Cover of Troy - The Director's Cut
Self-Care Tip #188 – Don’t avoid the obvious to be a friend to yourself.
Have you ever watched someone make a bad decision? Probably, if you’ve watched anyone. We all do make bad choices. But a really bad one? One that when you hear it going down, you can almost feel the hair on your neck point south. We ask ourselves why no one stops them. We perhaps have tried to reason, to force, to pull favors to buy them away from this choice.
If you do this, ….
Maybe weeping some. Maybe they’ve done this same variety of bad choice before; many times perhaps.
The problem is bigger than our own selves of course. The people in our wake, being tumbled about by our bad choices, these people suffer. It’s irresponsible. Sure. Those tumbled people are responsible for there own self-care too, but they aren’t responsible to accept us back with open arms when we drive our boat over them. We don’t connect that the reason they are back there bobbing in the water is in part because we don’t have insight into our behavior.
Brad Pitt played Achilles in the movie Troy, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. If you remember, he died in the end. Movie critic, N.S. Gill described what killed him well.
Achilles is moved by love of glory and knows that he will die young if he pursues it, but his reputation is all that counts because all he is a warrior and the best one, at that.
Carl Jung describes the inferior function of someone’s personality type as their Achilles’ heel. Myers called this the shadow. It is the part of us that has the least amount of conscious awareness (otherwise known as insight.) This is the part of our temperament that we are not comfortable with. Although it may strengthen with maturity, it can be the death of us if we don’t take it seriously. We will always have it, true. But with deliberate effort and with working no harder than what self-care has already proven to be (the kind of bleeding effort that makes us plead “Mercy!”) …then we can grow.
Then perhaps after performing the hardest work of our life, we may be fortunate enough to die from another reason in the end. 🙂 We also may be fortunate enough to have people in our lives who feel safe with us. People who feel they can trust that we will treat the precious connection between “Me and Thee” responsibly by taking care of ourselves.
Questions: How has your Achilles been influencing your life? How have you helped yourself to stop avoiding “the obvious?” Please tell me your story.