Debbie Ford - Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy

Exploring why good people do bad things and why we turn into our own worst enemies is one of the most intense inquiries that any of us will ever embark upon. It is an eye-opening expedition to uncover the vast and often hidden darkness that influences our choices and pervades every facet of our human experience. This journey will take us into the heart of the duality of darkness and light that operates within each one of us. Its a challenging yet compelling conversation because most of us are blind to the whole of who we are. We go to great lengths to continue to see the world through the perspectives we are familiar with and will do whatever we deem necessary to protect the person we believe ourselves to bewhether good or bad. That is why this inquiry requires us to step outside what we have long held to be the truth about ourselves and expose the hidden mechanisms that drive us to hurt ourselves and other people.

This investigation into the polarities, ambiguities, and hypocrisies of our humanity demands that we bring radical honesty to the places where weve been in denial, that we bring compassion to the parts of ourselves weve been ashamed of, and that we bring courage to the areas of our lives where weve been afraid to admit our vulnerabilities. Its not a process of smoothing over, covering up, or pretending that the things we do to harm ourselves and others are not that big a deal. Its a process that forces us to stop minimizing the impact of our self-destructive behaviors; admit what they are costing us and how they lead us to becoming our own worst enemy. To stop our self-sabotage we must be self-confronting and willing to understand how the primal split from our authentic nature caused us to create a fabricated selfwhat I refer to throughout this book as the false self. Our false self is the culprit that causes us to act out in inappropriate ways, destroy our relationships, sabotage our dreams, and place ourselves in harms way.

This path from darkness to light, from emotional pain to spiritual liberation, has been my journey for the past twenty-five years, and yet even after writing five previous books I am still aware of a deeper truth that I have yet to share. My goal with this book is to have you understand that your deepest pain arises as a result of the primal split between your higher nature and your human self. My intention is to lovingly support you in unraveling the lies and distortions, the guilt and the shame, that unwittingly turn you into your own worst enemy. I want to interrupt the internal mechanisms that cause you to turn your back on yourself, ignore your intuition, inappropriately cross boundaries, and give your power away to some person, thought, belief, addiction, or impulse that might lead you down a dark road to nowhere rather than the liberated path you were meant to travel. The information and processes you will find in this book will allow you to heal your deepest regrets, challenge your insecurities, befriend your self-doubts, confront your inner demons, and face up to the ways in which you participate in your own self-destruction. This book will provide you with a reliable path to defy the gravitational pull of your past and step into the infinite possibilities of your true and limitless self.

I know that the greatest gift I can give you is the benefit of all my experience as a workshop leader, coach, and educator. After struggling with my own darkness and destructive tendencies, I have come to understand the absolute perfection and absurdity of the human experience. I know the power, as well as the potential hazards, of our unprocessed pain. And I know what it takes to make peace with the past and integrate the unresolved conflicts of our conscious and unconscious minds. My absolute faith that the gold lies in the dark is what allowed me to heal my shame and help hundreds of thousands of other people heal theirs. It was my own journey through darkness that helped me build an intimate relationship with my authentic nature. It was not my good self but rather my evil twin that led me to heal my emotional wounds and ultimately launched my career. Its not my quick wit or my perceived brilliance that has allowed me to transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but rather the wisdom I gained as a result of integrating my anger, discontent, shame, fear, and insecurities. In fact, it was my inability to function well in the world that forced me to strengthen my spiritual connection and learn how to thrive, even after devastation. It is the very darkness that I didnt want to be or experience that has driven me to become the woman I always longed to be.

All of my flaws and negative qualitiesof which I have manyhave brought me priceless gifts, for they are what have led me to become who I am today. I can no longer stand in judgment or disapproval of my human flaws, weaknesses, and dark impulses, because the integration and wisdom of my own humanity are what have led me to deliver my greatest gift and create a life beyond what I could ever have imagined for myself. Because of this, I believe I am the perfect person to guide and support you in understanding who you are and why you do the things you do.

When we come to understand that we are all both good and bad, light and dark, strong and weak, brilliant and oftentimes utterly stupid, we begin the profound process of healing the internal split that invariably takes place for most of us at some time in our lives. This is the only path Ive found that actually relieves human suffering. We achieve peace not by learning new tricks or more strategies to hide our imperfections but by embracing more of our insecurities, more of our shame, our fear, and our vulnerabilities. When we heal the split between our darkness and our light, our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we have the resources to make better choices, think more empowering thoughts, and behave in ways that leave us feeling proud and inspired. We gain the courage and the confidence to see things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, and we understand that it is not by accident that each of us becomes the person we are today or that we struggle with the issues that we are faced with. With this priceless information in hand, we hold the key to unlocking our tendency toward self-sabotage, and we open up the door to living a life beyond the limitations of our false selfa life filled with passion, meaning, and purpose; a life graced by the very experiences and heartaches that brought us to our knees.

W hy Good People Do Bad Things is a powerful inquiry into the hidden forces that drive us to commit unbelievable acts of self-sabotage and self-destruction. Weve all heard the stories; they show up on the evening news, on the front page of newspapers, and as headlines in the weekly tabloids: the Olympic sports hero who falls from grace after being accused of injecting steroids; the TV evangelist who gets arrested for soliciting prostitutes; the schoolteacher who carries on an affair with one of her students; or the baseball star who gambles on his own games. These are the public demonstrations of good people who have gone astray, and they have become our national obsession.