The dark side

Have you ever thought about the flipside of your life? Many of us have a part of us that remains hidden in the shadows of our personality. Anytime we find ourselves exhibiting traits of such behavior, we are often surprised that we could do things like that. Don’t fret, you are not alone, we all have a dark side.

The dark side mostly includes traits and qualities that we do not portray in our daily lives. They are those traits that makes us feel uneasy and embarrassed anytime we see them play out. Sometimes, these traits make us feel like we have betrayed our basic essence of being and that we are no longer worthy of belonging to a community. In some cases, we might have buried such traits so deep that we no longer realize they exist. But a twist of this is that embracing these negative traits as ours mostly opens the doors to happiness and true fulfillment. Debbie Ford in her book, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, said that “but embracing these negative qualities actually opens the door to happiness, fulfillment, and true enlightenment”.

We will clearly see that what we refer to as our dark side is a part of our entire being and who we are, and by uncovering and embracing our not so bright side, we become whole.

There are certain occurrences in our lifetime such as periods when we experience crises or unplanned circumstances that makes some of this dark sides of us present themselves. For example, there was a popular belief held regarding Nigerians that, there is no way a “black man” would ever contemplate suicide regardless of whatever they are going through. We can however rebuff this theory as we have seen a steady increase in the rate of suicides and attempted suicides in the country even among the young populace.

We can also demonstrate this using the example of a lawyer, who has been diligent and upright in his works, but because of an unattended anger issue that surfaces once in a while, he found himself at the other side of the law when he “accidentally” stabbed a house help in his living room because the help had gotten on his nerves. He claimed it was the devil that made him do this, but psychological experts will deny this claim.

According to a journal published by INSEAD titled Coming to terms with your dark side  the author says that “studies show that we tend to deny the negative parts of ourselves as a form of self-protection. We split off these bad feelings and project them onto others. Thus, we see these traits in others but definitely not in ourselves”

https://knowledge.insead.edu/

However ascertaining the fact that we all have dark sides; some more than others. it is important to note that we can resolve the effects they have on us by acknowledging those which we have identified for ourselves and be self-cautious whenever we notice we are about to exhibit the identified traits. If not they can continue to operate unconsciously in ways that can end up being harmful and detrimental to our lives.