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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 1 year ago
Condemning and resenting traits, actions, or inactions in others reflects aspects within yourself that you are too proud to admit you have and you’re thus actively dissociating from owning what you see in them. This false pride blocks you from seeing the very behaviors you condemn in others inside yourself.
“Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.”
Roman 2:1
When you do not align your life with what you value most, fail to prioritize your day with your highest-priority actions, and consequently feel bombarded by unexpected challenges, you tend to be more polarized in your perceptions, leading to unrealistic expectations of yourself and others.
When you are more polarized in your perceptions, you activate your amygdala, the lower and more primitive subcortical area of your brain, instead of your executive center, the more advanced and self-governing section of your prefrontal cortex.
Your more reactive amygdala seeks to avoid predators (what you perceive to be more negative, and challenging to your survival) and find prey (what you perceive to be more positive, and supportive of your survival) in the same way that animals behave in the wild.
In other words, your amygdala looks to seek pleasure and avoid pain, seek ease and avoid difficulty, seek support and avoid challenge, seek positive and avoid negative.
However, the desire for this one-sided life is a futile pursuit, in the same way that trying to cut a magnet in half to create just a positive pole without a negative pole is futile.
Just as a magnet has two sides, so too life has two sides, every relationship has two sides, every goal has two sides, and every individual has two sides. This is the law of duality – everything is made up of complimentary opposites, from the infinite micro to the infinite macro.
When you live congruently with your highest values or priorities, you are more likely to demonstrate objectivity, balance, and resilience. When you are not living congruently with your highest values you are more likely to polarize your perspective and seek a one-sided experience while trying to avoid the other side. When you are congruent you embrace both sides of life in the pursuit of something meaningful - a balance between pairs of opposites.
What you may not yet either know or often remember is that seeking one side inevitably attracts the complementary opposite into your life. The two poles are inseparable except in a subjectively biased mind.
To again use the analogy of a magnet – the positive pole is inseparable from the negative pole, and vice versa. You may also have heard people say that similars attract, but so do opposites. You seek that which is similar and attract that which is different or opposite.
You tend to seek that which is similar to you and attract that which is opposite to you, to keep you balanced.
Maximum growth occurs at the border of support and challenge or positive and negative. So, the more supported you are, the more dependent you tend to become on that support, and the more likely you are to attract challengers to break that dependency.
To reiterate: in addition to what you seek in life, you attract the opposite into your life.
For example, seeking a so-called ‘nice person’, a one-sided persona, will bring someone who is also mean at times, the opposite, complimentary persona that you’ll in ignorance perceive to be a so-called ‘mean person’.
Seeking pleasure comes with a complimentary set of challenges. Unexpected disadvantages accompany what you assumed would offer more advantages than disadvantages.
So, by seeking one side and avoiding the other, you are breeding what you condemn. This can be seen in relationships that begin with an infatuation where you are more conscious of an individual’s upsides and unconscious of their downsides, only to later become more aware of their downsides in order to bring balance to your relationship. This process helps to teach you to love all aspects of your partner (and ultimately to love all parts of yourself too).
Choosing not to embrace both sides of your partner, perhaps spending years trying to “fix” the negatives you perceive in them, is futile.
It is impossible to get rid of half of them and only be left with the parts you perceive to be positive.
Loving both sides, including the support and challenge, nice and mean, positive and negative, is what allows you to feel genuine love for them.
The mature and masterful approach is to embrace both sides of life. This approach activates the executive or governing center of your brain that helps you have realistic expectations that people and life have both sides.
But if you're stuck in your primal amygdala, driven by survival biases, it's like your brain thinks it's in survival mode, always on the lookout for easy wins and their accompanying threats.
This survival mindset tends to oversimplify things, making you see the world in black and white. Except, life's not that simple, and sooner or later, reality tends to smack you in the face. So you unintentionally attract the things you're trying to avoid or criticize, and tend to wake up and express what you repress and condemn.
You only resent things in other people that remind you of things inside yourself that you're ashamed of, that you’re too proud to admit you have, and that you're likely dissociating from. You may be too proud to admit it, but you do (to the exact same degree) what you condemn in others.
What tends to occur is that when you try to push away and deny the traits, actions, and inactions that you dislike in others, attempting to distance yourself from them, those consiously suppressed or unconsciously repressed aspects inevitably resurface.
The effort to conceal and maintain a façade, driven by pride, paradoxically leads you to embody the very characteristics you criticize.
This phenomenon is evident in the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East - each country or group condemns the other for their actions, yet, ironically, engages in the very same behaviors they condemn.
Life has a way of reflecting the hidden aspects you attempt to suppress and repress - your disowned parts.
I firmly believe that whatever you criticize, you end up bringing into your life, attracting, and eventually becoming.
This cycle is a profound lesson to teach you how to love and embrace the parts of yourself that you've struggled to embrace and be grateful for. Life, by its very nature, encompasses two sides, and the pursuit of a one-sided existence, as I’ve said, is ultimately futile.
A significant contributor to feelings of depression arises from comparing your present reality to an idealized fantasy (one-sided positive outcome) you're striving for - an unrealistic expectation that life will have more positives than negatives, more kindness than cruelty, more peace than war, more support than challenge, more giving than taking, more generous than stingy, and more considerate than inconsiderate.
This fantasy cannot occur, because everything in the world is a unity of opposites.
So, rather than futilely seeking a one-sided world, it is wise to acknowledge and internalize that the reason you attract and become what you condemn is to guide you in learning how to appreciate both aspects of life. You don’t need to get rid of any part of yourself to love yourself.
Avoiding what you fear or dislike only perpetuates a cycle where you keep encountering these elements. Striving exclusively for one side of life, and negating the other, most often leads to distress and symptoms that signal an imbalance. Pythagoras wisely noted that a balanced mind results in a balanced body and healing.
You have a choice: either embrace both sides of life, adopting a balanced perspective with foresight and strategic planning, or linger in the amygdala, seeking a one-sided world and facing the consequences of attracting and becoming what you're trying to avoid.
It's wise to recognize that your infatuations and resentments hold power over you, occupying space and time in your mind, influencing your perceptions, decisions and actions, and “running” you from the outside.
Distress (or what some people refer to as stress) mostly arises when you juvenilely seek infatuation and its concomitant dependency, only to be confronted by also its opposite, what you don't desire.
On the other hand, eustress likely emerges when you maturely embrace both sides of life objectively.
Wisdom lies in pursuing challenges that inspire you and that awaken your innate genius.
Distress, conversely, results from avoiding challenges that “despire” you and in futility attempting to seek a one-sided reality.
Breaking free from distress and repetitive cycles, akin to the karmic wheel, involves embracing both sides of life.
Living by your highest priorities, as I teach in my 2-day signature Breakthrough Experience, helps you organize your life, prioritize tasks, and delegate lower-priority tasks to others. In doing so, you will be less likely to seek a one-sided world and more likely to embrace both support and challenge in pursuit of your more objective dreams.
Understanding that life inherently comprises both positive and negative aspects can help you master your mind, master your life, and transform your life from the inside out. It’s why I teach the Breakthrough Experience almost every weekend, and spend time teaching the Demartini Method, a powerful tool to help you dissolve unrealistic expectations and delusions.
I have seen hundreds of thousands of people learn to embrace both sides of life, themselves, and others in just 2-days, becoming more poised, present, powerful, objective, balanced and authentic in the process.
Please consider joining me at my next online Breakthrough Experience program. Let me share the Demartini Method and practical applications of living by priority, helping you neutralize unrealistic expectations. This way, you can set authentic goals, achieve real outcomes, and experience true and more balanced fulfillment in your life.
To Sum Up
- Resentment of others reflects aspects within yourself that you're hiding but ashamed of, where you’re too proud to admit you have what you see in them.
- Misalignment with your highest values and failure to prioritize your daily actions can polarize your expectations and experiences, activating the reactive amygdala in your brain.
- Life, like a magnet, has two sides, and seeking a one-sided existence is a futile endeavor.
- Attempts to avoid or condemn certain traits results in attracting and becoming those very traits.
- Balancing support and challenge is wise for growth, as maximum growth occurs at the border of support and challenge.
- Embracing both sides of life is a wise path to wisdom, objectivity, and resilience.
- Trying to eliminate half of life's experiences is futile. Genuine love requires embracing both sides.
- Life inherently comprises both positive and negative aspects, and the mature approach is to embrace both sides.
So if you want to have meaning, which is the mean between the pairs of opposites, if you want to have love in your life, if you want to be inspired by your life, if you want to be grateful for your life, if you want to be certain and present in your life, then come and join me at the Breakthrough Experience so I can show you the science and the tools and principles that can help you to live a truly fulfilled life.
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