Are We Bringing Out The Best In Each Other?

I’m sure you’ve heard it said before that it’s a great idea to surround yourself with positive people. At first glance, it seems like such a simple and reasonable piece of wisdom that we’re often not inclined to take the thinking about it any further. However, that would be a bit short-sighted…and with this in mind, what are the deeper layers of truth involved here?

As a global community we’ve just suffered through another terrorist attack, this time in Paris, victimizing hundreds of innocent people. Most folks I’ve spoken to about this have equivalent reactions – “we ought to kill all those terrorists, root ‘em out, slaughter ‘em all, bomb their homes, take out their families”, etc. Not that I think we shouldn’t respond strongly and decisively to such provocations – I think we have to – but as a therapist I can’t help observing what the other guy’s behaviors activate in us – that their destructiveness activates ours! Think about it…chilling, eh?

When our destructiveness gets activated, what happens to us? Good things? I don’t think so. Destructiveness also inevitably seems to involve self-destructiveness; I don’t know why this is, but I think it’s fair to propose such a link. It’s also fair to say that I’ve spent much of my professional career helping people repair messes they’ve gotten themselves into. Do any of us not know folks who have taken huge missteps in life, made colossal mistakes that later they reflect on by saying “good grief, what was I thinking?” Indeed, it’s happened to all of us personally at one time or another.

Some time ago I read Power in the Helping Professions, an arcane but challenging little book by Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, a Swiss psychiatrist and colleague of Carl Jung. In the book he makes a point that “shadow in patient constellates shadow in analyst”. Guggenbuhl is referring in particular to difficulties therapists get into when working with the issues their clients bring to them, but for us, in a practical and everyday manner, what does this mean? Well, if we roughly equate “shadow” to be that within us which:

• we don’t know about, because it’s unconscious, and…
• presses us to operate against our own best self-interests (our own unconscious destructiveness/self-destructiveness)

In short, what it means is that encountering dark material in other folks will quite possibly activate our own dark material.

Another way to say all this is to note that when we interact with other people, they unavoidably have some effect on us, even if we are unaware of any particular effect. This happens for the positive as well as the negative. This is why recovering addicts are encouraged to make new friends with folks who are not wrestling with addictions, and why people in the midst of a marital separation with the goal being to ultimately reunite with the spouse, are cautioned against listening too much and taking too much counsel from their bitterly divorced friends and family members.

It’s probably getting obvious that to bring out the best in each other we need to develop a sense of positivity about ourselves, and we also need to have positive people around us. Positive people can be inspirational, shine a light on our hidden talents and assets, and help us to be forgiving with our shortcomings. This doesn’t mean we should deny or avoid facing our limitations and being honest with ourselves; it’s more a reminder that our relationships will have an effect on us and we need to stay mindful of this reality.