert Bly, More than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales
Likely, our biggest mistakes have been coaxed unconsciously by elements of ourselves that we neglect, abhor, and hate. Perhaps we ignored our own hurt which lead us to seek immature vengeance hurting a person on whom we projected our own unresolved pain. Maybe a desire that is denied unconsciously moves us to act out destructively and selfishly. Whatever your actions were that have caused your downfall it is vital to understand how your unconscious played a role in your behaviour.
In the meantime, do not make the mistake of ignoring and hating the same neglected parts of yourself before it repeats its destructive regression. If you have faced severe social reprisal you are likely to have discovered an even greater sense of self disdain that could throw you in a feedback loop of shame and shameless behaviour or being hurt and hurting others. The worst things about you have been put on display in the worst interpretation and now you have more reason to hate yourself. This is the time to learn the lesson that the hated parts of your psyche will wreak havoc in the long run.
While other people will find it easy to belittle you, no one will be harder on you and cause more lasting damage than yourself. Most people who hate you will grow tired of it and move on, the person you need to worry about the most is you. But how can you possibility look at your shortcomings in any way other than disgust?
“Every part of us we do not love will regress and become more primitive.”
You are human and possess the capacity to good and evil. You have desire and impulses that are wonderful in some settings but wildly inappropriate in others. You think mean things sometimes and you wish ill on others even if you don’t admit it. You’re impatient sometimes and you complain too much and even when you do what you’re “supposed” to it’s often for the wrong reasons. You’ve hurt people. What we want to do is say the right prayer and read enough self-help books or get enough therapy so that all the evil within us disappears. We want to bury the part of us that has lead us astray so that we will be pure in the eyes of others. But denying that there is opposition within us sets up our unconscious to “devolve” and eventually take control.
When Jung said we need to love all the parts we have he doesn’t mean we should be ecstatic over our worst thoughts and damaging behaviours. I think what he meant is that none of our parts are bad. Sometimes they are misinformed, misaligned, or misunderstood. Someone who steals bread when they are starving has broken law and social etiquette but do we blame their hunger? Do we enrolled them in a therapy group for the pathologically famished? Hunger indicates that something is wrong and it can motivate behaviour that could cause shame. None of our parts are “bad” but they can devolve into antisocial and immature versions of itself, especially when denied or exiled.
You do not need to love what you have done. Your mistakes and the memory of their consequences will always to some extent remind you of shame. But by accepting that you have faltered and that there are parts in you that have acted out in disgraceful ways, it opens you up to the humility needed to fully heal. A man who steals bread when hungry will not change his ways when punished by further starvation. Your shame wants you to starve the parts of you that motivated your acting out but that will not work in the long run.
What does accepting these parts look like?
Imagine that your troubled parts were like your troubled teenage children. When they cause grief and destruction you might be disappointed in their actions, you might even need to impose consequences and restrict freedoms for a while but you do not cease to love them and accept them as your children. With empathy you attempt to understand the many factors that have led to their poor decisions. Without judgement you hold them accountable while holding them emotionally. Yes you messed up. No you are not kicked out of this family. No you are not bad. This is how it might look internally with your “parts”.
When you accept your parts your post-disgrace analysis is curious but without judgment. You find the humanity in the motivation and you assess how it could have gone sideways. This does not mean you seek excuses. Understanding the unconscious forces that drive our behaviours is not to absolve us from accountability. It’s almost the opposite of making excuses, like you are saying, “yes I am in this position because of my own immaturity or selfishness and I am gaining a greater awareness as to how I allowed myself to fall into this trap.”
When you accept your neglected parts you might eventually be able to laugh about it. Think of celebrities who have returned from shameful, public embarrassments, they often crack a joke at their own expense to demonstrate their humility and then confidently continue forward.
If a part of you is starving you accept its hunger and examine what it truly is craving. My belief is that no part is “bad” but all parts can devolve or warp when improperly addressed. So many of our destructive appetites have at their core a very human and otherwise wholesome desire. Rarely do we reach for junk food out of sheer hunger and rarely are unkind words expressed in sheer anger. Food, sex, instant gratification, procrastination, retaliation, and many other potentially dangerous human inclinations do not work alone and are often the vehicle in which other, deeper emotions seek expression. Mindfully, without judgement, we gain important insight when we examine our “worst parts” because they are likely a source of underdeveloped or unloved aspects of ourselves that need remedy.
Like a child acting out, there are reasons and circumstances that motivate his undesirable behaviour and we can hold him accountable while still showing him that he belongs. We don’t have to immediately and drastically change him. We don’t use harsh punishment to scare him into complying. We let him see the natural consequences of his behaviour, we acknowledge the many conscious and unconscious factors that led him to his mistakes, and we show him how his human and wholesome desires were never bad in the first place, just misplaced or mistimed. We accept him. This you can do for yourself as well. Few others will at first but if you can do it, others will follow when they recognize the parts in them that are also capable of so much damage.